Ganache filled cupcakes with white chocolate cream cheese frosting.

As much as I despise the nuisance needed to make frosted cupcakes, I have attempted it again last week.

I followed this easy cupcakes recipe by Annabel Karmel in which you simply whisk all ingredients together, chocolate ganache to fill them, and white chocolate cream cheese frosting to ice them.

The cupcakes look adorable even when naked.

And the sprinkles are essential for camouflaging the cupcakes from my non-existent frosting skills.

I could not get even-sized centres with a gigantic knife and the crumbly cake texture. Consider the person lucky to get the cake with a bigger ganache centre.

White chocolate cream cheese butter birthday cake with strawberries.

This old blog's been collecting dust lately. I made a layer cake for my child awhile ago for his second birthday. It was similar to the butter cupcakes that I have made in the previous post, except that for the frosting I used this recipe for White Chocolate Cream Cheese Buttercream which looks like a dream. The cake was Mrs Ng's recipe which I have attempted a few times, but this time in a different size of tin.

The frosting requires butter, quality white chocolate and cream cheese with a 1:1:1 ratio. It is important to use high quality chocolate or else you would make the same mistake as I did. I subbed the chocolate with normal chocolate chips I bought from a bakery shop and the frosting didn't turn out as good as I expected it to be (it might also be due to myself not exactly following the recipe ...). 

You may use my version to speed things up or refer to the original recipe. I believe with the relatively warmer, more humid weather in Malaysia, the frosting needs to cool down in the fridge before it is used to frost the cake.

If I would whip this up again, I'd opt out the butter and just double the cream cheese. I like the pure flavour of cheese for my frosting.

I decorated the cake with heart shaped strawberries and an animal toy as a cake topper.

Butter cupcakes with cream cheese frosting.

Frosting cakes has never been my thing. There are more dishes to do and a piping bag to clean. Besides, the frosting always seem to be TOO sweet. And I could never get the hang of frosting a nice pattern.

It took a lot of motivation for me to actually initiate this trial. I used the most trusted recipe of butter cake for the cake base. You could use just half the recipe to make a dozen cupcakes.

I couldn't recall where I got the cream cheese frosting recipe from. I whipped 250 g of softened cream cheese with approximately 40 g of white chocolate and about 20 g of icing sugar. I don't remember the exact recipe but it was enough to ice 12 cupcakes.

If I try the recipe again I would post it here.

Chocolate & marshmallow muffins.

Fudgy muffins.

Chocolate and Marshmallow Muffins (makes 12)

Dry ingredients:

210 g flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

30 g cocoa powder

110 g icing sugar

80 g chopped chocolates

4 marshmallows, cut smaller (tiny white marshmallows would be more appealing)

Wet ingredients:

1 egg

95 g vegetable oil

240 g milk

1 tsp vanilla essence

1. Preheat the oven to 200 °C. 

2. Mix together the dry and wet ingredients. Do not overmix. Seeing small traces of flour is OK (lumpy mixture makes the best muffins).

3. Pour into 12 muffin cases, 3/4 full.

4. Bake for 15-20 minutes, or until puffy.

Brownie with chocolate ganache and fresh strawberries.

The brownie recipe was taken straight from Annie Bell's rendition in her book Gorgeous Cakes, which was my all-time favourite.

I did some Google search and found out that the ground almonds cannot be swapped for flour, as they give a different texture to the cake while flour forms the gluten which helps the cake to hold together.

Brownie with Chocolate Ganache and Fresh Strawberries

For the brownie:

250 g chocolate buttons
144 g butter
100 g granulated sugar
3 eggs, plus 1 yolk
80 g ground almonds
1/2 tsp salt
100 g flour
1 tsp baking powder

1. Preheat oven to 170°C. Grease a 10" pan.
2. Microwave chocolate and butter for 30 seconds. Stir until incorporated.
3. Mix in the sugar until melted.
4. Add in eggs and the yolk, one by one.
5. Fold in the ground almonds and salt.
6. Carefully fold in sieved flour and baking powder in several additions.
7. Pour into the greased pan and bake for 30 minutes.

For the ganache:
12 g butter
25 g milk
100 g chocolate
4 strawberries, rinsed, dried and quartered

1. Microwave all ingredients for 30 seconds.
2. Whip until well mixed. Put aside to chill to your preferred consistency, if needed. Spread on top of the unmoulded cake and serve with strawberries.

