PEARL SAGO PUDDING

There was a time when school children were required to starch their uniforms if they wanted it to look crisp, neat and smart.

So we made starch from tapioca flour. I used to do that. I mixed some tapioca flour with a little water to make a nice thick paste and while I waited for the water to boil in the kettle I would pinch little pieces of the chalk white mixture from the bowl and let it drop onto the window sill. It would form into little blobs and it was these blobs that fascinated me. They were not quite liquid nor were they quite solid. They were in between. Like mercury, almost.

I would blow at them and they would roll and quiver as the sun shone on them. Sometimes I would nudge them gently with my finger and they would do a little roll, quiver and then come to rest in a blob. Sometimes I would let a big blob drop to the floor and watch it break into a million blobs dots. They looked almost like sago granules. I would do this in complete fascination and it would hold my attention for quite a while until the water came to a boil.

And when I added the hot boiling water it would turn completely translucent after a few stirrings and that was what I used to starch my uniform with, by soaking it in the liquid starch, hanging the slimy thing out to dry in the sun, ironed it to a crisp and that was the cardboard that I marched to school in everyday almost all of my primary school life.

Over the years as I moved upwards and life progressed my spinach green, box pleated, cotton pinafores of my primary years gave way to a synthetic fabric in a bright turqoise blue which did not require starching.

But starch was something I continued to make with tapioca flour because that was what I used as gum for school art projects. It was exactly the same as the making of starch for my school uniform but very much thicker and gummier.

Then one day in the early days of my marriage whilst surviving mostly in a semi conscious state I ventured out into making some sago pudding, a much loved dessert. When I had boiled the white sago granules long enough and they had turned translucent, I poured them into moulds, chilled them in the refrigerator and one bite later I found that I had actually made starch. That was what it felt like and that was what it smelled like and that was what it tasted like. It was a childhood memory reincarnated into a face screwing pudding. I threw it away.


But after life shook me by the shoulders a few months and years later, snapping me out of my state of enlightenment, by handing me a complete stranger in the form of a shrieking baby and more babies and more babies later I became animated and adventurous and discovered through experimentation that the secret to making a good sago pudding that doesn't taste like a big blob of starch/gum for an art project was to simply rid it of excess starch.


And that was exactly what I did. I rid it of the excess starch and the sago pudding became magically edible worthy and deserving of a rich and thick dark palm sugar syrup and creamy coconut milk flowing down its sides and resting in a divine pool around it.

I have never looked back since (whatever that means) and every time I came across someone who made starch instead of sago pudding and lamented about it I remained tight lipped and refused to share my little secret. I revelled meanly at her perplexed state and offered no suggestions. (I'm feeling guilty right now..heh..repent Zurin).

I remained mean for a good number of years until today when I have decided to be gracious and share my little secret with you (if you still haven't yet discovered it for yourself that is). :P

Here's the recipe....for 4 small servings

150 gm of sago pearls (I used the small ones)
4 - 5 cups of water

some palm sugar or muscovado sugar
white granulated sugar, about 1 tablespoon
about 1 cup of water
a pandan leaf

1/2 cup of coconut cream
pinch of salt

Pour the 4-5 cups of water in a small pot. Pour in the sago pearls and bring the mixture to a boil over medium heat. When it has come to a boil lower the flame to small and watch the pot because starch/sago burns easily. Cook and stir until the sago pearls turn transparent/translucent and there are very little white spots visible.

Remove from heat and over the kitchen sink pour the cooked sago mixture into a fine sieve. Run some water from your tap through the sago mixture whilst stirring the sago in the sieve with a wooden spoon. This will rid it of all the excess starch and what is left in the sieve will be lovely translucent pearls of sago. Leave a little water in if you want a softer pudding.

Scoop the sago into 4 little moulds or one larger mould and chill in the refrigerator.

Meanwhile make the palm sugar syrup to your taste and consistency (using the pandan leaf as a flavouring when you're boiling the syrup) and when done pour into a small jug (discard the pandan leaf). Add a pinch of salt to the coconut cream, stir and pour into a small jug.

