BIG BAD WOLF BOOK SALE !!!

We went to the BIG BAD WOLF book sale! N the man, N the woman and R the man At MAEPS in Serdang......We arrived. We queued. We hounded. We hunted. These were what I snared. Thirty eight books with a total damage of RM415. NICE!

Ten of them were hard cover cookbooks, nineteen were novels and the rest were what-nots. :PPP

All books were at 75-95 per cent discounts. Al novels were a mere 8 ringgit each, hardcovers were 20-25 ringgit each and the rest were pure cheap as well. 

N the man snared a stack, N the woman snared a stack and R the man snared a stack. But I snared the mostest. Need I say more?

Don't be too jealous. I'm going a-huntin' again. Bulls eye!

YUM!.... Look at those cookbooks :)))

WOO HOO ! I snared the mostest. :)

BROWNIES

 

Forgive me for the long silence. Things have been a little hectic. But I'm back and there is no better way to start off a-blogging than with these moist, scrummy and fudgy brownies.

These are the most delicious brownies ever! They're chocolatey, fudgy, slightly chewy, with that shiny crackly skin on the top. They are addictive. You can't stop at one. Swear to god. They are even better cold straight from the fridge and I've even had them half frozen from the freezer.

I had kept them in the freezer so we would not gorge on them in one sitting but apparently frozen brownies were even more engaging to eat. I don't think these brownies would ever get dry.

They were born from a small home business run by a young man who is an engineer by day and brownie baker by night. How more intriguing could that get? And they have crossed the seas to Singapore, Sri Lanka and Brunei.

They are baked in a 10 inch by 10 inch tray.

Yum!

A SNOW WHITE FAIRY CAKE ~ FOOD FOR THOUGHT

This is my long delayed fifth contribution to Food For Thought, the brain child of the lovely and brilliant Jain of Once in a Blue Moon.  All I can say Is I've been meaning to. This is a fortnightly meme of food and books. The perfect combination.  Thank you Jain for hosting this meme. It's a brilliant idea and one of the most exciting I've come across.

THE FAIRY FOLK AND SHE by Mary-Anne Grosse Ivie.
***** 
WARNING ~ FAIRY OVERLOAD

I have to tell you that when this book arrived in the mail I said to myself that it had better be good because I had  no wish to write a bad review or to feel obliged into writing a good one in spite of. I needn't have feared.

It was an enchanting fairy tale ~ with a twist. In the World Within a World of fairies, gnomes, elves, brownies, warlocks, witches, sorcerers and sorceresses lay the enthralling towns of Tranquility, Serendipity  and Ever After and a little further away, Darkland, a place where evil triumphs. 

Lisa, the daughter of the Old woman in a Shoe sacrifices a good part of her life to Razzlewitch who, in return, saves her family from poverty and hunger. While there Lisa discovers that she has powers she never knew she had. It is a story where love, trust and kindness conquers all  A tale told by Mary-Anne, I believe, from her heart.

Like all fairy tales the line between good and evil was distinct. Their names say it all ~ Verity, Melody, Kindred, Willoway and Zyneth the evil one. 

Although it was an intriguing fairy tale of good fighting off evil in which the child in me could sit back and enjoy I couldn't help but notice through my adult eyes, how, as the story went along, its characters raised, in their quest, the deeper and more soul searching questions of free will versus destiny, of the need to believe in the power of love and trust, and at one point, there even rose the question of the existence versus the non-existence of a supreme being. I found that as refreshing as the characters are innocently charming.

I was especially surprised too at the way the story  came to a close. I had expected the story to end with a scene in Tranquility. It didn't. Secretly, I wished it did. It would have been the most bewitching place to bring the gentle end of the story to. But then again it made complete sense that it didn't because Lisa was after all a human living a real existence in a real world. Life, as we know it, is not a fairy tale.

I give this book 5 stars. If I hadn't had errands to run because I was an adult I would have sunk myself into an overstuffed pillow, sucked on some lollipops and stayed there until I was being called for dinner as opposed to cooking it. This is a book for both children and adults because it made me  wish that I lived in Tranquility amoung fairies, elves, goblins, warlocks and brownies....minus Zyneth of course.

Although there were ample mentions of food in the book especially the mention of pink fairy cakes first introduced when Seraphina the sweet fairy brought some to Lisa for tea I just couldn't bring myself to make them for this review. I should have because it became Lisa's favourite cake in the story.  

But I didn't. Fairies do something to me. They make me silly happy. I had such a blast making sugar paste fairies and I knew instinctively that she had to be sitting on a dreamy white cake (inside and out) deep in the woods, surrounded by shrubs, flowers and birds with lots of shade and bands of streaming sunlight. There! I said it.

