Chicken pie

I admit I'm not that good at making pies or tarts, and I tend to avoid them, especially when flaky pastry is required. I can't imagine that amount of butter in me!

But I had a craving for chicken pie. A craving for not just any chicken pie, but Violet Oon's chicken pie. I used to take a bus to Holland V to get them. That was about 15 years ago. I'm not sure if Violet Oon still sells chicken pies, but I remember hers to be the only ones I like. The pie crust was not too flaky or dry and the chicken very tender. Best of all, a little gravy oozes out when you eat the pie. Oh, one more important thing - they do not contain peas!! I do not dislike peas on their own, but I just cannot stand having peas, carrots and corns (you know, the frozen packs) in my pie.

I procrastinated for a few weeks because I am lazy. There's the pie crust to make and chill, chicken to cook, pie to assemble before finally baking it. It's a lot to do!

But then, hey, I just bought a new baking board. It can be used to roll dough, roll fondant, protect my table top and so much more! I can't wait to use it. Just at about the same time, I came across Donna Hay's Modern Classics Book 1. I'm her fan! I love her books, the pictures. I can stare at them for hours. They excite me like no other books can at the moment. No excuses now.

So, I started my pie attempt one afternoon. By the time my pie was done, the skies had turned gray and  begun to rain (hence the last 2 pictures looking quite awful with camera flash)

The original recipe used puff pastry to cover the top of the pie. But I decided to use the same crust for both the top and bottom. I am not good at making pastries. It took some struggling to get the pie crust to cover the top of the pie nicely without breaking. Fortunately, I was only using small pie moulds. My eggwash was also not brushed nicely, which affected the final look. I definitely need more practice on this.

The chicken was a little too salty, most likely due to the tweaks I made, since I did not have white wine on hand. I added some chinese cooking wine and soy sauce and left the chicken to simmer in the stock.  The taste is of course different, but that was all I had! But I certainly like having the gravy in my pie. It only lasted a while when it was freshly baked though. When I warmed up another one the next day, the gravy had already been absorbed into the bottom crust and the top crust had dried a little. Perhaps I should have used flaky pastry like what the recipe recommended. Next time. I'll do this again with spinach and salmon.

The recipe for the shortcrust pastry is here and the recipe for the chicken pie is here.

Choux a la Creme

My friend came back from Japan more than a week ago and came over to my place for a baking session. 

It is funny. We were really close friends back in Secondary school but we went to different schools after that and weren't exactly in touch. I can't exactly remember how we got in touch again after leaving school. Thinking back, that was 18 years ago when we first knew each other! No wonder I need to upgrade my face moisturiser to "Repairwear" range!

Somehow we got in touch again in recent years ( I think it's thanks to Facebook!) and somehow baking came into the picture. She is currently enrolled in a culinary school in Japan *envy envy* and seems to be enjoying her classes.

So she came, armed with her recipe from school and we made cream puffs (fancier name: choux a la creme just as they had taught in her school). I had an earlier attempt where I made cream puffs using Pierre Hermes recipe. I did not post the recipe but you can easily search from any Daring Bakers' blog in google.

I do not have my friend's recipe. Even if I do, it is from her school, I do not think it's nice of me to post it. To me, I am not quite able to tell the difference between her school's recipe and Pierre Hermes', yeah my taste buds are that lousy. They both taste good! Light and puffy, just like cream puffs should be.

Other than the puff, what goes inside is just as, if not, even more important. There are places that sell cream puffs with whipped cream and I think that is a lazy shortcut method. I like cream puffs that are only filled with pastry cream. I can accept pastry cream added with whipped cream to lighten it a little, but just not whipped cream alone.

Since I wanted to save my vanilla pods for my little project which is coming up, we used vanilla bean paste for the pastry cream instead. That is a good vanilla bean paste too with all the vanilla seeds in it, but of course, the pod would have been a little more fragrant.

2 weeks are going by in a flash and she will be back in Japan soon. Not sure when we will have the opportunity to bake together again, but the refrigerated cream puffs sure smelt and tasted so good!

Cream Puffs with Chocolate Pastry Cream

What does going to Pantry Magic mean to you? For me, it's feels exactly like a 5-year old kid going to Toys R' Us, there is so much to play with! And going in also means spend, spend and spend. I see the colourful silicone baking tools and colourful melamine mixing bowls and just drool. What's the fascination over pots, pans, baking trays..which I have and see everyday? I don't know. The grass is always greener on the other side. I am a big sucker for nice (and sometimes expensive) kitchen stuff. Even if it means not owning them, I have to look at them. I can go to a department store and look at the expensive pots, knives, crockery for the umpteenth time and not get tired of them. But I told myself I do not need a sixty bucks mixing bowl. Therefore, todays's trip to Pantry Magic was a highly disciplined one. I went in without a shopping list, which was very dangerous, but I managed to spend only a little.

