whippin up somethin

Guacamole

Exam is over! I can finally quench my thirst of food experimenting! So for this auspicious occasion i made Guacamole, the mexican green sauce to go with tortilla chips! For this post-exam treat, i used a 50-cent avacado, courtesy of Lidl. After all “guaca” means avacado and “mole” sauce. Since i can’t get coriander from the supermarket, i replaced it with petersilie, i’ve nothing to loose cause i never tasted guacamole before Squashing the soft flesh of the green fruit is the peak of the fun! After sprinkling the soft pulp with salt and finely chopped onion i scoop a tiny spoon and go “hmmm…yum…”, it’s the beginning of a growing respect and love for mexican food.

Short-story of my shortbread

Winter time is here! Snow is falling and the whole city is now coated with a fresh new layer of icing that stretches over statues, church spires, rooftops, gutters and pigeons’ tails It’s the time of the season where the aroma of cinnamon, clove and allspice lingers in the air around Christmas market and crawl up our nostrils churning our appetite for Glühwein and Spekulatius cookies. This evening however, my craving for shortbread is stirred up.

The last time i bake was with a friend whom i was lucky enough to have as a pair of helping hands and a pleasant company in the midst of all the meticulous steps of baking. But one can’t get so lucky to always have someone at disposal especially when it is a spontaneous idea. So i was having a monologue about the butter and how doughy it should get in lieu of the jokes and teasing remarks i shot at my once sous-patissier.

Oh, and how it filled the confined air of my antechamber and vestibule with the exact mellow smell of ja! Butterkekse!

Pineapple tarts/wontons

My mum is every bit as committed as she is ready to jump ship. When it comes to baking, i guess everyone will agree there’s an entire archive about the beating, the sifting, the kneading, the folding, the moulding, the tasting, the commenting that is exclusively mother-daughter. I  however, remember more vividly, the parts on conniving over a stubborn gravitated batter, those grunts and sulks over the half-heartedly whisked egg whites, the indifference towards inconsistently shaped pastries, the smirks that come with every fragrance from the oven.

My mum has an attitude towards baking that keeps me baking more, block after block of butter dumped into the mixing bowl, carton after carton of eggs, separated from their “nuclei”, just for a rendezvous later when they are beyond recognition from their primitives.

We do not bake like the professionals, I doubt we ever seriously heed any advice of improvement. Sometimes when we take in any advice, we would end up putting the blame on that surplus information when the end result is disappointingly below par.

Today i could not stop laughing when we both gave up figuring out a complex piping device and decided to be “creative” instead

“As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.”
-Ernst Fischer

and my mum starts rolling a thin circular layer of dough on her palm, places a ball-shaped pineapple filling in the middle, folds he palm, and pinches the dough where two layers meet-just like when one is making wanton.

So the pineapple tarts are now more appropriately named pineapple dumplings

So ist meine Mama. She is alright with all the imperfections that i’ve produced and just like that she possess a certain beauty and poise beyond any ornate surface of perfection.

“Even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state.”
-Thomas de Quincey

Lasagne

I never thought i could produce something that i couldn’t pronounce correctly the first time i ordered it off the menu. Lasagne. I remembered mum brought us to pizzahut and i was intrigued by a picture showing cheese oozing out of some dough in a pool of red sauce, i pointed at that to the waitress and squinted at the word printed below it and mouthed it in Malay “lasaknee” (??!!). Luckily, i am in Malaysia, that’s all i can say. Not in Italy. I could have caused fits of laughter in the restaurant. Years later, almost a decade after that faux-pas, i pop one of those out of my own oven and  it’s not one of those ready made, rip-off-the-foil and let-the-oven-do-the-job, but rather, one of those 3-types-of-cheese, sauté-the-fillings and layer-the-sheets lasagne. Lasagne della grace, della casa. Though i had to keep track of the cost of each ingredient, hence the slight dryness and lack of creamy texture, i paid my tribute to this classical italian dish. Under 8 euros!