Coffee oreo muffin.

This is probably my last time baking cakes in another few months to come! The next trip home is indefinitely timed and the blog will remain idle during this time too.

Here are some Coffee Oreo Muffins made using recipe adapted from Bakericious's Chocolate Oreo Muffins. To be frank I didn't like the strong aftertaste because I don't drink coffee. Btw, any cream filled chocolate cookies are good enough for the recipe, unless you are a passionate Oreo lover who can tell a counterfeit cream-centred cookie from a packet of Oreos with eyes closed.

Butter cake version 2.

I had always loved the fluffy butter cake I made with Mrs NgSK's recipe shared by Wendy here.

Just recently I wanted to make 2 loaves of it. The baking time was reduced. This time I took out a quarter of the sugar used.

Strawberry banana bread.

Hey guys, so I tried out Roasted Strawberry Banana Bread from Skinnytaste but it didn't turn out nice and dry like a banana bread. Eek.

Mine is just too moist! Because I thought using wholemeal flour will dry the bread out so,

- I roasted the strawberries for only 10 minutes, since I omitted the applesauce;

- the bananas I used probably wasn't mashed sufficiently so as a result there are still lumps of bananas;

- I used 100 g molasses for the 110 g sugar in the recipe, which could have contributed to the moistness.

And the baking temperature at 175 °C was probably too low! 50 min wasn't enough.

Will update if I attempt the recipe again.

Passion fruit cheesecake.

When you crave for some sugar fix but don't know what cake is on the safe side ... Just side with cheesecakes. Cheesecakes that don't need leavening to look presentable.

Although I would say, better ditch the sponge cake base. :(  Because it will be stone firm without sugar.

The cheesecake recipe is adapted from Alex Goh's Fantastic Cheesecake, and sponge cake recipe from Food.com.

I reduced the sugar in the cheesecake, but for the sponge cake I only managed to cut away 2-3 teaspoons. Overall, sugar content is 20 g (sugar in cheesecake) + 52 g (sugar in sponge) + est. 10 g (sugar present in dairy products) = about 82 g, plus fructose present in the pulp of 2 passion fruits!

Nevertheless, its carb and fat contents are still high so eat in moderation.

No bake coffee cheesecake with sponge base.

Daddy's birthday is supposed to fall on this day. So it's practically a holiday everytime.

He's supposed to turn 63 this year.

Anyway, happy birthday daddy!

With or without a celebration, our home is always filled with a cake. To put my baking desire on hold whenever I'm short of sweet stuff.

Here is a sugar guilt-free version of Bakericious's Non Bake Coffee Cheesecake. Except for the sponge base (adapted from Food.com), in which the sugar plays a very crucial role, there's no added sugar in the cheese other than what was already present in the whipping cream.

Okay, it is however wise to taste your cake before chilling it ... Cream cheese is naturally salty so I should have balanced it out with some sugar, or used sweetened coffee powder.

I made this in a loaf pan so it's a pretty petite cake.

And please don't be bothered by the unkempt setting. :/ I lined the rounded tin with foil so that the cake can be extricated easily. The sides then looked like crumpled paper.

And I probably should have infused the coffee more into the boiled water before filtering. Or used more coffee.

Easy and fast low sugar orange olive oil cake.

I made these darlings today, after more than an hour of search high and low all over the Internet.

Because I was bored out of my wits. And the 34 degrees Celsius out there wasn't helping. I dreaded to pass the few hours in the afternoon.

Recipe was adapted from Food Network's Orange Olive Oil Cake. Mine didn't turn out looking anything like the olive oil cake in their picture, which looks deliciously heavenly judging by the fluffy and smooth texture.

The cake bakes fast so if you don't have much time to spare, an hour is sufficient to make this large cake.

Like my previous recipes of the past few months, I used molasses sugar in place of table sugar. I didn't have enough so I compensated with some granulated sugar. The molasses sugar gave the batter an irresistible caramel-like appearance, and the cake came out in a dark orange tone.

I followed some advice in the reviews and used more juice than it was called for. I used self-raising flour to prevent the cake from turning out too flat. Baked the cake for 20 minutes tops!