Please don't mind her eyes. She looks a little squint but I dared not rectify it further for fear of making her look even more startled. H says she looks like the blue female in Avatar. No dear..this is Seraphina..let me spell it out to you.... S-E-R-A-P-H-I-N-A ......The Fairy.

I had searched the interenet on some instructions on how to make the fairy and this is the best video that I came up with. It was very helpful but unfortunately it stopped short of showing how to form the body and her dress. So the rest they say is trial and error....and lots of patience. But most of all have fun! 




Since I do not own a mould for a fairy face I had to be happy just rolling out a ball of sugar paste, moulding out the socket for the eyes with the end of a rounded stick and the rest they say is shaky hands and squint eyes. The video advised that the eyes be painted to look sideways rather than straight at you otherwise it would make her look very startled

I had also made the limbs by eyeballing the amount of sugar paste since I did not have those fancy thingys. Then I had a problem making the blouse and skirt. It made me almost cry (in fun) (I think) but finally I did it. The most enjoyable part was deciding the colour of her clothes. So fun fun fun. I was silly happy. The flower 'hat' was another thing that made me silly happy making and putting it on her little head. And of course the hair made me feel like a fairy hair stylist. Now that I've bared my soul please don't judge me.

Ah...And the WINGS! Oh that was so fun too. However they are only partly edible because I had used a gauzy paper print to stick onto the sugar paste wings for a more colourful and sweetly pretty pair of fairy wings. They were perfectly pretty. The rest they say is edible. Except for a toothpick in her little head and body.

Finally I glued all the parts together with royal icing and how I love her long and slender limbs and little Cinderella feet.  


And the cake was a white cake from Collette Peter's, my favourite cake decorating book. It was soft, white and delicious.

I had taken the idea for its decoration from her lovely lovely book too. All was of white cut out vine leaves, rose leaves and some flowers carefully arranged and glued on with egg white onto a domed shaped fondant covered cake while Seraphina the fairy watched me, quiet and still. And sweet ~

Here's the recipe for the Snow White Cake ~ by Colette Peters

3/4 cup vegetable shortening
1 1/2 cups castor sugar
2 tsp vanilla
2 3/4 cups cake flour
1/2 tsp salt
4 tsp baking powder
1 cup milk, room temperature
4 egg  whites, room temperature


Preheat oven to 350 F.

Grease and flour 2 9 inch baking tins. In a large bowl of an electris mixer, cream shortening until light and fluffy.Slowly add 1 cup of the sugar, continuously beating until fluffy. Add vanilla. 


In a small bowl, sift dry ingredients together. Ad 1 T of the dry ingredients to the shortening mixture and mix well. Then add 1 tablespoon of the milk. Alternate in this manner until the flour and milk is finished blending well after each addition. Do not overmix.


In another bowl beat agg white until fluffy and then add the 1/2 cup of sugar and beat until stiff and shiny. Gently fold in teh egg whites into the flour mixture until blended.


Pour into prepared pans and bake for about 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean.


Decorate with fondant and sugar paste decorations.


The recipe for the fondant and the sugar paste are here and here.

DOUGHNUTS ~ FOOD FOR THOUGHT

This is my fourth contribution to Food For Thought. A fortnightly meme, the brainchild of the wonderfully talented Jain of food With Style and of  Once in a Blue Moon. 

If you read a book and love to cook post a post as Food For Thought.

OLIVE KITTERIDGE BY ELIZABETH STROUT
**** and a half

Lives lived are mostly dysfunctional. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout throws that fact into our faces. And I find it hard to dispute otherwise.

Olive is a large woman, solidly built, who lives without apology. She may be illogical, logical, temperamental, perceptive, obsessive, ego-centric, compassionate or abrasive. Or all of them at once. You feel her rage, you connect with her frustrations and her denials but at times you also despise her. Finally you sympathize in her fight to endure.


This is a book about several people, each, neck deep in living out their lives and reacting. Some desperately, some resignedly and some stubbornly to the crap their world has to offer.


This is also a story about the pain of growing old, the feeling of despair and frustration when you watch your stroke striken spouse become blank and distant then relieved and heartbroken when he dies. It is about the anger welling inside of you as you watch your children grow away and who seem intent on breaking your heart. It is about being "done with that stuff" in regards to bedroom life and about "I don't care if I die either....Long as it's quick."

This is a story about spouses who sense the infidelity, each in the other, mentally or physically, but who sometimes choose to pretend otherwise, to appear, even to themselves, to understand, intent on rationalizing the unacceptable or where things happen that alter their perception of each other forever. 

It is about wondering how or why you have become what you are and your marraige what it is. This is a story about life. Take it or leave it.

There is no plot really. Like real life. Strout presents Olive Kitteridge through the stories of uniquely different people each connected to Olive in some way, significantly or otherwise, in a small town of Crosby, Maine, a town by the sea where the waves lap, the seagulls squawk, the wind blows and the flowers bloom.