Greek lemon cake

Twice i dumped my failure in the bin. As i look at the heap of gooey yellow fluid i wonder what when wrong. There could be a hundred factors-i did not whipped the egg whites enough, i used the wrong tray and the water from the water bath seeped into the batter…..I think two consecutive times of bad turn-outs is enough to stop me from mixing the batter for a lemon pudding cake. Be it a cake that i’ll never get the hook to make, a cake unable to be produced by my bare hands, a cake untasted of. I resort back to a more promising solution-an all-time success that never let me down, chocolate brownies!!

But my ambition for lemons has not died. At a flicker of hope i started mixing again after i tuck those approving looking brownies into my fridge. Cutting off lemon peel, squeezing lemon juice, chopping the peel into tiny flakes because i do not have a grater for a short-cut to obtain lemon zest. After mixing and crossing my finger, i put the chiffon tray with my greek lemon cake batter into the oven, almost wanting to lay hands on the oven and pray for it to bake well..haha…

Then, the most exciting part-watching my batter breathe, rising up and air bubbles surfacing, thinking about the things my material science lecturer taught-how trapped air bubbles leads to faults in materials in the process of synthesizing. In baking however, the more air bubbles, the more airy and light your batter is, the lighter the texture, the easier the batter rises .

For me, the thing i anticipate the most when i bake is when i put the batter in the oven and watch it through the glass of my oven for the next 40-50 minutes, guarding my cake until it is fully “grown” (since it “breathes”, i think this is a pretty appropriate verb).

Hmmm….the lemony smell in the air…time to check my cake! tata :p

Fusion/Desperation

Weeee….this is my first success of making something completely sensational. Sour. Spicy. Mucus-running, tearducts-stimulating, tongue-vexing and lips-smacking scrumptious! Proudly presents. Tomyam glass noodles. With a little help from package flavourings from asian shop and of course lots of luring from mushie*. Yummy Yummy..

Thanks to my extremely difficult TM paper that aggravates me, I’ve gotten another idea of doing the Tomyam without any help from the package flavours. To make the noodles look like those yellow ones use in noodle soup back in Malaysia, I use spaghetti instead of glass noodles. Ok, i know lots of people would cringe up their noses in disapproval of the barbarous clash of western and eastern cooking. But look, even food goes global now. My seafood tomyam curry spaghetti soup is a emblem of culture integration ..check it out.

Twist of taste

Germany is a land of dough. When you step into a backery, you find all sorts of bread. Spoiled with the multitude of selections, you really need to stall and think fast because the salesperson at the counter is waiting for your order but which is a really difficult task since your eyes cannot even settle on one item, let alone your mind. Since January, I’ve been eating a lot of the typical german breakfast bread, served in CDC Radolfzell which comes with a cup of hot drink. Whether it is eaten with salami or cheese, you cannot be more satisfied with the crunchy crust and the soft texture beneath it.

In my Hochschule, the cafeteria offers a pretty large variety of sandwiches and bread. I especially love those with sunflower seeds embedded in the crust, laid with salami or turkey breast meat, iceberg leaves tomato, cheese and spread with a thin layer of butter. During lunch time, some thin crusted bread with frikadelle(meat patties) or leberkäse(a kind of meat loaf very popular here) are also put on the trays.

This afternoon I have the rare pleasure of having a short day at the Hochschule and grab this opportunity to do a little roaming. I walked into a backery next to a supermarket and came out with these.

I bite into this and was chewing seeds and loaf together in my mouth. This one is quite dry. Maybe too much fiber, lack of water. Too much oats too. But still crunchy:)

This is my personal favourite. Mini baguette! It has a thin crunchy outer crust and soft light texture inside. Scoffing down one doesn’t leave you the carb-saturated feeling. Here is how I eat my mini baguette:

Mini Baguette with turkey breast meat and iceberg homemade. Or at least, grace made