Nigella Lawson's old fashioned chocolate cake, wholemeal low-sugar remake.

Sugar is addictive.

One day I was craving for cakes and chocolates. But I can't afford to have so many chocolates in my cake - that would literally turn it into a brownie. So I turned to a less sweeter alternative by using low sugar cocoa powder and baking chocolates.

Through the day I whipped up an adapted version of Nigella Lawson's chocolate cake by substituting some materials.

It resulted in a chocolate-y and not too sweet (evidently for my mom too as she savoured as much as I did) cake.

The chocolate cake slices look plain without some icing sugar dust but I'm alright with that. My cake was crumbly. And because the top nearly burned, it's hardened, crumbles more than the rest of the cake.

You can amp up the chocolate by boosting the amount of chocolate chunks. Or make the cake more airy by using 200 g sugar as called for in the original recipe.

Bring back the butter rather than using vegetable oil. The better measure for the oil was supposed to be 3/4 the amount of suggested butter (131 g oil to substitute for 175 g unsalted butter), but I increased it to 170 g so that the cake would remain moist as wholemeal flour and molasses sugar soak up more moisture than plain white flour and white sugar. It's your verdict: 175 g butter or 170 g vegetable oil?

And throw in some nuts I'd say.

Making cheesecake with molasses sugar.

I am on a low carb low sugar diet, which means eliminating white and refined products and processed foods as much as I can from my life.

So mommy (and my husband, too) are growing sterner with me when I begged for ice cream, ais kacang, cakes and ... repeat.

Blergh.

Mom said I could bake cakes, ONLY if the sugar amount was cut back very drastically.

You know how hard it is to bake WITHOUT granulated sugar.

So I have resorted to using the darker varieties of brown sugar - in this case, molasses sugar. Molasses are present in your typical packaged brown sugar, the colour depth varying with its molasses content. I was looking for muscovado sugar at the organic store but they only had molasses sugar and unrefined cane sugar for my replacements. 

Can anyone enlighten me on the differences between muscovado and molasses sugar?

Brown sugars contain more moisture than white sugar, therefore the dryness of white sugar is extremely crucial in making a cake with light texture.

On the other hand, instead of using my regular full cream milk, I have replaced it with low fat high calcium milk.

This recipe requires one to beat egg whites with sugar until soft peaks form. I actually whipped until firm peaks are formed. It takes a longer time to attain this with molasses sugar than you would regularly with granulated sugar.

I obtained 16 servings from this recipe.

Table below is the nutrition content of the cake. Take note that I did not include carbohydrates from the flours and protein from the eggs.

Moist chocolate cake.

It's a new year again. After so many years, our family is welcoming it with my paternal relatives up north. It was only when I was a child, dad would drive us all the way here and I remembered it took 10-12 hours of travelling from Kuantan.

Now with dad gone, we have no reason to stay in Kuantan for big days like these.

Families aside, I'm blessed to not be forced into kitchen duties (yet) and I can help out just whenever I feel like it.

So my daily routine goes from sleeping, eating and sitting.

Bored to my bones here with no oven, I have resorted to making steamed cake from whatever I could collect from our local mini marts.

I used a barely accurate mechanical weighing scale (which returns to different zero positions after each compression).

Adapted from Bakericious's Steamed Moist Chocolate Cake, a love at first sight. If you see some ingredients omitted from my recipe, it's because there is barely any ingredient at home and in the marts.

Butter cake.

All my life I've been avoiding from making butter cake because I grew up with mom baking them.

But Wendy's post on fluffy butter cake has gotten my heart, here's her take on her friend Mrs NgSK's recipe.

I'm not a big fan of beating egg whites and yolks separately, especially because they involve the use of mixers ... Cleaning the whisks is a tedious job.

The adjusted recipe is as below.

Dragonfruit mousse cake.

Hey guys.

With internship sucking away most of my patience and energy now, I'm glad I found myself home to recharge from being stuck in an office 12 hours a day.

Being able to walk in places surrounded by trees and not buildings that are at least 7 levels high is a bliss.

Being inspired by Typica's signature cakes that are so soft and smooth, I have decided to try making a mousse cake with a fruit of my choice.

I really wanted the purple flesh dragonfruit but it seems like they are not in season.

