These few weeks I have seen people post Wimbledon themed cakes and I decided to make some too! This is a classic Victoria sponge recipe but instead of vanilla essence, I have swapped it with rose water.

Cuisine & Culture the Chinese Family Way
These few weeks I have seen people post Wimbledon themed cakes and I decided to make some too! This is a classic Victoria sponge recipe but instead of vanilla essence, I have swapped it with rose water.

Last week, my little girl turned six and you wouldn’t believe that if you saw her in real life. She is as little as a three or four year old. Anyway, I asked her what type of cake she wanted and she requested a Princess Castle cake for her big day. So on her birthday eve, after putting them to bed, I started whisking and baking. It took me nearly 3 hours just to bake alone. I didn’t have enough baking equipment resulting in having to wait until I’d finished with some items so it could be washed and dried before reusing for the next task.
So I made two tiers of Madeira cake and a sponge cake for the top. The reason for the different cake was because I ran out of baking ingredients too! Then I iced it with strawberry flavour icing. For the castle, I dipped the ice cream cones into candy sauce and sprinkled lot of sprinkles onto it. Once dried, I sliced a few into half for the sides of the castle.
Then I made a flag from a cocktail stick and paper. Once everything was in place, I mixed two different icing for piping. The green is for the plant and red icing for the flower.

I have recently received this Wilton baking tray dippers for review and at the back of the instructions is this breakfast dippers recipe provided by Wilton. This Cinnamon Waffle Dippers is very simple to make and you can also use any waffle recipe for this tray.

Happy Egg Taste Makers recently partnered up with food stylist and instagrammer, Marte Marie Forsberg, who has provided her Top 5 Tips for creating the best looking food. So they set us, the Happy Egg bloggers, a challenge to take part and create our own style using her tips for a chance of winning some great prizes.
I love baking and I have always wanted to make roulade. I have tried a few times now and had made a rainbow roulade and vanilla sponge with strawberry. This time I am going to make this Blueberry Chocolate Roulade. This recipe is from the Favourite Cakes book by Best Baking.

Need a quick fix for your cookie cravings? You need this quick and simple recipe from 150 Fast & Simple Recipes book from Parragon! This beautiful little book offers 150 easy-to-follow recipes from light bites like Spicy Chicken Noodle Soup, to more adventurous dishes, such as Salt & Pepper Squid. This small hardback book is available to buy from Amazon and good book retailers. Please do note that this book is pocket size, so all the wordings and photos are quite small! It is very well written and all the recipes look delicious! Best of all, this book is very affordable at RRP £3.

One of my polytechnic Chinese friends from Mauritius has always told us how beautiful his country is. Since then, I have always wanted to visit Mauritius. It possesses a range of natural and man-made attractions, tropical climate just like Singapore and with clear warm sea waters and attractive beaches.
I was thrilled when I received the Winner of Masterchef 2012 Shelina Permalloo’s Sunshine on a Plate cookbook. This book is an introduction to the homely cooking of Mauritius. Looking through the book, I found that there are a few Chinese influences on Mauritius recipes which made me even more excited! Anyway, my hobby is mainly baking cakes and pastries! So I decided to bake an Almond & Cinnamon Cake. This is my first time baking a flourless and gluten free cake. I have no idea if it will taste like an egg sponge. Very much to my surprise, it was excellent! I would definitely bake it again as it requires minimal ingredients.

Did you know that Jamie Oliver has teamed up with Moshi Monsters favourite character Furi to inspire young budding chefs around the world to get into the kitchen and learn how to cook? The duo have been cooking up a storm in Jamie’s kitchen to create a delicious Butternut Squash Muffin.

For this Easter, I decided to make these delicious hidden mini Easter egg chocolate truffles for my little guests. This recipe is inspired by Co-Operative Food Home Bake’s March week 2 chocolate truffles recipe. I was going to make a huge centrepiece dessert recipe – a chocolate egg filled with chocolate mousse but changed my mind at the last minute, and decided to make these simple chocolate truffles with hidden mini eggs.

Learning to make creative cakes is something I’ve always wanted to do. Having only a couple hours of a sugar craft course, I did made a few creative cakes like a Batman cake and Spider-man cupcakes I made for my son’s birthday.

Baseball cakelet is a recipe I found on Cupcake Envy by Amy Eilert published by Tuttle Publishing. She is a self-taught cake designer whose love of baking and working with her hands found a perfect outlet in cake making. She founded Cupcake Envy in Wake Forest, North Carolina in 2006. In this book, it showcases a range of her cleverly single-serving cakelets that resemble a stylish party dress, a desktop humidor, a cheery coffee cup, an adorable baby bottle, a wicked voodoo doll, a stylish purse and even a baseball!

This coming Mother’s Day, I decided to bake and make this mini Cake Bouquet. I have a sweet tooth and I can eat cake all day long. This is perfect as a Mother’s Day gift or even breakfast with tea!

Dr. Oetker wants everyone to celebrate the great and good about chocolate and get experimental by trying new chocolatey bakes you have never attempted before. To get everyone excited, throughout March, Dr. Oetker is running a Twitter competition to encourage everyone to have a go at baking their own yummy chocolate cakes and bakes. To enter, simply Tweet @DrOetkerbakes a photo of a chocolate bake you have made and tell them who you will be sharing it with using the hashtag #evenbetterbaking for the chance to win a deluxe hamper of Dr.Oetker chocolate products! What are you waiting for!
We are a huge fan of chocolate and I frequently bake chocolate cakes or cookies to share. Chocolate always tastes better if it’s shared with your loved ones and friends. I tried baking traditional chocolate profiteroles recently, but this time around, I decided to make a creative linked heart effect pattern on the Choux buns. This chocolate recipe can be found on Dr. Oetker’s website where you can find lots of baking inspiration for chocolate cakes and bakes.

I have never tried to bake a marble cake from scratch as it is often easier to use a pre-mix to bake with my children! We all love marble cake for its chocolate swirls in the cake! But there isn’t much choice of marble cake pre-mixes on the market.
Anyway, recently The Happy Egg Co have kindly sent me a signed copy of Eric Lanlard’s Totally Chocolate cookbook, which features all his favourite chocolate recipes! I was so excited when I saw this chocolate and vanilla marble cake recipe which also happened to be his first listed recipe. I was thrilled to make it from scratch!
The fabulous chef, Eric Lanlard also created Peanut Butter & Chocolate Egg Cups for the Happy Egg co which can be found on their website.

After I watched Comic Relief Celebrity Bake Off, I really wanted to bake chocolate profiteroles too! They are my favourite desserts! However I was temporarily stopped in my tracks when my mixer went kaput. I managed to find a new affordable mixer so here’s how I got on with the profiteroles.

Peanut cookies are one of my favourite snacks to eat during Chinese New Year. Normally we will buy them from shops in Singapore but now living in the UK, it is impossible unless I buy them from Chinatown. So I decided to make it myself using the recipe book given to me by my aunty.
The first obstacle I found to making this recipe was trying to buy roasted peanuts without added salt. In the end I bought raw peanuts and made everything from scratch. You can usually find packets of raw peanuts in the health food aisle of a supermarket. To make roasted peanuts, I chopped the raw peanuts in a blender and roasted them in the oven at 160°C for 15 minutes. I stirred the peanuts every 5 minutes of baking.
