Cuisine & Culture the Chinese Family Way
My husband and I enjoy eating Thai food but I have yet to learn how to cook it from scratch. Normally, I use ready-made packet sauces. Thai food is famous for its balance of sweet, sour, salty and hot flavours. One of my favourite dishes is Tom Yum soup. It is a clear soup base and very spicy! I love the hit of the spiciness.
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.
British Tea Lovers is a new online tea shop that opened in 2015. Their aim is to provide high quality leaf-tea for all tea consumers across the UK and the rest of Europe. They liaise with farmers directly and to ensure the quality of their tea remains in excellent condition.
The company has designed and created a limited edition Father’s Day gift. This beautifully designed tea tin comes with a special message on the top: For A Special Dad. This is a great gift for any tea lover’s dad! Inside this tin, it is filled with a packet of 100% Ceylon black tea and weighs 75 grams. The tin is ideal for storage of loose leaves and looks great on the kitchen top!
This week is the National Vegetarian Week hosted by The Vegetarian Society, which runs from 18th – 24th May 2015. To celebrate this #NationalVegetarianWeek, we were invited to try out a range of Amy’s Kitchen’s delicious vegetarian and gluten free dishes.
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.
As a regular at Frankie & Benny’s, it is always great to try out a new menu to sample different dishes. Our local F&B is just 5 minutes away and my children always love to eat there. Last week, we were fortunate to get invited to attend Mummy Bloggers Networking lunch hosted at The Fort Shopping Park F&B to review their new Kids and Junior Menu.
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.
Are you adventurous with food? Would you like to try 9 – 14 different types of food products each month? Degustabox will be a great solution for you! This April month has an international food theme. If you don’t drink alcohol, you will receive an alcohol free box!
Opening the box, it was very neatly packed with lots of bubble wrap to protect those breakable items. They also included product information and flyer /recipe. The flyer has little flags on it to help understand where the foods have come from if you are interested. It also has the price list and recipe on the back of the flyer.
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.
Ever since I learnt how to make Tiramisu via Sacla Cookery School (read my Sacla Aubergine Parmigiana’s recipe here), I wanted to try it out! So I finally I got around to it!
This is my first time making Milo Tiramisu and it works! The best of it is that I didn’t even use raw egg white. I find it hard to make tiramisu with raw egg white as I am not used to eating raw food. So I swapped it with mascarpone instead. I know that you can buy pasteurised egg whites which would be better in this recipe. The product is called Two Chicks but not many places sell it near us. I couldn’t find it in Tesco or Morrisons but managed to find it in Waitrose.
This will take only 30 minutes to make and you need to let it rest overnight before you serve.
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.
Have you seen Warburtons’s freshly baked ad with Sylvester Stallone? It was first shown yesterday on ITV at 8.15pm. This is the lovely Sylvester Stallone’s action advert with the British freshly baked bread from Bolton. I love the T-shirt (I love Bolton) Sylvester Stallone wore! I am so glad that we managed to get one plus the Warburtons hat and oven gloves! This is Mr C wearing it! Don’t he look smart in it! Lol.
Last month, I was fortunate to win two places to attend Sacla cookery school at their headquarters. So Mr C and I took over 3 hours to drive down to Buckinghamshire! This was their first time hosting the cookery school and once we arrived, we were joined with other competition winners.
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.
Apam Balik, also called Min Chiang Kueh (面煎粿) is one of the local snacks from my childhood that I used to eat for breakfast or dessert. Nowadays, it is a very common kueh/snack you can find at shopping malls or at hawker centres. They can come in many different fillings like ground peanut, red bean paste, cheese, salted green bean paste, chocolate, black sesame seed and many more. It is more common/traditional to have ground peanuts as the filling. If you have a nut allergy, you might want to avoid some of the Asian desserts!
My preferred filling for Min Chiang Kueh is ground peanut. I had already bought a few packets of ready-made ground peanut with sugar while in Singapore last year so now was an opportunity to use it.
