Caramel Mocha Cake

I have been craving for mocha cake for several days now. Was going through my cookbooks when I saw this recipe from Aurelia Yap's cookbook -- Caramel Mocha Cake. Mmmmm... sounds yummy. One problem though: c-a-r-a-m-e-l. There are two things I try to avoid when it comes to baking. One is sugar cooking. The other one is making puff pastry. But my cravings took over, and so I went ahead and baked the cake.

Cuisson de sucre -- one of the topics in school that I had never really paid attention to. When I try to make syrup though, there are two things I always keep in mind. First, never agitate the sugar. Second, always have a pastry brush ready, to brush around the sides of the saucepan while the sugar is boiling.

For some reason though, my sugar ended up looking like this:



The picture above was taken 30 minutes after I had been cooking my sugar. My sugar should have turned amber by then. For some reason though, the sugar crystallized. Still don't know why it did, as I had been very careful about it. After concluding that the sugar was ruined, I asked our maid to wash the saucepan. But she needed to reheat the pan because the sugar was already rock hard by then. After a few minutes, she came back and showed me the saucepan with syrupy amber sugar! Apparently, all it needed was a few more minutes of heating.

Here is the recipe for the caramel mocha cake:

Ingredients:

2 1/4 c cake flour
3 t baking powder
3/4 t salt
3/4 c caster sugar
1/2 c cooking oil
7 egg yolks
1 T instant coffee
1/2 c hot water
2 T evaporated milk
2 T creme de cacao (I used Bailey's)
1 t vanilla
7 egg whites
1 t cream of tartar
3/4 c caster sugar

1. Into a bowl, combine and sift once the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar.

2. Make a well in the center, add cooking oil and egg yolks and coffee dissolved in the hot water.

3. Add evaporated milk, creme de cacao, vanilla. Blend well.

4. Beat egg whites together with cream of tartar, till light and fluffy then add remaining 3/4 c sugar.

5. Fold egg whites to the coffee batter mixture. Pour into a 9" x 13" x 2" pan.

6. Bake at 325 F for 50 minutes.

7. Invert. Let cool.

Caramel Icing

1/2 c caster sugar
1/4 c water
3/4 c caster sugar
6 T flour
1 can evaporated milk (use the big can)
2 yolks
1 t vanilla
1/4 c butter

1. Let boil the sugar and water until amber.

2. Combine the remaining 3/4 c of sugar with flour and add into the syrup.

3. Stir and add remaining milk.

4. Continue stirring until thick.

5. Add yolks.

**Turn off stove before adding vanilla and butter into the caramel frosting.

6. Continue stirring till well blended.

7. Frost cake immediately.

Some notes:
1. You can substitute regular sugar for caster sugar.
2. For the caramel icing, adding in the flour-sugar mixture to the amber resulted in some big time lumps! Suggestion -- add in the evaporated milk first before adding in the flour-sugar mixture for easier handling.
3. Add in evaporated milk slowly. The original recipe did not specify what size can of evaporated milk to use. So I did it by tancha. :)
4. Caramel frosting will be very sticky once cooled. So make sure to spread the frosting while it is still hot.

**Pictures to follow once I've resized them. :)

Risotto

I had my first taste of risotto in Angelino's Katipunan Branch. That was way back during my college years in Ateneo. I had their Risotto ala Bolognese -- risotto in tomato sauce with stewed tomatoes, bell peppers and chicken liver, and I really loved it! That's a lot coming from me, considering that I dislike bell peppers and liver. I have been hooked on risotto ever since.

In fact, risotto class in CACS's program was one of the classes I really looked forward to. So I'm sharing a recipe from the school's program here. It has been modified of course, since I didn't have mushrooms and saffron on hand.

Ingredients:
1/2 c Arborio rice (available from Santi's)
1/4 c prawns
1/2 c heavy cream
1 T onion, diced
1-3 c chicken stock
3 T white wine
salt and white pepper to taste
2 T butter
Parmesan cheese block

Procedure:
1. Saute onion in oil and butter. Add the Arborio rice and stir to coat the grains with oil and butter.
2. Slowly add stock, little by little and fold lightly.
3. Add prawns and white wine.
4. Put in the cream gradually. Add in a little amount of butter.
5. Serve with shaved Parmesan cheese.

Happy Chinese New Year!

Tikoy from Mike


Even though I come from a very traditional and conservative Chinese family, the Chinese New Year was celebrated quietly and without much fanfare. There was the usual offerings of food and prayer to ancestors and Chinese gods. No dragon dances and angpaws for this year though.

One of the things that I really look forward to during the Chinese New Year are the boxes of tikoy, or ti-ke as my father calls them. Ti means sweet, and ke means cake. As I mentioned in my other blog , I like dipping tikoy in catsup. In fact, for the most part of my life, that was how I thought tikoy was eaten --dipped in catsup!

Anyway, happy Chinese New Year to all!

Well Behaved Almond Ice Cream

I remember my mom used to buy a can of powdered almond when we were younger. She would ask our yaya to mix them like ordinary powdered milk, and that would be our milk before bedtime. It was a yummy change from our usual Bear Brand milk in cans. Aside from the almond milk, we would also have almond cake for merienda, which was really almond jelly with the texture of maja mais.

I have tried this recipe before and my family liked it. But I wanted to make something pretty from the usual plain old almond ice cream. Picture above is the result of that experiment. :)

From Frozen Desserts , here's the recipe for well behaved vanilla ice cream. Well behaved because of the gelatin content. :) Use almond extract instead of vanilla for the almond flavor.

Ingredients
water -- 2T
gelatine -- 1T
milk -- 2 C
sugar -- 1/2 C + 1 T
pinch of salt
cream -- 2 C
vanilla extract -- 1 T (use almond instead)
** recipe makes 5 cups

1. Spoon water into medium sized bowl then sprink in gelatin, whisking constantly. In a saucepan, bring milk to a boil then remove from heat. Stir in sugar and salt. When sugar has dissolved, pour into the bowl containing gelatin, stirring all the while. Cover and leave to cool.

2. Finally, add cream and almond. Mixture is now ready to freeze.

** I absent mindedly left the gelatin mixture in the refrigerator for about 3 hours. When I came back, the mixture had already gelatinized. As a remedy, I put a small portion of the gelatin in the microwave and heated it. Heating will liquify the mixture. Of course, there were still small gelatin bits left in the heated mixture, which is why my ice cream's texture did not come out too well.