Banana Cake & Farewell
It was exactly three years ago today that I started this blog. It has been fun and enjoyable sharing my ‘experiments’ with all you people out there, those who have actively supported me through the three years, and those who have done it silently, I thank you all.
After three years, I think it is time to say goodbye to my beloved ‘Café of the East’. In the three years since I started blogging, I have seen a plethora of cooking blogs appearing. I remember I have time to visit the few good cooking blogs three years ago easily most days, but now I find that I don’t have the time and also impossible to check on most blogs on the net today. As all you bloggers out there, you all know how time consuming it is to blog – taking photos, editing photos, uploading, research & write-ups, etc., then also time to answer questions as well. I think I need a rest from blogging after three years! I haven’t decided yet if I will continue to blog in the future (if I do, it will be on a brand new blog or I’ll post the recipes on my forum), however I will not been updating this blog anymore. Café of the East will however stay open so you can still access the recipes that I have posted so far, just no more new update.
As for my ‘Home Baking Club’ forum, I’m thinking of partially closing it down as well, as it has not been a success as I hope it would be. As a forum, most members have not been active in coming forward and sharing their cooking or baking experience. Only about 20 or so members have been active there, so I sincerely thank those few active members who have kept the forum going the past year or so. I really appreciate it.
So I bid you all farewell, and hope to see you soon somewhere on the net… and here I share with you one final time, one of my favourite cakes…
[Ingredients]
250g (1 cup) mashed over-ripe banana, from about 2 cavendish bananas
1 teaspoon lemon juice
150g butter, softened
150g caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 eggs
200g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon bicarb. of soda (baking soda)
2 tablespoons milk powder
http://cafeoftheeast.blogspot.com/
[Preparation]
1. Preheat oven to 180°C. Grease the sides of a 20cm round cake tin and line base with baking paper.
2. Mash the bananas and lemon juice with a fork, set aside. Sift plain flour, baking powder, soda and milk powder together, set aside.
3. Cream butter and caster sugar until pale and creamy. Beat in vanilla. Beat in eggs, one at a time, until combined.
4. Add mashed banana and fold in. Add sifted flour mixture and fold in.
5. Pour into the prepared tin. Bake for about 50 minutes, or until cooked when tested with a skewer.
[Note]
1. Please note this recipe uses 1 standard cup of 250ml, 1 tablespoon of 20ml and 1 teaspoon of 5ml.
2. The size of egg used is about 60g (includes shell) unless otherwise stated.Labels: Cakes and Cupcakes, Teatime Treats
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Sugee Wafers
The problem with buying special ingredient to make something is that you inadvertently have some leftover which you don’t know what to do with. So it either sits in the pantry or the refrigerator and take up space or it just quietly goes past its use-by date and turns bad then you have to throw it away.
One such ingredient for me is ghee which I only use for baking purposes. I know I could use it to cook Indian meal, but it has just never happened, yet. So over the weekend, I found myself with some 300g or so of ghee in a tin which has just gone by its best use-by date. I have kept it in the refrigerator and it still seems alright. I tasted it, no rancid taste, so it was still fine to use.
My thoughts turn to sugee (or semolina) cookies as I also have some semolina at home. I haven’t made them for a long while, so I intended to use up as much of both ingredients to make the cookies. I used my Cashew Sugee Cookies recipe I last experimented with and adjusted it. As I wanted to use up the ghee, I added in as much of it as I dare to see what would happen! Well what do you know, after baking they turned into wafer thin biscuits, and oh so crispy and buttery! I love the taste and texture of the wafers, and the faint fragrant of the almond essence is so delicate – goody, another new recipe to add to my bikkie collection.
Wafer thin biscuits.
Base of the cookie (bottom right).
Makes approx. 40 to 50 biscuits.
[Ingredients]
225g ghee, softened
85g icing sugar, sifted
¼ teaspoon almond essence
170g plain flour, sifted
110g fine semolina (sugee)
1/8 teaspoon salt
http://cafeoftheeast.blogspot.com/
[Preparation]
1. Cream ghee and icing sugar until pale and creamy, beat in almond essence.
2. Fold in dry ingredients. The dough will be very sticky, so chill in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes or until firm. Preheat oven to 160°C.
3. Pinch and roll into marble-sized balls (about 2cm or 1 inch in diameter), space them well apart on a cookie tray.
Before baking.
4. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until light golden. Cool and store in airtight container.
After baking.
[Note]
Please note this recipe uses 1 standard cup of 250ml, 1 tablespoon of 20ml and 1 teaspoon of 5ml.Labels: Biscuits (Cookies), Teatime Treats
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Danish Pastry
Occasionally in the morning, if I woke up early enough and the weather was fine, I loved a quick stroll to my local bakery for some freshly baked croissants or Danishes.
For me, nothing beats a warm croissant or Danish in the morning with a cup of coffee. The flaky, crispy crust and the buttery layers inside just make for a delicious start to the day.
The doughs for making these two morning pastries are very similar. They are both made from laminated dough (the other laminated dough is the making of puff pastry, but that doesn’t use yeast), where the thin dough layers are separated by thin layers of butter or baker’s margarine. I’m not too sure if the croissant dough and the Danish dough can actually be interchanged, but I have seen most recipes for croissant dough made without the addition of egg, but the Danish dough does. From what I’ve read, the other small differences are apparently in the amount of yeast used, croissant dough uses a bit less yeast than the Danish dough. Also the Danish dough uses less butter or baker’s margarine for the laminating layers and have one less turn (or the folding process) than croissant (2 turns for Danish and 3 turns for croissant).