It ends with Olive Kitteridge feeling vindicated in her belief at the age of seventy four "that lumpy aged and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young firm ones."

I found the book depressing but from page 203 onwards Strout 's descriptions of situations and characters began to take on the occasional hilarious streak. Some simply made me laugh out loud. 

Olive is a multi-faceted character, like us. And to be able to write about people like us in minute and introspective detail, with clarity, is astonishing and, to read it, is frightening.


This is not a book for everyone. It wasn't unputdownable for me simply because it was mostly depressing or perhaps because it was too raw, uncomfortably truthful and blatant about angry feelings, about growing old, about infidelity, about imperfection, about real life. Perhaps we all live in denial at some point of our lives.


It won the Pulitzer Prize and I can certainly see why.

Perhaps ~

We may be old enough to make choices but we may never be old enough to know if we have made the right ones. 

Olive Kitteridge loves doughnuts. 

Dunkin donuts was where Olive and Henry, her affable husband, would stop by for a coffee, for doughnuts and for the doughnut holes. Doughnuts feature consistently in the book and I knew it had to be either donuts or doughnuts for Food For Thought.

It's amazing how pretty and playful doughnuts can look. I'm not much of a doughnut person and am amazed that people actually make a long bee line for doughnuts from a shop called Big Apple Donuts when it opened several years ago. I must say their toppings simply set them apart. They were gorgeously pretty. You just have to click on their link.They are beautiful! Sorry Dunkin Donuts!

If I had a little bit more love for doughnuts I would probably be queuing up myself.

This doughnut recipe belongs to Delia Smith. These doughnuts are gorgeously delicious, soft and thick. I've never tried any other doughnut recipe but my son says a lady at his university canteen sells doughnuts that are just so good because they are crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. But I don't have her recipe so Delia Smith's it is.

The recipe ~

Makes 8 doughnuts......

8 oz plain flour

11/2 oz castor sugar

2 tsp dried yeast ( I used the same amount of instant yeast)

1 egg, beaten

1 oz butter

1/2 tsp salt

3 T milk

3 T boiling water

Oil for frying

Method......

Measure the milk into a measuring jug and then add the boiling water, a teaspoon of the sugar and the yeast. Stir it and leave the jug in a warm place for about 10 minutes till the yeast mixture froths. Put the rest of the sugar, the salt and the flour into a bowl and rub in the butter. Then pour in the beaten egg and frothy yeast mixture and stir and mix to a smooth dough. If it sems a little dry add a tespoon or so of warm water. 

Turn the dough out onto a board and knead for about 10 minutes by which time it should feel springy and show slight blisters just under the surface. return it to the bowl, cover with a damp cloth and leave in a warm place to rise until double in size, about 45 minutes to an hour.

When it has risen tip it out onto a board and punch it down to disperse large air bubbles. Divide the dough into 8 equal parts and flatten to a disc.

At this point I depart from Delia Smith by shaping it into a ring instead of filling the centre with jam. 

Once shaped place on a baking tray and enclose them in an oiled plastic bag or a bin liner as Delia suggests. Let them rise for 30 minutes. Heat up enough oil (I used canola) in a pot to deep fry to about 185 C and fry the doughnuts, turning them frequently so that htey will brown evenly. About 4 minutes frying time.

drain on kitchen paper tehn toss then on a bowl of castor sugar or any sugar combination that you like.

A THAI DESSERT OF MINIATURE FRUITS ~ LOONG CHOUP ~ FOOD FOR FOR THOUGHT

This is my third contribution to Food For Thought, a fortnightly meme where books combine with food in a post, hosted by the wonderful and talented Jain of Food For Thought, Food With Style and  Once in a Blue Moon.

 
THE GIVER ~

*****

This book came with an ending that I could never quite forget. Not because it was spectacular, unexpected or odd but because it was warm, inviting and absolutely welcoming. It was a beginning.

When you read about people who think about love as being meaningless or obsolete, when their life is black and white and grey, literally or otherwise, when pain and suffering has been lost to a world long ago that the wisdom that comes with it is no more, you begin to ponder on the purpose of their existence. 

This is a childrens' modern classic. It is a book that has become required reading in schools across America and in Germany while at the same time arousing debate and controversy over the suitability of its mature themes such as euthanasia, infanticide and suicide for children. 

My son was working on it in his 6th grade while he was studying at the Taipei American School in Taiwan and after he was done with it I had picked it up and found that it could not be put down until I had finished it. It is a book that will haunt me and then compel me to read it again every once in a while. 