First prepare the base. Press enough crackers crumbs mixed with butter into base of cake tin and bake at 180°C for 10 minutes. You can chill it instead, but I reckon baking it will form a more cohesive base.

Lemon yogurt cake with mango sauce.

I saw this great shot of Lemon Yogurt Cake in a past CNY/Valentine issue of Flavours magazine, and decided that since daddy's a fan for sour stuff, I'd do this lemon flavour infused cake for his birthday. If it was before, I might have made a cheesecake instead but I wanted to save (mommy's) money this year, so ... :)

For the sauce, you'll need:

Juice of 1 fruit (I prefer one with a sour pang, squashed half a mango for this recipe)

Sugar (approx. half the volume of the juice)

1. Heat juice over medium fire. Pour in sugar, stir until dissolved.

2. Let it simmer until sauce thickened to your preferred consistency. Remove from heat.

For the cake, you'll need:

250g caster sugar

1/8 tsp salt

zest of 3 lemons (I used what was left: 1 lemon)

2 eggs (lightly beaten)

100g butter (I used fat spread)

400g plain flour

2 tsps baking powder

200g plain yogurt

1. Preheat oven 180°C. Brush a 20" cake tin with butter or line with greaseproof paper.

2. Mix together sugar, salt, zest and eggs. Whisk.

3. Sift together flour and baking powder. Pour flour, butter and yogurt into eggs mixture. Mix until incorporated.

4. Bake for 30 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean when inserted.

The cake was pretty firm, as predicted. The making of this cake obviously did not indicate that it'll be airy when baked, and the instruction to stir together flour, butter and yogurt is really vague. I just poured in half of the flour mixture into the eggs mixture after mixing butter first, and then I nearly got a firm cookie dough out of it.

I love you like a fat kid loves cake.

 Red Velvet Cupcakes w/ Cream Cheese Frosting

Because I love how my nails match the 100's and 1000's, a little.

Chinese New Year is only a week away sweetums! Although my second semester commences next Monday. *wail*

As promised, cupcakes made using flavouring and colouring. I was thinking of saving up on other ingredients because cream cheese has never ceased intimidating me with its price.

So instead of using the frosting recipe to save on the cream acquired at Joy of Baking, I turned to another recipe at allrecipes.com that goes with butter. And because unsalted butter could not be found and salted butter's price is another jaw-dropping factor, I substituted it with fat spread.

Talk about bad choices!

Cream would make a good frosting along with the cheese and sugar, over butter, and obviously fat spread too. By the way, since I don't fancy overly sweet stuff, I would recommend to cut the sugar amount of both cake and frosting recipes by half, although I've actually reduced both of their original sugar content! Otherwise, chucking this baby down your throat will be a guilty and torturing experience.

Cream cream frosting:

250g cream cheese

57g (4 ounces) butter (which I used fat spread)

125g sugar (reduced 70g from the original 195g)

Cream the cheese until smooth, add butter and cream until even. Add sugar, mix until fluffy.

When making this frosting, I wasn't a happy kid. :(

Red velvet cupcakes:

125g flour

1/4 tsp baking powder

1 tbsp cocoa powder

57g (4 ounces) butter (which I used fat spread)

120g sugar (I used 80g confectionery and 40g brown)

1 egg

1/2 tsp vanilla essence

120ml milk (mixed with 1 tbsp lemon juice as a substitute to buttermilk, refer to Joy of Baking)

1/2 tbsp red food colouring

1/2 tsp white distilled vinegar

1/2 tsp baking soda

1. Preheat oven to 175°C.

1. Mix flour, baking powder and cocoa thoroughly.

2. Cream butter until smooth, add sugar and cream until fluffy. Whip in egg.

3. Add vanilla essence into the butter mixture.

4. Pour red food colouring into the milk, mix evenly.

5. In batches, add flour mixture and milk into the butter mixture alternately, beginning and ending with flour.

6. Pour baking soda over vinegar, allow to fizz, then mix into batter.

7. Acting quickly, pour batter into containers. Bake for 25 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean when inserted.

I was expecting them to rise, not crack. Gah.

I managed to bake 9 of these babies, thanks to the larger muffin container. Ugh. :( So I had to pile up the frosting merrily.

To assemble:
1. Pipe or spoon the frosting over cupcakes when cool.
2. Allow to set in the fridge for a few hours.

