I Heart Cherries!

But in these tropical climes, fresh, juicy red cherries are fleeting, not to mention expensive. But hey, a girl’s gotta live a little, no?

Recently C and I passed a fruit stall along Geylang where we journey to every now and then for our fix of pomfret charcoal steamboat. The pile of gleaming, rubescent fruit were simply impossible to resist — well, that and the durians that C carted home in a pungent Styrofoam box.

We had cherries, stoned and sliced into our bowls of yoghurt and cereal at breakfast; we ate them for dessert, and then for supper. They also found their way into this deceptively delicious cake from Mich Turner’s Fantastic Party Cakes.



Now there are books I buy for the recipes and those I pick purely for aesthetic inspiration. This book falls in the latter category. So until I read a review of the book in last Sunday’s newspapers, I’d never actually thought try out any recipe from it. But the reviewer said something about the author’s recipe yielding the best butter cake that had ever come out of her oven. And in our house, the quest for the perfect easy-to-make butter cake is a never-ending one.



Indeed, Turner’s recipe for a basic vanilla butter cake yielded one of the best that’s ever come out of my oven. And a few pages away was the recipe for this gem. It is moist, soft, fluffy and just downright delicious. The crumble on the top also gives it a nice, light crunch. It is a cake that needs no accompaniment — not ice cream, not crème fraiche, not whipped cream, nothing. Well, maybe just a steaming cup of coffee or tea.

Cherry & Almond Cake
(adapted from Mich Turner’s Fantastic Party Cakes)

For the cake:
140g self-raising flour
50g sugar
1 large egg
4 tbsp milk
85g unsalted butter, melted
1 tsp almond extract (I used vanilla instead)
350g cherries, stoned and cut in half or quarters (I got away with using about 200g)

For the crumble topping:
25g butter
25g ground almonds
25g sugar
1/2 tsp almond or vanilla extract

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees C. Grease and line the base of a shallow 20cm tin.
2. Measure flour and sugar into a bowl and mix well. Make a well in the centre and add the egg, milk, melted butter and almond or vanilla extract.
3. Beat with a wooden spoon till smooth.
4. Spoon into the tin and spread evenly.
5. Scatter the cherries over the cake mixture and gently press them in.
6. Make the topping by measuring all the ingredients into a clean bowl.
7. Rub the butter in until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs gently clumped together. Scatter this over the cherries.
8. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until a skewer inserted in the centre of the cake emerges clean.
5. Allow the cake to cool and then remove it from the tin to cool completely on a wire rack.

Easy Biscuits

I can't say I've ever had a real Southern meal. Despite being a city rich with world-class restaurants serving all manner of cuisines, Singapore is not well endowed with eateries serving Southern food (that is, Southern USA — biscuits, gravy, fried chicken, grits, red velvet cake). And no, Popeye's doesn't count.

But I love biscuits. The kind you mop up brown gravy with; the kind they used to serve at McDonald's for breakfast many years ago.

My many attempts at making those flaky, fluffy buttermilk biscuits have all been in vain. Our tropical weather and my non-air-conditioned kitchen make it damn near impossible — which probably says something about my talents and patience, or lack of. So C and I would settle for the Pilsbury variety. That's until they stopped stocking it at Jason's several years ago.

So the long and short of it is that we haven't had biscuits for a while. Well, we stopped at Popeye's one night but they make a poor excuse for biscuits, which don't even come with gravy!

It's a good thing then that I discovered Bon Appetit, Y'All by Virginia Willis. Its catchy title grabbed me immediately, and as it turns out, it is filled with easy-to-do home-style yet refined Southern recipes gleaned from the author's family kitchen. Within its pages are a recipe for Buttermilk Angel Biscuits, which, with its "trio of leaveners protects even the worst of bakers from abject failure", she writes. She must be speaking to me.