Lois Lowry pulls you into a community of sameness where citizens are observed, marriages are perfectly matched, jobs are assigned, food is centrally provided, children are allotted to couples, where there is no pain and no suffering, no angst, no differences, even of opinions, no hills and no valleys, no choices, not even basic primitive sensations and where the weak are released all because there are no memories. 

It is the survival of the fittest in its most organized form. It is a Utopia that Plato would have been proud of. It is totalitarianism at work.

Twelve year old Jonas's selection to be the next Giver and his training to prepare him for the most honourable position in the community gives him the knowledge of a world where once there was war, pain and suffering and also of love and joy and colour. And for the first time Jonas experiences these sensations and begins to question the 'perfected ' world that he is a part of.

Lois Lowry makes you sense rather than know that something is not quite right with the world. She gives no explanation about how things came to be. She lets you wonder in suspense. And when you're finally done reading it you're left ruminating in a disturbing pool of thought.


It is a short novel, simply and skillfully written while being powerful, profound and simply unforgettable. I could not finally put it down without experiencing a weighty brooding sensation hovering in my thoughts over the next few days. A five star book indeed.

Jonas's very first glimpse of colour was red; provoked by an apple that he was tossing in the air. Later he was stirred by the redness of a girl's hair and later on still he was disturbed by the colour of crimson blood.

This is a very challenging book for Food For Thought because it contained no food for pleasure. It was only in the mention of the apple that I had had to work on and to make the most of. So I made apples and for added colour some pears in miniature form.

  
The recipe ~


The first time I had made this was about 11 years ago after having been invited to a delightful Thai lunch. After a wonderful meal of spicy Tom Yam soup, some green chicken curry and a fabulous mung bean vermicelli and chicken salad the meal ended with a dessert of some sticky sweet cakes and then by these entrancing miniature fruits that simply sparkled and twinkled madly at me. 

I felt my heart pounding in my chest prodding me to ask for the recipe. And of course I did. Then I went home very carefully just so the recipe wouldn't spill out of my head.

Their whimsical glossiness ever since have added a sublime sparkle to my life. 

Although it uses food colouring and is completely edible I do however avoid eating them. I do try as much as possible to avoid additives and especially the unnecessary consumption of food colouring. Something that we all use in icing and fondant of course. But if you're not averse to it this makes a delightful, frivolously fanciful and deliciously colourful dessert.

After a long hiatus I had also forgotten some useful tips that I had gained from my very first experimentations. So this was a project of frustrated joy. 

They are made from boiled mung beans, drained and then mashed and mixed with coconut milk and sugar. Very much a bean paste and its texture perhaps akin to marzipan albeit not oily.

I'm quite aware that the pears I  made are twice the size of the apples. Loooong story.

You would have thought that apples would be the easiest thing to shape and sculpt but let me tell you ~ I'll never make apples again! Simply because it was very difficult to form the depressions realistically. I was never satisfied over each attempt but I just had to be by 3 am when I thought I saw a pair of eyes blinking outside my kitchen window. 

But when I poked the 'leaves' into them it did raise my spirits a little. So I went to bed a reasonably happy and obsessed woman.

Now for the recipe..........

Paste ~ 


2 cups skinned mung beans, boiled and drained
1 cup coconut milk
1 cup sugar

Place the boiled and drained mung beans, coconut milk and sugar in a food processor. Blitz until the bean mixture becomes a smooth paste. Remove and scoop the paste into a heavy bottomed medium pan. Cook over low heat and keep stirring until the paste dries and becomes a thicker and firmer paste. Remove and transfer to a bowl and shape into fruits. Paint and let the colour dry a few minutes before dipping int he gelatin mixture.

Coating ~


2 T gelatin powder (I used 1 T agr-agar powder)
1/2 cup sugar
2 cups water


Boil all ingredient and stir until the sugar dissolves. Sieve through a fine sieve. Dip the shaped fruits into the gelatin mixture and leave to dry a few minutes and repeat process at least twice more.

Equipment ~


A 9 inch round or square styrofoam board
cocktail picks or toothpicks
small and soft paint brushes
food colours
flat plate or paint palette for mixing colours
a small bowl of water

Accesories ~ 


Kaffir lime leaves, each leaf trimmed to size to suit the apples or other fruits that you would like to adorn with leaves.


Hints ~


* Shape the fruits until you have done as many as you desire before starting to paint. 


* Once the fruits have been shaped pierce with a toothpick and make them stand on the styrofoam. Let them dry a little, five or ten minutes but not too long or they may start to dry and crack.


* Paint one type of fruit at a time then move on to a different type of fruit. It makes for less mess. Once painted let them dry a few minutes, about 8-10 minutes.

* Dip the fruits into the gelatin while the gelatin is still quite warm and do one type of fruit at a time so that just in case the colour runs you will not ruin other fruits of a different colour. 


* