My Golden Rats

Since I am making another batch of pineapple tarts. I decided to play with the dough and made these six little rats to welcome the Rat Year. I got this inspiration from aunty Yochana's blog. Let me tell you, these are not easy to shape at all and really have to kudo to those that have the patience to shape so many rats, or the rose shape pineapple tarts. This was not my best job as I had to do it fast as little one was crying (wanna sleep), thus some turned out looking more like pigs. LOL!

Baked Pork Floss Mini Puffs

I saw the mini peanut puffs at Lily's blog and it gave me an inspiration to make mini pork floss puffs. Reason being I have a bottle sitting in my pantry ready to be used. Since I have no plan on making any deep-fried CNY cookies this year, I decided to experiment with the basic pie crust recipe for my baked puffs. The resulted pastry is buttery, crispy and flaky!





The crust/pastry recipe adapted from allrecipes.com.

Ingredient:

Pork floss
1 beaten egg, for glaze

Pastry:
1 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 cup or 1 stick of cold butter, cut
3 Tbsp. ice cold water

Method:

1. To make the pastry: In a food processor, add in flour, salt and cut butter. Pulse until it resemble crumbs. Then, add in the cold water and pulse until a dough is formed and pull away from the food processor. Wrap the dough with plastic wrap and put in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes.

2. Roll the dough thinly, cut it out with a round cookie cutter and place the round dough in a mini puff maker, place the pork floss filling inside, close it and take out the mini puff. Place on parchment paper and brush the top with egg glaze.

3. Bake in preheated 350'F oven for 20 minutes. Let cool completely on wire rack before storing.

~Yield about 40 mini puffs.


I used the mini puff maker above. It came in three sizes, the ones I have are medium and small sizes.

Note:
If you have the time, it's better to pleat the puffs by hands as half of my puffs split open when baking in the oven. But for own eating it's fine I guess. This mini puffs is so good it won't last long at all.

Kuih Bangkit II, 2008

I baked my 2nd batch of kuih bangkit this morning. Ahhhh, practice makes perfect (I also didn't use frozen coconut cream). I achieved the light, crispy and melt in the mouth texture that I like. I'm going to make my 3rd batch next week using the Pandan extract like I did earlier and let my brother brings it back to M'sia for my mom.


Playing with the different cookie cutters.


Are those pineapple and pine tree designs? What do you think?

For my kuih bangkit recipe, click here.
For my step-by-step-pictures guide, click here.

Gong Xi Fa Cai, Xin Nian Kuai Le!

I would like to wish all my readers who celebrate CNY:

Sorry so blur because Evy kept saying "Gong Xi, Gong Xi" and Edda kept moving her hands.

Happy Lunar New Year! Let's the feasts begin!

Early Reunion Dinner ~ Steamboat

My brother is in Denver for three weeks. He is here for training. And since he is here, we had an early reunion dinner with him. I prepared Tom Yam steamboat as this was very easy and satisfying. :o)


Vermicelli, napa cabbage, shrimps, fish fillets, marinated chicken breast slices, cutterfish, straw mushrooms, babycorns.


Chai Hsin, romaine lettuce, tofu, DoDo fish balls, fish cake, assorted fish cakes, tofu pok.


Tom Yam soup for steamboat.

I prepared too much again. Left with quite a lot of soup and ingredients. Guess would make Tom Yam Udon noodle with the leftover.

Green Bean Cookies

My modified version of Green Bean Cookies adapted from Rose's Kitchen. This is a crunchy and melt in the mouth kind of cookies.

Ingredients:

1 cup butter (2 sticks)

1/2 cup powdered sugar

1/2 tsp. salt

1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour

2 Tbsp. cornflour

3/4 cup green bean flour

1/2 tsp. baking powder

1 egg yolk, for glazing

Method:

1. Cream butter, powdered sugar and salt until creamy.

2. Mix in sifted flours and hand knead until a dough is formed.

3. Pinch a piece of the dough and roll into ball. Finish the rest of the dough. Brush the top of each cookie with the yolk glaze.

4. Bake in preheated 300'F oven for 20 minutes.

~Yield about 90 cookie balls.

More CNY Bakes 2008 (2)

Peanut Cookies ~ Another of my favorite! I have great childhood memory with this melt-in-the-mouth peanut cookies. I remember I always sort this out at my late grandma's house to eat (oh yeah, my late grandma used to make kuih and sell, she was a great cookies and kuih maker).



Cornflakes Cookies ~ Didn't use a cookie scoop this time, as I wanted a smaller cookies.



Sugi Cookies ~ After few batches of CNY bakes, the last cookies I made looked like this. LOL! I only wanted an easy way out and too lazy to shape the cookies into balls, let alone the presentation of it. Just roll into cylinder and cut, Evy helps with the pattern on top. Uniquely me right? :P

For peanut cookies, click here.
For cornflake cookies, click here.
For sugi cookies, click here.