But before I tread once more into that familiar territory of biscuit failure, I figured I'd have a go at a decidedly easier recipe for Mayonnaise Biscuits. It is such a simple throw-everything-together recipe that the even author confesses to — in her younger, more foolish days — regarding it as one step above a baking mix. Be that as it may, it yielded such fabulous results that I am now determined to try her recipe for Buttermilk Angel Biscuits.

When I eventually find the time to, that is.

Mayonnaise Biscuits
adapted from Bon Appetit, Y'All by Virginia Willis
(Makes 9-12, depending on the size of your muffin tins)

1 tbsp canola oil, for brushing your tins
2 cups self-raising flour (I made mine by following Ms Willis' instructions to mix 1 cup cake flour with 1 cup plain flour, 3 tsp baking powder, and 1 tsp fine sea salt)
1 cup milk
3 tbsp mayonnaise
1 tsp sugar

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees C.
2. Brush muffin tins with the oil.
3. Mix all the ingredients in a bowl.
4. Using an ice-cream scoop, drop a scoopful of batter into each muffin tin and bake for 20–30 mins, or until golden brown. Serve warm.

In the Mood for Spanish

My brother recently returned from a month-long holiday to Spain and Paris and came home carting a bag full of delicious edibles for this grateful and gluttonous sister. There were macarons from Pierre Herme, jamon serrano from Barcelona, jamon iberico bellota from Bellota-Bellota in Paris (check out Chubby Hubby's post on this gorgeous ham), and a hunk of Manchego cheese.

Perhaps Spain's best known cheese, Manchego is typically made from sheep's milk in the central region of La Mancha. I like to think of it as the pecorino of Spain since it has a similar brittle texture and a sharp, nutty taste.




I used my stash to make a tapas of delicate triangles of bread fried in olive oil, layered with quince paste and topped with chopped toasted pine nuts. The honeyed flavour of quince paste provides a wonderful contrast to the sharp cheese, while the flavour of the olive oil which the bread is fried in just ups the whole Spanish-ness of it all. The recipe I used is from Spain and the World Table, a fantastic book filled with easy-to-follow recipes and lots of great information about Spanish ingredients, dishes and produce.



For this classic tapas of cheese-stuffed dates rolled in serrano ham, I used some leftover blue cheese that I had in the fridge and added a sprinkling of cocoa nibs for added depth and crunch. This surprising inspiration I gleaned from the same book, which uses figs instead of dates, but the principle remains the same. You could pop these sweet-salty dates straight into your mouth, but a short blitz in a hot oven intensifies its flavours, making the salty ham saltier, the sweet dates sweeter and endowing the blue cheese with added robustness — turning it all, quite literally, into a taste sensation.



More manchego went into this crab pasta, which is based loosely on a recipe for crab ravioli in Cocina Nueva, another book I turn to often when in the mood for Spanish. Plenty of freshly picked crabmeat is folded into a tomato sauce that is richly flavoured with carrot, leek, brandy, white wine, thyme, garlic and bay leaves. Before serving, the sauce gets a shot of cream infused with a flurry of Manchego shavings and a bay leaf.

Cookie Crunch

I found myself with a rare free afternoon the Saturday before Easter and since I've had my Easter cookie cutter set for over a year, I decided now was as good a time as any to make my virgin attempt at cookie decorating.

And boy did I suck at it.

Patience, as anyone who knows me will tell you, is not one of my virtues. And cookie decorating requires plenty of it. Well, that and talent — which, as the pictures of my cookies will attest — is not something I am particularly blessed with in this respect.

Firstly, my cookies didn't bake to perfectly even surfaces, so the flooding didn't quite sit well. Secondly, my flooding was probably a little too thin, so it didn't render a nice opaque tone. Then there's my unsteady hand, which translated to quivering borders and, well... child-like designs would be a kind way to put it.

And then there's the patience thing again. I just couldn't wait for the icing to dry before piping in more dots and things. My dots had tails, my lines broke mid-way... I don't really need to go on, do I?