I was in high spirits, and still am. My mind is still at my niece's birthday party over the weekend. I reckoned that during parties, anything bite-sized moves the fastest ( at least I personally would rather grab bite-sized food than hold a plate all the time). Moreover, she already had a birthday cake so I decided to make some bite-sized cream puffs filled with chocolate pastry cream.

I had initially wanted to make eclairs. Well, the pâte à choux is the same anyway. But somehow, when I made them into eclairs, the centers did not dry out 100% and my piping skills sucked. They did not look as nice as I wanted them to be. So I made a second batch of the pastry dough and made them into small cream puffs, or also called profiteroles.

The pastry dough was easy peasy. Initially, the instructions for the pastry cream did not go well into this little scatterbrain of mine. I had to read it over and over and over again and all I got was "pour into here...and then pour into there...and then pour in here again...". But once I got into doing it, I wasn't that scatterbrain after all.

The recipe that I used was not the same as I had used in my first attempt. This time, both the pastry and cream recipes are from Pierre Hermé, one of the most famous pastry chefs in the world. It was one of the Daring Bakers' challenges (which I have been dropped as a member since I did not follow their baking schedule), you can do a google search and find it on the blogs of numerous Daring Bakers. I did some slight tweaks on the recipes to suit my guests' palate and my oven's cooking time. I also did not do the chocolate glaze as the Daring Bakers, I used my own recipe and squeezed them out of a squeeze bottle.

Two people found the pastry cream a little too sweet, the others all said they were delicious! They also look a lot better than my first two attempts on cream puffs. This recipe is a keeper!

Chinese New Year - Pineapple Tarts

Chinese New Year is here again! It is the period of eating, eating and eating!

2 weeks ago, we had our Reunion Dinner session 1 with my aunt's family. Then there was another session with my own family, and another session with dear's family.

On the second day of CNY, my family went out for a good lunch, almost bursting our stomachs. Straight after that, we travelled for about 30-40 minutes to my cousin's place, and ate like silly again. That was early dinner for me...and about 10pm, dear and I went out for supper...my favourite cheese and mushroom prata.

Of all the CNY snacks, I usually have these few - kueh bangkit (MUST be melt in your mouth type), pineapple tarts (homemade from my aunt), peanut puffs (homemade from my other aunt). Kueh Bangkit and peanut puffs shall be my trial items next year.

This year, I made peanut cookies and pineapple tarts. Up to the week of CNY, I had been making these 2 items for consecutive evenings. They never seemed enough. I had a list of people I want to give them to. It was over ambitious again, because my oven could not handle that much. As I baked, dear ate and ate. To his dismay, I had to tell him not to eat any, otherwise I would never be making enough...and he had to eat the "rejected" pineapple tarts, those which failed my QC and did not look nice enough to be put into jars to be given away.

For pineapple tarts, as I made them over and over again, I got better and faster. Some people leave the tops empty, and some use a tiny cookie cutter to make some cutout like flower shape etc.....but they all look kind of naked to me. As far as I remember, the pineapple tarts I have been eating from young (made by my aunt) always have these handmade crosses. Moreover, I like the imperfect look (some bigger, some smaller) of homemade stuff, it smells of home....rather than factory made tarts which weigh and look all the same for every piece. Haha, that's an excuse for myself for not being able to make every tart look the same. :P

Since this is the first year I make pineapple tarts, I decided to use store-bought jam. I do not want to waste time cooking the jam and then end up with failing in making the crust. There are many many recipes out there for pineapple tarts. Some use milk powder (I do not quite like the smell of milk powder), some use cornflour, some use rubbing in method, some use creaming method...The first recipe I tried was too flaky. I then tried this second recipe which did not use milk powder or cornflour but turned out very good, so I am sticking to it till I find a better one. Now that I have found a good recipe for the crust, I can try making the jam next time.

Mini kiwi tarts with lemon curd

Was supposed to go for a picnic yesterday, but it rained, so I stayed indoors and tried out my new baking mat.

I decided to make mini fruit tartlets. I made peach tarts before, so I wanted to make some mini ones this time. I could have filled them with whipped cream or pastry cream or chocolate but I chose lemon curd instead.

For the fruits, I wanted use kiwi and strawberries, but I could not find nice strawberries, so only kiwi was used.

The tart shells shrank a bit when they were baked, but they turned out quite fine. I love the lemon curd. I tried it before and loved it. I still do.

When freshly baked, the lemon curd and kiwi tasted a little sour. After refrigeration, I ate some again this morning and they were so nice! Dear loved it. I brought some over to my parents and they liked them as well.

I think they were a little too small though. It was quite tedious filling the mini-muffin trays with the dough. But I will defintely make them again!

Now, I still have half a bowl of lemon curd....I'm thinking what I should do with it... ;p

The recipe to the lemon curd is here. It is a new blog I have started to store my recipes, and the lemon curd recipe is the first entry.