Cream Puff

I've always thought that making cream puffs or eclair is hazardous to your kitchen because of their different method used. So I gathered some courage and manage to make tons of it yesterday. It's still hazardous in terms of how many times you have to wash your beaters, pans and pots, but the result is rewarding :)

333 gr milk
168 gr butter
4 gr salt
250 gr bread flour
8 eggs

• Bring milk, butter, and salt to boil. When it boils, quickly put all the flour on the pan and using mixer, beat it with low speed on moderate heat until the dough forms a ball and pulls away from the side of the pan


• Then take it aside and beat with low speed the eggs, one by one until smoothly incorporated


• With whipping pipe, pipe about 4cm straight for eclair or round circle for cream puff.


• Bake in 200C for 20-25 minutes until golden brown and crisp
  

240 gr milk
130 gr sugar
1 egg yolk
75 gr cornstarch
rum, to your taste

• Separate about small bowl of milk to mix in with cornstarch and set aside


• On the sauce pan, put milk, sugar and egg yolk. Stir in the egg yolk until it's fully incorporated with the milk before turning on the fire. Bring to boil and stir in the cornstarch. Keep stirring until it boils again and set aside.


• Quickly stir on to cool the custard and when it cools down, pour your favourite rum and stir on until it's incorporated.
  

Serving: Cut off bit of the side of the cream puff and spoon or pipe in the custard. Then, sprinkle the top with icing sugar or top it with ganache.

Maccha Cake with Azuki Beans

Been wondering how to incorperate the maccha into standard cake recipes and here is the result. Still in smooth texture but it smells heavenly with green tea aroma. Maccha must be accompanied by its partner, the sweet azuki beans to be called complete. So I splashed some of the canned azuki beans inside my maccha cake :).


170 gr butter
150 gr sugar
3 eggs
130 gr cake flour
20 gr green tea powder
4 gr baking powder
2 gr vanilla essence
1/2 can azuki beans

• Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy in high speed and add in vanilla
• Reduce the speed to low and add the eggs until well incorporated
• Still in low speed, add in all dry ingridients and resume to high speed untill the batter are well blended
• Using 8' round baking tin, pour 1/2 of the batter and spread it evenly, with spoon, spread the azuki beans, and tope it off with the rest of the batter
• Bake it for 30-45 min in 180C
• Serving option: sprinkle the top with icing sugar

Cold Tofu

This is a very simple Japanese dish and it taste so soothing and comforting. Very suitable for a hot day or after a long day at work. And the catch is, you don't even need to cook it.

1 box good quality Japanese tofu (silken tofu preffered)
6 tbsp shoyu (you'll most likely find this at the Japanese food aisle in any supermarket nowadays. You also can use this to eat with soba/somen)
2 tbsp sake (to make it sweeter) - optional
bonito flakes - to your taste (I like lots of it) - optional, you also can substitute this with furikake, but mindful that furikake is much more saltist, so you have to reduce the amount of shoyu that you pour
decorative toppings: sliced green onion, minced ginger, grated white daikon - optional

How to:

• Wash tofu to get rid of the preservative liquid from the box, pat dry with paper towel and place it the bowl
• Pour the shoyu around it and top is with bonito flakes and the rest of the toppings
• Optional: to make it even luxurious, you can place ice cubes underneath the tofu, the purpose it to keep the tofu chilled, but in the next few minutes, you'll sacrifice the shoyu's thickness

Marble Cake

I admit it, I'm not so creative this week. I want to make some full-proof and not a time consuming cake, so that's why it's marble cake this week. The whole process from preparing to washing the kitchen take a total of 1.5 hour, so it's quite fast. The cake itself is quite versatile. So long as you cream the butter and sugar correctly, your cake will not get deflated or dry or burn or whatever disaster that you can imagine. It also will not dry if you forget about it in the oven for 5 more minutes from the supposedly baking time, but off course longer than that it's a blackhole (with a burnt smell).

100 gr sugar
1 tsp Vanilla extract
200 gr butter
4 eggs
13 gr milk powder
4 gr baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
210 gr cake flour
10 gr choco paste

1. Cream sugar, vanilla and butter in high speed until light and fluffy.
2. Lower the speed then spoon in the eggs one by one, until each of them is incorporated.
3. Still in low speed, mix in all dry ingredients and turn back to high speed for 10 seconds, and set aside the batter.
4. Take about 4 scoops of the batter and mix it with the choco paste.
5. On an 8-inch round pan, already lined with the parchment paper, pour in half of the white better, the pour about 4 scoops of chocolate batter then top again with the remainding of the white batter. With toothpick, swirl around the batter until the top looks like a marble.
6. Bake it for 40 minutes at 180C.
7. After baking set it off to cool.