The only good thing that came out of this experiment were the cookies, which came from Peggy Porschen's Pretty Party Cakes. They are basic cocoa-flavoured sugar cookies, but they pack an intense chocolatey taste and a nice crisp texture. So I did the sane thing and cut the remaining cookie dough with a bite-size circular cutter and now serve them on a saucer with post-dinner coffee.




Chocolate Sugar Cookies
(Adapted from Peggy Porschen's Pretty Party Cakes)

200g unsalted butter
200g sugar
1 egg, beaten lightly
50g cocoa powder (I used Valrhona)
350g plain flour

1. Cream the butter and sugar until well mixed and just creamy in texture. Don't overwork or the cookies will spread during baking.

2. Beat in the egg until well combined. Add the flour and cocoa powder and mix on low speed until a dough forms.

3. Gather the dough into a ball, wrap in cling film and chill for at least an hour.

4. Place the dough on a floured surface and knead briefly.

5. Roll out to about 5mm thickness.

6. Use your cookie cutters to cut out shapes and then lay them on a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper.

7. Chill again for about 30 minutes.

8. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C.

9. Bake for 8-12 minutes, depending on size.

Raising Elephants

Here's a lesson I learned this week: When make fondant cakes in tropical weather, keep them small. I'd been making cupcakes with fondant figurines for a while now, so when a friend asked if I could make her a birthday cake with elephants on it, I thought, now why the hell not?

So off I set to work, fashioning the cutest little elephant (well, at least I thought so) sitting up with a fat round belly complete with a belly button and a raised trunk. I figured I didn't want to bother with leaving it in an air-conditioned room because a) I'm tight and b) I didn't want it to wilt the minute the cake was taken out of the dry air-conditioning and into our humid climes. If it was going to wilt, it may as well do so right in front of me where I could rectify it. And of course, it didn't disappoint. When I woke up the next morning, my little fella had put on some weight, lost some height, and was slipping backwards. His trunk had lost a little enthusiasm too -- it was no longer raised.

So it was back to the drawing board. After flipping through a couple of books, I found inspiration in this one. A lying-down elephant, in a sort of clambering-up-the-cake kinda position. Why didn't I think of that? I also made a little baby one to accompany it.

I made this two days before it was to be collected, hoping against all hope that it would dry. It rained and rained and my elephants got less perky by the day. But I guess they held up well enough (the picture was taken shortly before it was sent on its way to the birthday girl).

Over lunch the next day, my friend D, who is spectacular at making fondant cakes — she's made entire Thomas the Tank Engine cakes, Spiderman cakes, and teddy bear creations (all while living IN LONDON) — later told me that in this weather, it's best to just keep the fondant figurines small so they'll dry out faster and won't wilt. I wish I'd had that conversation with her earlier.

But then I remembered her telling me that she'd made a Spiderman cake for her twin sons recently and asked her how she managed that. As it turns out, she ended up making little fondant buildings and streets and then sticking a plastic Spidy figurine in the centre of it all. "If I'd made a fondant Spiderman," she said, "the black webs on his mask and costume would have streaked, and he would have to be lying down playing dead."

She'd also left the air-conditioning on for four days straight so that the cake wouldn't melt and die. Next time someone asks for a large fondant covered cake, I'm going to suggest a Dali theme.

Orange Season

It must be the festive season that's put me in a citrus mood. And it can't be helped, really, since everywhere you turn there are kumquats and mandarins, satsumas and oranges galore. So for dessert over many festive dinners, our table has been laden with all things orange.

At one dinner was crepes with kumquat compote and vanilla ice cream; at another was our nostalgic orange trifle which my brother and I nearly finished all by ourselves when the guests weren't looking. There was honey kumquat sorbet; orange cupcakes with earl grey tea-infused chocolate ganache frosting topped with candied orange peel. And now that the eating frenzy has passed, we're munching on sweet juicy mandarin orange wedges straight from the fridge.

