Heavenly Paradise@AdelineAng.com

I came across with this Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe last week and decided to give it a try. This is definitely a keeper! 

Ingredients:
1 cup butter, softened
1 cup white sugar
1 cup packed brown sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
3 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp hot water
1/2 tsp salt
2 + 1/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips

Directions:
1. In a mixing bowl, cream together butter, white sugar, and brown sugar until smooth. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then stir in the vanilla extract.
2. Next, dissolve baking soda in hot water. Add to the batter along with salt. Stir in flour.
3. Lastly, stir in chocolate chips. On a ungreased cookie sheet, drop cookie dough by large spoonfuls, about an inch apart.
4. Bake in preheated oven at 350 F for about 10 minutes, or until edges are lightly brown. For crunchier cookie texture, extend baking time for another one to two minutes.

* Yield: ~ 4 dozens

Baked buns (or ” siu pau” in Cantonese, “shao bao” in Mandarin) are Miles’ new favourite. This time around, I made smaller buns (~ 18 buns) with thinner pastry and more meat filling.

Recipe can be found here. I used pork this time, for a change. It tasted just as great!

If there is snowman, there should also be snowwoman! Miles and I found a snowman cake pan from Wal-mart before Christmas. We’ve been waiting for to bake a snowman cake. And guess what, snowwoman is getting into the picture too!

Snowman is dressed in his manly black hat and a red scarf.

Snowwoman is dressed in a girly pinky scarf, with a purple and pink hat.

Josie, a good friend of Miles and I celebrated her birthday last weekend. We wanted to prepare a birthday cake for her during a Christmas/birthday party at her place. The first question that came into my mind was, “how am I going to incorporate the two themes into the cake?”

Tier cake, fondant covered cake, layered cake etc. After a few days of discussion, we finally decided on a checkerboard cake. Mind you, it’s a festive checkerboard cake!

Josie’s wedding bouquet had her favourite white roses and orange lilies. To personalized the birthday cake, I handmade the flowers with fondant and gum paste as cake decorations.

It seems like a long process preparing just a 4-layer 8-inch round cake. Nevertheless, Miles and I had great fun preparing it, despite the challenging part where we had to put the rings of cake together. A good try!

We were glad that Josie enjoyed the cake. All the “wows” and ‘wahs” we received for the pretty flowers and a surprise festive checkerboard pattern as everyone savoured the cake.

More baking! Miles and I did more baking last weekend. There was something new that we wanted to try preparing–gum paste.

Similar to fondant, gum paste is a pliable dough that can be easily shaped for cake decorations. As the name implied, the latter has more of a gum texture and it holds its shape better than fondant.

Cake baking, cake cooling, cake leveling, cake icing, cake chilling… all happened on the first night. Fondant and gum paste were prepared on the same day.

The next morning, we moved on to rolling out the fondant and laying the thin sheet (1/8 inch thick) onto the cake. Miles did a fabulous job transferring fondant onto the cake on his first attempt!

While the cake is being chilled in the fridge, we cut out various patterns on gum paste. Then, they cut-out patterns were placed in mini tin foil cupcake liners to hold their shapes. Painting was the next step. We used mainly gel paste food colouring for painting. Meanwhile, home-made chocolate icing was artistically piped along the top and bottom edges of the cake.

Finally, we assembled the gum paste ornaments onto the cake, placed a maraschino cherry on each flower, and garnished cake with milk chocolate curls.

Final results:

It was a heart-breaking moment to have to cut the cake. Oh well, that’s what the cake is for–consumption! More importantly, Miles and I had great fun preparing the cake and everyone enjoyed eating it ;)

I’m fascinated by beautifully decorated cakes with delicate edible ornaments. For the past few months, I’ve been watching the cake show on TLC channel, the “Cake Boss.”

“Cake Boss” is a show that films some absolutely stunning cake preparation processes, prepared by the Carlo’s Bakery in New Jersey, U.S.A. Needless to say, one of the most popular items on their cakes is fondant. I thought to myself, “I’m going to give it a try making it some day!”

Knowing that it’s going to be a time consuming process to decorate the cake, I opted for a quick and easy way to cake the cake by using cake mix. My favourite marble cake! Thanks to the Duncan Hines Marble Fudge cake mix. The cake turned out fabulous!

The baking process took me about 35 minutes and about 20 minutes for icing the cake. However, the decorating process took Miles and I nearly 2 hours (equivalent to 4 man hours)!

The cake turned out great, simple yet colourful. It wasn’t bad at all, considering that was our first fondant attempt.