When the sago pudding has firmed up which will happen very quickly unmould them by running a knife around the edges and teasing it out onto a saucer or bowl. Serve and let guests help themselves tot eh syrup and cream. Delish!

COFFEE CAKE WITH CHOCOLATE GANACHE 'N CHOCOLATE BARKS

I have been debating with myself over making this cake for the past few weeks. Unfortunately cakes just have too much sugar, eggs and butter while the ganache has so much cream in it that I just don't want to make it for the family too often and especially so when I am not able to resist anything that looks even remotely like chocolate. I've been working at the gym like a good girl and too much cake and cream is just not going to be good for me/you and everyone else. And just in case you didn't notice that's the reason I don't blog too much about cakes with cream, fudge or frosting etc. But, the devil won and finally with much guilt and bad feeling I did it. I gave in. I succumbed like a cookie crumb to ants.

I had to make this coffee cake and slap on that darkly lovely ganache.

But I always say this little prayer before I indulge.....

If you eat something and no one sees you eat it, it has no calories. If you drink a diet soda with a candy bar, the calories in the candy bar are cancelled out by the diet soda. When you eat with someone else, calories don't count if you don't eat more than they do. Food used for medicinal purposes NEVER count, such as chocolate, brandy, toast and Sara Lee Cheesecake. If you fatten up everyone else around you, then you look thinner. Cookie pieces contain no calories. The process of breaking causes caloric leakage. Things licked off knives and spoons have no calories if you are in the process of preparing something. Examples : peanut butter on a knife when making a sandwich, or ice cream on a spoon when making a sundae. Foods that have the same colour have the same number of calories. Examples : spinach and pistachio ice cream, or mushrooms and white chocolate. Note : chocolate is a universal colour and may be substituted for any other food colour.

Whoever wrote this is a genius.


The cake was moist, soft and quite rich but could do with more coffee in it. And if you like, lots of choc chips too! I made it once with choc chips and it was so good. The ganache was fabulous...as always...Rose's recipe never fails me. YUM. I was licking my fingers at every smear I made. There were a lot of smears believe me. Unfortunately our hot weather made the ganache a little soft so it didn't show through well between the layers but was ok on the top. I did not coat the cake too thickly though....just too rich. But nobody complained.


I made the whole recipe but divided them between 2 pans about 6 inches in diameter so that I could frost only one of them and left the other one plain. Less fat for everyone. I made the chocolate barks from melted chocolate a little earlier in the morning and chilled them in the refrigerator. I didn't take a picture of how I made them but they're pretty easy to do. I might make them again tomorrow just to take some pictures to blog.


Anyway here's the recipe.................

280 butter
250 sugar
250 self raising flour (I used plain and added 2 tspbaking powder)
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
5 large eggs
2 or more tbsp instant coffee plus 1 tbsp hot water to dissolve coffee, leave aside to cool.
2 tbsp cream/milk ( I used sour cream, which I think doesn't make any difference to the final cake)

Set the oven at 180 C. Prepare 2 9 inch sandwich pans.

Sift flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl.

Mix the coffee mixture with the milk/cream.

Beat butter and sugar until creamy and fluffy. Add egg one at a time and beat until fluffy. Add the coffee and cream/milk mixture. Take it off the mixer if you're using one and fold in the flour with a spatula in 3 batches.

Add chocolate chips at this point if using (YUM).

Pour into pan and bake 35 to 40 minutes (depending on your oven). Will spring back lightly if done the sides will shrink a little,

Turn out after 6 or 7 minutes and allow to cool completely.

Ganache....Rose Beranbaum's recipe

340 gm bittersweet chocolate
385 gm heavy cream/whipping cream
57 gm unsalted butter (optional) (I did not use this)
28 Cognac (I did not use this)

Break chocolate into pieces and process in food processor until very fine. Heat the cream to boiling point and with the food processor running, pour in the cream in a steady stream. Process a few seconds until smooth. Transfer to a bowl and cool completely. Gently stir in the optional butter if using and the Cognac. Allow to cool several hours before using.