Of all the orange desserts, the easiest has to be this simple and homely orange cake that's a cinch to make. Like the Lemon Poppy Seed cake in my last post, this one is easy to dress up. Made into cupcakes, they are delicious topped with fresh whipped cream infused with a teaspoon of orange blossom water and strewn with finely chopped pistachios. It also makes for a great teatime treat topped with candied oranges and a trickle of orange syrup.



Orange Butter Cake

250g butter, softened at room temperature
1 1/4cups sugar
4 eggs, at room temperature
2 cups self-raising flour, sifted
2 tsp orange zest
100ml fresh orange juice

1. Preheat oven to 160 degrees C.
2. Cream butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy.
3. Add the eggs one at a time and beat well after each addition.
4. Fold the flour into the batter.
5. Add the zest and juice and mix only until the batter is well incorporated.
6. Pour batter into a moulded tin, like a bundt tin, and bake for 40–60 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the centre of the cake comes out clean.

Lemon & Poppy Seed Cake

Like another cake-loving friend of mine, I have, over the years, learned to appreciate the joys of the lemon. In fact, until several years ago, you would have been hard-pressed to get me to choose anything lemony when it came to dessert. For me, it had always been chocolate or bust.

I can't tell you exactly when I came to see (or taste) lemon in a different light. Perhaps it was in the curds I discovered when Marmalade Pantry first introduced the Harvey Nics range in what must have been around the year 2000. Whatever the case, I've since come to love a good lemony cake, cookie, tart or slice.

This Lemon Poppy Seed Pound Cake satisfies both C and I in the sense that he likes cakes at their plainest while I like them with a bit of variety and lots of dressing up. From The Cake Book, the secret to this tender, buttery, moist cake is in creaming the butter and sugar for four minutes, until it becomes a pale, fluffy shade of marigold. Brushing a lemon syrup over the cake as it cools also adds to its wonderful moistness and lemony-ness.



This is a great tea cake, which C can enjoy with his post-meal coffee. I, on the other hand, need a bit more than that, so to up the lusciousness and lemony-ness, I eat it with with a healthy spoonful of lemon curd on the side. For a more "complex" dessert, I turned to some leftover buttermilk ice cream which I had made a week ago, which also made for a lovely complement with its tangy and delicate taste.



Lemon & Poppy Seed Cake
(Adapted from The Cake Book by Tish Boyle)

200g sifted cake flour
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
3 tbsp poppy seeds
227g unsalted butter, softened
240g granulated sugar
4 large eggs, at room temperature
1 tbsp lemon zest
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/3cup heavy cream

For the syrup:
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
1/3 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice

1. Preheat oven to 150 degrees C. Grease the bottom and sides of a loaf tin and dust with flour.
2. Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Add the poppy seeds and whisk to combine.
3. In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat the butter with a paddle attachment till it is very creamy, about 2 mins.
4. Add the sugar and beat at medium-high speed until very light, about 4 mins.
5. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.
6. Beat in the lemon zest and vanilla extract.
7. Add the flour at low speed in three additions, alternating it with the cream in two additions. Mix only until the flour is incorporated.
8. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top.
9. Bake for about an hour or until a skewer inserted comes out clean.
10. Remove the pan from the oven and let it cool on a wire rack for 10 mins.
11. While the cake is cooling, make the syrup.
12. Combine the water and sugar in a small saucepan and cook over medium heat till the sugar dissolves.
13. Remove from the heat and stir in the lemon juice.
14. Poke the cake all over at 1-inch intervals with a bamboo skewer and then brush it with half the lemon syrup.
15. Let the cake stand for 5 mins, then invert the cake onto the wire rack and poke the bottom all over with the skewer.
16. Brush the bottom and sides of the cake with the remaining syrup.
17. Turn the cake upright on the rack and let cool completely.