Star-Topped Mince Pies

It's Christmas already, and the potluck party invitations are in. I'm always having so many dishes I want to bring, only to find myself pressed for time. I love baking and cooking for friends and families during the festive season but it is also one of my busiest season with Great Bakes. My poor oven runs daily and on some days, for hours straight...just the fruitcakes will take 4-5 hours to bake in very low temperature. So, I have to plan very accurately. This year, I planned for Mince Pies. First up is the Star-Topped Mince Pies. This recipe is available in both Feast and How To Be A Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson. Mince Pies are very easy to do especially if you can buy a good jar of mince instead of cooking it yourself. Not that cooking mince is difficult, it really is easy especially without suet. I'll do it next year just to prove it...remind me. The pastry is relatively easy to mix and all you have to do is roll 'em, fill 'em, star-top 'em and bake 'em. Doesn't even take long to bake them. Just 10 minutes. I'll give it to you if your fingers are a little large because you do need to gently place the fine pastry into the miniature tins. But these babies are beautiful to look at and to eat. Pop-in-the-mouth sizes. My kind of mince pies...I can't stomach large mince pies :-p

Almond Torta with Chocolate Chips

I bought this book because the cover says "100 Foolproof Italian Dishes.." and it was written by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich. If the writer's married surname sounds familiar to you, that's because her son, Joe Bastianich is one of the judges in US Masterchef and my favourite one. This is basically an Italian almond cake. Italian almond cakes are always drier and they have a good reason for that. It's always accompanied by whipped cream, ice-cream or zabaglione (a sabayon-light custard, with Marsala or Moscato). I love the cake but not so much the chocolate chips. Kinda "cheapen" the whole cake, if you get what I mean. I believe using chocolate chunks would have been a better idea. With every bite comes the softer chocolate rather than the over-processed chips. Will do this again simply because it's such a healthy cake!

Chocolate Buttermilk Layer Cake

Picked up a copy of Donna Hay's Oct/Nov 2012 Spring issue waaayyy back in September, and on the back cover was a bonus section- Best of Baking, Classic Cakes. All the recipes were "fast, fresh, simple". True to Donna Hay's style of cooking. Little Miss requested for this cake simply because she loves icing. And eating cakes layered with icing is her idea of nirvana....right after ice-cream. This is a melt-and-mix type of cake and as expected, the chocolate cake was a little too dense for my liking. The frosting was chocolate cream cheese. It's was 36'C then (still is) and melting fast, as I feverishly tried to slice and slap on the frosting in between layers! Clearly, the assembled cake had to be stored in the refrigerator all the time and that didn't help the cake texture. Still dense, a tad chewy and drier. I recall baking Donna Hay's 6-layer Chocolate Cake some years ago and I think it must have been the same recipe because its texture was the same. Little Miss polished off whatever cake was left anyway...hmmm, got to teach her to be a bit more discerning. 

The World's Best Chocolate Ice-Cream

Did I mention that I got myself a Cuisineart ice-cream machine in June? Well, I DID. At a SALE. It was ON SALE. It was CHEAP-er. Such a bargain that there was only 1 UNIT LEFT. My DAUGHTER LOVES ice-cream. Oh....a woman will have every justification possible when she buys something on a whim doesn't she? I've been meaning to shop for one since last year and all I encountered were either the plasticky, toy-like versions or the industrial sizes. I wasn't looking for it this time when I was in Melbourne but as chance would have it, it was there in Essential Ingredients. The one and only unit in the store calling out to me, begging to be adopted. But I was there specifically for ONLY Maggie Beer's Verjuice, a bottle of paella spice mix and Callebaut dark chocolates!! My girlfriend was surprisingly unsurprised when she came back from turning the car around to hear me telling her that I was carting an ice-cream maker back. Mind you, it was quite a large box and I had to re-organise my cabin baggage to accommodate an extra hand luggage. Yes, I had my tote on one arm and the huge 4kg box on the other. I looked ridiculous. Even had to sort of fling it to show the check-in officer that it was simply light plastic ware and my overweight check-in bag could use that allotted 7kg instead of paying a penalty. Story of the ice-cream machine's journey doesn't end there but I'll stop now...we're getting out of context here.

So, the world's best chocolate ice-cream, eh? This recipe was from Nigella Lawson's How To Eat book and she swore that this ice-cream deserved the title. I have by then churned a few rounds of ice-cream and they've all been great. Best be known that homemade ice-cream is nothing like store-bought ones. Not entirely better but entirely different. All depend on what you want from your ice-cream. Our staple brand is Bulla and once in a blue moon, a very expensive and small tub of Haagen-Daaz. But this chocolate ice-cream is truly a class of its own. I used a half of dark chocolate and another half of bitter chocolate. The smokiness from the burnish caramel gave this ice-cream its much-deserved title. It is velvety smooth, creamy rich and.....orgasmic. Beauty of it is you only need a small scoop to get your fix...see how easy it is to satisfy a woman?

Chocolate-Pistachio Cake

This cake came about when I was idling in the kitchen while the boys were watching the Singapore F1 race on the telly and a jar of pistachios on the sideboard threatening to go rancid. Got a kilo of these wonderful nuts from Dubai and we've been popping them till our throats were scratchy. Needless to say, we refrained from them to recover and it's been rendered purposeless since. So, I sat in the kitchen for half an hour just shelling all that were left. Thankfully, there was just enough for this cake. I've resisted baking this cake in the past because pre-grounded pistachios are non-existent and I worry that my food processor may not do a good job. But this old kitchen helper proved me wrong. It did a beautiful job processing the pistachios until dust and it was simply putting the rest of the ingredients after that, to finish off the batter. This flourless cake was moist, yet light and that's all due to the meringue folded into the batter in the last step. So, you have to make sure that you beat the egg whites till they are glossy and firm. I didn't cook the orange-flower-flavoured ganache and this scrumptious cake didn't need any icing to take it to cake nirvana.

Chocolate Cheesecake

We love cheesecakes and we love this Chocolate Cheesecake from Nigella Lawson's Feast. My only gripe is the recipe calls for a couple more ingredients to make up the filling. But then again, it may not be as yummy if it didn't have those extras. Compared to the version from How To Be A Domestic Goddess, this one's smoother and the chocolate flavour is much more intense with a good balance between the sweetness and tang from the sour cream. The two obvious things I did, which probably contributed to its sophistication are (1) using Oreo cookies (no cream) for the base instead of digestive biscuits and (2) Callebaut Dark Chocolate, which reminds me...... I'm out of it!!

Marble Cake

The MOTH finally agrees to this Marble Cake! Over the years, whenever a slice of Marble Cake is presented to him, he'd look at it with disdain. You see, he has very little regard for Marble Cakes...remind him of tuck shop cakes - dry, character-less and plain sweet, just so they can call it a cake. I tend to agree at some point because it really is just a two-colour Madeira Cake where you divide the batter in two and colour one with a tablespoon of cocoa. But this version from Nigella Lawson's Feast is different. Using her moist Madeira Cake as a base, she also gave a small but significant twist to each colour. Citrus zest to add some zing to the plain batter and a little coffee to perk up the chocolate base. The cake is moist, flavourful and you won't stop at one slice. A real comfort cake. No wonder it's in the "funeral" section of that book!