I sandwiched the cake with ganache and topped it with ganache too. Normally when I'm not being lazy or for special occassions I would make a light chocolate butter cream and use that to sandwich the cakes together and the cake will only be covered with ganache. Then topped with chocolate barks. The different flavours and textures of the chocolate butter cream, the ganache and the coffee and the chocolate barks make a sensational combination.

APAM BALIK - PANCAKE TURNOVERS

Brass pots and pans are so hard to come by nowadays and are getting a little pricey for my liking. I went in search for them about a week ago at PJ old town, rummaging through topsy-turvy and dusty old shops. These are shops that seem completely disorganized with cast iron woks, bamboo brushes, heavy duty commercial gas rings and a myriad of other kitchen stuff sprawling over to the floors in dark dim corners ready to trip you up. These are shops that seem to have anything that you would need in an Asian kitchen from the small home cook to the commercial restaurant or stall owner plus some more from canes to whack your children with, if you are so inclined, to plastic dustbins, to rattan baskets, to tiffin carriers and to feather dusters. My kind of store.

Unfortunately they did not have the brass mould that I was looking for at a price that I was willing to pay for. So I left and decided that a good old non stick would just have to do for the pancakes that I was planning to make.


Traditionally this pancake turnover or apam balik is made in a brass mould because brass distributes heat evenly, is thick and heavy so food does not scald easily. These are what the brass moulds look like...


And these are the pancakes that are made and sold to a long queue of customers every Sunday.


The fillings are crushed peanuts, creamed corn, sugar and artery clogging magarine.

So these are what I made today,a Monday, when the apam balik family stall is not around. This is a very good recipe that makes a very good apam balik. As good as the apam balik man's apam balik I must say. It was given by one of the Malaysian ladies when we were in Taiwan at a time when many Malaysians get homesick and yearn for good old Malaysian street food. Thanks to her we were able to satiate our appetites for lovely apam balik. Did I tell you I have a bad memory for names? Unfortunately I do. I must try to recall.


The picture above and the one below are the first two apam baliks that I made. They weren't as pretty as the very last one that I made (in the first 2 photos above). Practice does make perfect. But it tasted good nevertheless.


Here's the recipe..........makes about 6 pancakes depending on the size of your pan...

340 gm plain all purpose flour
4 tsp baking powder
3 tsp sugar ( I used about 3 tablespoons instead)
2 eggs
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups water
1 cup evaporated milk
3 tsp vegetable oil (I used canola oil)
a pinch of soda bicarbonate

1 cup or crushed peanuts (slightly coarse, not like powder)
1/2 cupof granulated sugar, more or less
a small tin of creamed corn, optional
some butter or magarine

a little cooking oil for swiping the pan.

Mix all ingredients in a medium bowl until you get a smooth batter. Let the batter rest for at least 30 minutes or more. It will thicken upon resting and yield a nice thick batter.

Heat up a non stick pan. I used one that was about 7-8 inches in diameter. Swipe the pan with a little oil using kitchen paper. Make sure the pan is nice and hot.

Ladle up some batter, about 100 ml (a little less than 1/2 a cup), the amount depending on how thick or thin you would like your pancake to be. Pour the batter intot eh heated pan. Make sure the pan is on medium heat. Spread the batter around the bottom of the pan using the back of the ladle (in the case of the stall owner below, she used her enamel mug) until the batter is in an even layer.


Let it cook a little while until bubbles begin to appear....like so.....



Then sprinkle a layer of crushed peanuts, then a layer of sugar (granulated) and then if you like drop small dollops of sweet creamed corn from a tin, some blobs of butter or magarine and let the pancake cook until the top firms up and the batter is cooked through.


Using a flat ladle or spatula. lift and fold the pancake in half and take it out of the pan and place on a wire rack while you continue making more pancakes with the rest of the batter.




Cut up the pancake and serve, preferably hot or warm.


Home made apam balik below......YUMMY.............

PRETZELS

Curly Wurlys, that's what we call them, Hub and I. It's so much easier than saying Pretzels.


