CHRISTMAS!

Christmas is just around the corner and after all the dazzling goodies and log cakes, I must say I still love cookies the best! Though I haven't really been to orchard road to soak myself in the Christmas atmosphere and pretty lights these cookies sure edged me into the Christmas mood. From the dough, to the aroma when they're baking away in the oven, till the time their out and finally with that icing that makes all the difference (appearance I mean)! I'm so lovin it! =p

I'm ashamed to say that after years of baking, its my very first making a gingerbread man (though not gingerbread flavoured) but hey! it's still a milestone isn't it. haha. And the thought of those few wiggly lines, dots and ribbons making the whole gingerbread come to life, I couldn't contain that excitement and I knew I had to make a few more batches to give away as gifts. 

D was also really psyched when he saw those lying on the baking tray and immediately asked if I was free to bake some for his colleagues! Though it meant I had to spend more time baking extras (other than the order on hand), but it also meant some fun time together! Well, now I'm toying with the idea of making these for my friends. Packed nicely in a plastic pack, sealed and tied with a pretty ribbon, just how I love it!

Now, I hope I've spurred YOU (yes, you who is reading this post now) to get crackin and make some homemade goodies for your friends. Though "inexpensive", but sure packs a load of love and sincerity. No?

Recipe below!

Gingerbread cookies

Ingredients:

100g Salted butter, cubed and softened

  80g Caster sugar

    1   Egg Yolk

190g Plain Flour

1 tsp Vanilla Extract (or Vanilla bean paste if you have)

Method:

1. In a medium mixing bowl, cream together butter and sugar until well combined. 

    *Mixture doesn't have to be light and fluffy as we do not want the cookies to expand too much 

      during baking

2. Stir in the egg yolk until well combined.

3. Add in the flour, 1/3 at a time until a dough is formed. If dough is too soft to handle, cling wrap the dough and place it in the refrigerator for about 15-30 min to allow it to firm up a little. 

    *I usually split the dough into 2 and refrigerate one portion while I start working on the other. 

4. Roll out the dough on a piece of parchement paper in between 2 chopsticks (one pair) to ensure uniform thickness.

5. Get your favorite cookie cutter and stamp away! Gather the scraps and re-roll until the dough is used up. 

6. Place the cut-out dough on the baking tray and bake at 180C for 10-15 min (longer baking time require for larger cookies) or until the edges are lightly browned.

variations: 

Chocolate cookie

*Use 20g cocoa powder + 170g Plain flour instead

Orange/Lemon cookie

*Use 1 tsp or orange/lemon oil + finely grated zest of 1 orange/lemon

Royal Icing recipe

Ingredients:

2 tsp   Meringue powder

2 tbsp Water

165 g  Icing sugar

Method:

1. In a small mixing bowl, mix together meringue powder and water. Using an electric mixer, whip will soft peaks form.

2. Add icing sugar gradually and mix on high speed until medium peaks. *This consistency is good for piping

3. To colour (or flood the icing), add water, bit by bit until you get a consistency that resembles a syrup. 

forever twenty-one

I just had, not one, but two 21st birthday orders within just a week apart! To add on to the fun, this is my 100th post YAY! And of course, I hope my blog would remain as happening  as possible and just like the fashion label, forever twenty-one.

Many say that time seems to move twice the speed once you hit the age of twenty-one and I somehow got to agree with that. However, upon deeper reflection, I guess the magical fast forwarding of time doesn't happen when you hit the magic number 21, but rather, as you progress, responsibilities pile up and with that comes investment of time to maintain those responsibilities.

Just take for example, when we were young, all we had to fret was, studies, test and grades and probably how to prevent my classmate from stealing my notes or worse still, stealing my eraser or crossing over to my "territory" marked by an invisible line on our tables. Other than that, we lucky brats of this age practically had to worry nothing about food and clothing. Now that I've those who have crossed the 21 boundary, suddenly find themselves struggling to find an ideal job and managing their finanaces and increasing responsibilities. In a split second, the list of things to do gets longer and longer and you start finding that time is zooming by faster and faster.

And... I am reminded of how long ago was my 21st birthday whenever I come across someone else who has just turned 21.

Many thanks to my secondary school classmate, Eunice for introducing me to her friend, QY to order her 21st birthday cake from me =) It wasn't too difficult for me to conceive the idea of how the cake should look like because QY already had something in mind and even had a picture of how she wanted it to look. Of course decisions like sizes and colours and other minor details had to be made and THIS was what the final product was.

The cake was a simple vanilla butter cake sandwiched with yummy yummy nutella buttercream for the bottom two tiers and nice, tangy lemon buttercream for the top most layer! It was a pretty huge cake which was REALLY REALLY heavy. Cake sizes measured, 10" - 8" - 6". Each layer was a little more than 3" tall so you could just imagine how heavy the cake was with the fondant =XX

To complete the sweet pink, floral 'feel', I added a "tiara" and a fondant key since she was celebrating her 21st. Although I don't quite know the true significance of a key, but I do believe it's somehow symbolic of your key to the gates of adulthood.

And so, if you're wondering who's the next lucky one who's just turned 21, it's none other than Eunice's sister, Evon.

                 

Eunice saw my "chirstmas" cookies post and wanted those cute 3D cookies and in my opinion, I think those made perfect door gifts and not to mention, they are cute, even when plain!

These cookies are pretty huge so don't be fooled by the photo. Eunice actually asked how big a plate was needed to display the cookies so that the guests could jus take and eat them (like buffet style). I told her she'd need something that's at least 30" x 30" for 60 cookies.

Several days later, she increased the order to 70 cookies! 35 of pooh and 35 of mickey! Although no decoration needed to be done, assembling and packing the cookies were more time consuming and laborious than baking them! Not to mention, I had to bake extra because of my mighty strength I broke a few legs, necks and ears =X So I had to re-do almost 5-7 of mickey and pooh =(((

I had no idea how should I get the body stuck to the legs, so i used royal icing to "glue" them together. I guess the humidity in our Singapore air kinda softened the cookies a little and on hindsight, I think I should have placed a packet of oxygen absorber thingy in each packet. oh wells, lesson learnt! The cookies were a breeze to make, especially when I kinda memorised the ingredients after the 300 wedding cookies. BUT bending and rolling them out were a PAIN, literally and mentally. Especially if the ears broke off while transporting it from the table to the baking tray.

But nonetheless, I managed to get the cookies all packed, sealed. All tags cut and attached. DONE, before the scheduled pick-up time. PHEW! I think this is one of my rare orders that I need not rush and for once, I could breathe a sigh of relief and snap away while waiting for the cookies to be picked up! =DD

Like flowers which blossom and wilt and die, so do humans blossom, age and pass on. I guess it's not a matter of how long we maintain our youth or even "feel youthful" in our golden years. But rather, what have we accomplished in the days of our youth that is worth remembering. The period might be short-lived, but as long as it was spent meaningfully in an worthy, impactful manner, we could be, potentially, forever twenty-one.

With loveee...

Marriage has always been an issue of debate, even in the past. I believe that unhappiness and divorces did happen in the past, though probably not as prevalent and short-lived as the present.

My friend was just lamenting the purpose of the marriage certificate and questioned if it's existence is ultimately only a tool for self-protection. Without the cert, there's no argument for alimoney fees, without the cert, there wouldn't be any say in co-ownership of a flat/house. Without the cert, there probably is no reason to stay legally binded. Having said that, the binding power of the marriage cert is fast losing it's grip in today's time and society. Marriage as an institution is collapsing fast and the only one's who'd suffer are our future generations.

While getting married is truly something worth rejoicing and celebrating, it is really only but the beginning of a long, ardous journey together. I am not married, yet. But after witnessing the fall of many marriages of people around me really saddens me and makes me question the integrity of this institution.

However, I do believe that happy and ever-lasting marriages do exist. But those don't come easily and of course, effort and hardwork has to be put in to keep the love flame burning.

So, here's me wishing Philia and Xavier a happy, ever-lasting marriage. May the both of you work hard at keeping your love for each other burning!

I was tasked by Philia to bake her wedding favours and I was really excited as it's really, the first time I've done anyone's wedding favour =p It was easy to get it done because she knew what she wanted exactly and even showed me a picture. I was worried of not being able to get it done (especially when work zaps half your life) but she made things simple yet sweet. 3 small hearts in one packet, coloured white, pink and red respectively. With vanilla, chocolate and lemon cookies. Thank goodness she asked for small cookies if not, I wouldn't dare imagine how late I'd go to bed, slogging to finish baking these cookies.

Even so, baking them was no mean feat. Especially when 100 packs were order, which mounted to 300 cookies!! A day to bake, a day to ice, a day to pack. It was not easy, but D was sweet to help me out every single night. Seems like he's unofficially my business partner now =O Packing seems like something easy, but hey, it ain't easy when you have 3 different cookies to pack, seal and tie up complete with a tag. Not to mention, printing and cutting the tag needed time too!

It's a pity that I don't have a picture of the completed look of the wedding favour, but I hope you'd get an idea from the picture above.

Anyhow, here's wishing Philia and Xavier a blissful, happy marrige! Congratulations!!

Cookies Galore!

I'll have to admit that this blog post title is a little mis-leading. There's only one kind of cookie flavour featured here. BUTTER COOKIES. Its funny how we're usually more pre-occupied with the "pro" stuff that we come to realised we don't even have a good, basic recipe.

Fortunately for the invention of the World Wide Web, I don't have to rack my brains and squint my eyes all the way through shelves and shelves of books in the library for tried and tested good recipes. I fell back on the ever reliable HHB for the recipe of yummy, easy butter cookies.

The recipe was a breeze and the recommended way of rolling and cutting it out was brilliant. i loved it. It was time for the taste test. And.. it passed with flying colours under the examination of my younger sister and her friends' taste-buds. Not to forget, my brother as well. I actually did the first batch earlier, but without any high expectations. (as i had terrible experiences with cut-out cookies previously) Hence, no pictures of the first batch.

Not to mention, what's the fun in butter cookies when you don't decorate them! Many people start of baking with the simple stuff like cookies and decorating cookies. Ashamed of myself, I've never ever decorated a cookie before! So, whipping out my meringue powder, i made some royal icing. Thanks to the great tutorial here, I managed to grope my way around decorating cookies a little better. Here's just part I. The outline. I'm praying hard that the flooding succeeds and hopefully you'd get to see the end-result soon!

*I added cocoa powder to the royal icing to get a dark shade for the outline instead of trying to get it tinted black. (it's an experiment anyway =p)

Up next! Stained glass cookies. Do a quick search and I'm sure you'd find many people having attempted stained glass cookies. They're such a beauty, but I'm afraid I spoiled them =S The sweets bubbled like crazy in the oven and now they all look bubbly and "hole-ly". I comforted myself and well, isn't that a new cool design? HA~

To save resources, in case this fails, I only experiment on 3 cookies. Yes, 3 only. All the cookies above came from the same batch of dough. I figured that the temperature was too high for the sweets to melt nice and evenly, so I'm gonna try it a a lower temperature in future. Until I succeed...

Here's an attempt to see the "transparency", stained glass effect. Sad to say, I think the bubbles are obstructing that view. sigh. Till then..

Here's the recipe used for the butter cookies, with a tiny admendment and that is, the addition of pure vanilla extract.

Vanilla butter cookies (makes ~20 cut out cookies about 3" in diameter)

Ingredients:

100g butter, softened at room temperature

80g caster sugar

1 tsp pure vanilla extract

1 egg yolk

180g cake flour

20g corn flour

Method:

1.Sift cake flour and corn flour together and set aside. Line baking tray with parchment paper, set aside.
2.With an electric mixer, add in sugar to the butter in 2 ~3 additions and cream till the mixture turns pale and fluffy.
3. Add in egg yolk and vanilla and mix well.
4. Add sifted flour mixture in 2 ~ 3 additions, stir with a spatula to form a soft dough.

5. Place dough in a plastic bag and flatten with rolling pin. Refrigerate the dough for about half an hour.
6. Remove dough from fridge. Roll out dough on slightly floured work surface and cut out with slightly floured cookie cutters. If the dough appears to be a little to hard and breaks into pieces while rolling, leave it at room temperature for a few minutes. The dough will soften up and can be rolled easily.
7. Bake at pre-heated oven at 180 degC for 15 mins.
8. Let cool and store in air-tight container.

*I placed a ball of dough in those big transparent plastic bags (people used to put bao/curry puff/etc) and rolled the dough. This way, the you have a less messy work space and need not flour the work surface or rolling pin.

*I rolled the dough to about 1/4" thick.

*Do flour the cookie cutters lightly as it will help release the cut-out dough easier.

*I split the dough into smaller mounds and rolled it in several plastic bags. That way, the dough won't soften up too much/fast. You can work on each dough slowly without worrying the dough softening and having to refrigerate it again.

*gather the scraps and roll them out again until you finish using the dough.

recipe adapted from HHB