Laminated dough is not for beginners because of the technique and extra care needed to make it successfully. Basically the dough needs to be kept really cold throughout the whole rolling and folding process to prevent the butter or baker’s margarine from melting and leaking out which will defeat the whole purpose of trying to produce the laminating layers. It is for this reason I’ve never tried making Danish pastry before. However this all changed after I read the recipe for Beatrice Ojakangas' Danish pastry in ‘Baking with Julia’, a cookbook of renowned in the past few years. In it the yeast dough is not laminated in the traditional way, but done in a very similar method to making the ‘rough’ puff pastry where the butter is cut into small even chunks and mixed into the flour mixture, then carefully mixed and rolled out into a dough with the butter chunks still visible.
The puffed layers of the Danish.
Finally I cast all doubts aside and bravely trudged forward in making my first ever Danish pastry using this recipe. I was surprised the whole process went quite smoothly, albeit lengthy in time, and the end result was way much better than I had expected. I did make some little minor changes to the original recipe (due to the unavailability of some ingredients) but they still turned out very well.
I was also debating whether to post the version that I’ve adjusted since the original recipe used American system of measure, i.e. cups and spoons, rather than metric. Well, after thinking long and hard, I’ve decided to post my adjusted version in the end so I can have a copy for future reference, but you can still view the original recipe here if you wish.
Before I proceed with the recipe, just a note of interest about the name Danish. What we all called Danish or Danish pastry in the English speaking world, it is actually known as ‘Wienerbrød’ (Viennese Bread) in Denmark. According to Sandra J. Weber, who wrote about Danish pastry in The New York Times, during a strike by the Danish bakers in the late 19th century, replacement bakers were brought over from Vienna to fill the vacant positions. These Viennese bakers brought with them the knowledge of their pastry making skill. By the time the strike was over, the Danes had acquired a love for these rich and flaky pastries and in turns made them famous all over the world. In a twist of fate, Viennese now called these pastries ‘Copenhageners’!
Adapted from the recipe 'Danish Pastry by Beatrice Ojakangas' in 'Baking with Julia – based on the PBS series hosted by Julia Child', written by Dorie Greenspan, published by William Morrow, 1996.
Makes 16 pastries.
[Ingredients]
Danish Pastry:
180ml water
1¼ teaspoons instant yeast
1 egg, lightly beaten
55g caster sugar
1 teaspoon salt *
260g bread flour
60g plain flour
1 tablespoon milk powder
225g cold unsalted butter *
1 egg white, lightly beaten for eggwash
* If using salted butter, omit the 1 teaspoon salt. (This was what I did because I forgot to buy unsalted butter.)
http://cafeoftheeast.blogspot.com/
[Preparation]
1. Cut the cold butter into 1cm cubes. If the weather is warm, put the cubed butter back into refrigerator to chill for about 30 minutes before using.
2. Combine bread flour, plain flour, sugar, salt and milk powder in a large mixing bowl. Mix well then stir in instant yeast.
3. Add cold cubed butter and toss through the flour mixture. Then add the lightly beaten egg and water. Fold the mixture lightly just until the flour is moistened (see image #1 above). Don’t let the butter melts at any stage! Cover with cling film and refrigerate for at least 8 hours, or overnight (image #2). (I refrigerated mine for 18 hours before I was able to find time to continue with the next stage.)
4. Lightly flour a work surface (I used plain flour) and turn the sticky dough out onto it. Dust more flour on top of the dough and pat the dough roughly into a square (image #3). Use a rolling pin to lightly bash the dough in a criss-cross fashion to flatten it out. This is because it will be quite hard to roll out in the beginning due to the hard butter chunks. Now use the rolling pin to roll the dough out roughly about 40cm x 40cm (image #4).
5. Fold one third from the right side into the middle (image #5), then the left third on top of it, like folding a business letter (image #6). Roll out again to about roughly 60cm x 20cm (image #7), fold into thirds like before (image #8). If the butter starts to soften too much at this stage, wrap the dough in cling film and chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes before proceeding.
6. Dust again with flour if necessary (image #9). Roll out again to roughly 40cm x 40cm (image #10). Repeat step 5 (image #11 to #14).
7. Divide the dough into even quarters (each portion will be used to make 4 pastries). Wrap each portion in cling film quite tightly and chill for at least 30 minutes before proceeding. At this point, the divided dough is ready to be shaped and filled and can be kept in the refrigerator for 48 hours if desired.
8. Take one portion of the divided dough and roll it out to about 20cm x 20cm. Cut into quarters of 10cm x 10cm each (image #15). Fill and shape each as desired (use custard, jam and fruit of your choice). Place the shaped Danish pastries onto a lined baking tray and cover lightly with cling film. Let them rise in a warm place for about 30 minutes. Although the pastries won’t double in size, they will puff up and feel airy.
9. Preheat oven to 200°C. Brush the pastries with lightly beaten egg white and bake for 8 to 10 minutes, or until light golden in colour.
Some techniques for Shaping Danish
Spandauer
Baked Spandauer Danish
Danish Pinwheel
Baked Danish Pinwheel
Danish Twist
Baked Danish Twist
[Note]
1. Please note this recipe uses 1 standard cup of 250ml, 1 tablespoon of 20ml and 1 teaspoon of 5ml.
2. The size of egg used is about 60g (includes shell) unless otherwise stated.Labels: Breads and Morning Pastries
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