Oh-so-firm. *wail again*

My kind of breakfast.

This recipe was adapted from Jan '10 issue of Food & Travel.

It originally calls for carrot, orange rind and juice, but grating is a hard labour and we still have lots of passion fruit stocked up from Bukit Tinggi.

Anyway, the muffins are absolutely heart warming! Get infected with one bite off a freshly baked Passion Fruit Muffin using this recipe. This has got to be my favourite muffin recipe. It's really easy to follow. If you like light milky flavour then you can omit the fruit syrup from this recipe.

If you have a glucose-conscious family member, just make a small portion of the syrup to flavour the muffins.

I used a measuring cup instead of converting the measurements to metric form. Got myself 7 petite muffins using half of the recipe.

125g butter (I used fat spread)

1/3 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 1/2 cups self-raising flour

1/3 cup milk

Passion fruit syrup

Juice of 3 passion fruits

Caster sugar (measure it in the same container as the juice, have the sugar to make up half the volume of juice would do)
*Juice to sugar ratio is 2:1, e.g. 1 cup juice to 1/2 cup sugar.

1. Preheat oven to 180°C.
2. For the syrup: Heat the juice and sugar together, stirring constantly until the sugar melts. Turn the heat down and simmer until the liquid begins to thicken just a little, about 15 minutes. Remove from heat, it will thicken when cooled.

3. Beat butter and sugar until well combined. Crack the eggs one by one into the mixture, mixing before adding the next egg.

4. Then, fold in flour and milk alternatively in batches. (I didn't realize why until I did so, the mixture immediately became sticky you have to pour in the milk to smooth it back for the next batch of flour.)

5. Add a few teaspoons of the syrup into the batter. Sieve it if you don't fancy the seeds. Mix well.

6. Divide into cases.  Bake for 25 minutes or until cooked.

The muffins raised rather funnily, right? I didn't switch their places in intervals. And cracks!

Still a little airy, certainly not as firm-packed as the other muffins in older posts.

- Adapted from Food & Travel magazine,

Key Editions Pte Ltd,

Jan 2010 issue

No-bake red bean cheesecake.

I've been craving to make foods after I quit working. My university life is starting next month (tomorrow is the beginning of October, I gotta embrace it!) and it's been a long time since I had the time to cook or bake.

I found the recipe from my brother's bundle. Credit can be located at the bottom of the post.

This I could say, is one of my most successful cakes, maybe I was less slouchy and the method was not so tedious. The produce was rather delicate. *smiles* But sadly there were gelatin lumps that weren't incorporated into the cheese mixture.

It's a chilled cake and no egg is needed.

Firing away.

For the biscuit base:
I used the square crackers the seniors love dipping into coffee, and a tablespoon of melted butter. Only this time, I chilled it in a baking pan with removable base, instead of baking it.

For the red bean filling you'll need:

100g red beans, cooked until soft in water (but still a lil' stiff for my case, anywho, as long as it's edible)

60g caster sugar

1. Strain water from red beans, and process the red beans until they form a paste.

2. Cook the paste over medium heat. More water would ooze out after some time. Cook until there's less liquid, but still a little moist.

3. Add in the sugar and cook until it dissolves.

The final product.

For the cake:
250g cream cheese
50g caster sugar
1 1/2tbsps gelatin powder
60g water
250g whipping cream (I used the 250ml pack, it weighed a little over 200g, and the original recipe calls for 300g)
200g red bean filling (I had a little over 200g from the recipe, the leftover is still in the fridge *guilty*)

1. Combine gelatin powder and water in a bowl, over a bain-marie, cook until gelatin dissolves.
2. While waiting for (1), beat cream cheese and sugar until incorporated.
3. Pour (1) over the cheese mixture and stir well. (Lumps in my cake were formed in this process.)

I was curious about how mixing gelatin mixture with cream cheese would turn out.

4. Beat the whipping cream until soft peaks form, then fold into the cheese mixture.

I LOVED this! It was so fluffy!

5. Mix in 200g red bean filling.

6. Pour mixture into the baking pan with biscuit base.
7. Refrigerate for 4 hours or more.

Adapted from Fantastic Cheesecake by Alex Goh.

Highly recommended for bakers! I've tried some recipes since year 2005 and except for the Cottage Cheesecake, the rest turned out really good.