I always thought pretzels were hard crispy and shiny little biscuits in that weird shape that we, as children, used to dig for out of a deep blue, Danish Butter Cookie tin along with the butter cookies, some of which were made in the same weird shape. The Danish Cookie tin was 'the' cookie brand at the time when Famous Amos did not exist, when festive cookies were not yet sold commercially all over town, when young wives and mothers convened on an agreed friend's home to make cookies by the hundreds if not thousands together.

It was a time when the husband of the friend whose house was swarmed would conveniently move out of the way, disappear or pop his head in every now and then to banter and tease his wife and her friends and occasionally stretch out an intruding arm to steal a cookie. It was a time when all kinds of cookies were baked, not on baking tins, but on the flat aluminium lids of aluminium pots. Sometimes we, the girl kids, would help by swiping butter on the lids before the cookie doughs were shaped and placed on them or in between baking one batch of cookies and the next.

It was a time of laughter, jokes, bantering, teasing, gossip and loads and loads and loads of cookies and their killer smells. So, as you can imagine, every household belonging to the same group of friends would be serving those very cookies to each other when the house to house visits begin on the big day. No matter which house you visited within the group you'd be having the cookies that you made together. Strange.

It was a time when it was unimaginable to buy festive cookies. It was also a time when there were no such things as Auntie Anne's, Cinnabon, Famous Amos, Dunkin' Donuts and God knows what else.

The 'Danish Cookies' in that deep blue, 'branded', round tin was the ultimate in gift giving, in hampers or as a treat where a flurry of small scrambling hands would be inside of it fighting amoung the different butter cookies and the plain crispy pretzels. The butter cookies would be finished within minutes, the paper cases scattered along with crumbs all over the table and the floor and the poor pretzels, the poor dark brown plain not sweet pretzels would be left behind not quite devoured.

And that was what I thought pretzels were until Auntie Anne's sprung up all over the place like Jacks in boxes with these large soft bread-like curly wurlies in that familiar weird shape that they called pretzels.


So pretzels they are and these are the kind of pretzels I love. Soft, large and bready that makes me habitually falter before I eat it. I'm always not quite sure which end to sink my teeth into so that I don't get the anticipated half empty feeling in my mouth when only a curly strip of Auntie Anne's pretzel snuggles into the back of my mouth leaving the front half empty. So I was quite happy when I made these pretzels and they were fat and chubby and not skinny at all. Yum!


Here's the recipe that I got from this interesting blog Angelahenrie

1 cup milk
1 pkg active dried yeast (11 gm)
3 Tbsp light soft brown sugar
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour + extra for kneading
10 Tbsp butter
1 tsp salt
1/3 cup soda bicarbonate
2 Tbsp coarse salt

Warm milk in saucepan until just lukewarm (not too warm or hot or you'll kill the east and your bread won't rise).

Pour milk into a medium bowl and sprinkle in the yeast. Let yeast soften then stir in the brown sugar and 1 cup of flour.

Dice 2 Tbsp of butter and soften it and hten stir into the mix until evenly distributed.

Add remaining flour (1 1/4 cups) and salt and combine to make a sticky dough.

Knead dough and add more flour to make it a little less sticky. Knead for 5 minutes and don't skimp this step because it makes the dough elastic and easier to roll into strips without breaking.

When the dough is smooth shape into a ball and keep in a lightly oiled bowl and let it rise until double in bulk.

Mix 1/3 cup of bicarbonate soda with 3 cups of water and mix until soda dissolves and place in a shallow baking pan.

Once risen, divide into 6 or 8 parts and roll each part into a long thin strip maybe about 18 to 20 inches long. Lift the strip by holding each end in both hands each. Curl one end towards you and let it rest on the ...........you might like to go look at a picture of a pretzel and figure it out yourself. I'm too jumbled up with directions at this point to explain the intricacies of shaping a pretzel. But it is so much easier done than said. Believe me.

As you shape each one, dip the raw pretzel shape into the soda solution and place it on a parchment paper lined baking tray. Continuing doing all pretzels and let rise for 30 minutes and then bake in a 475 F oven for 10 minutes.

Meanwhile melt the rest of the butter and place in a shallow baking pan or bowl.

Once baked dip each cooked pretzel in the melted butter. Drain. Enjoy. YUM!!!!!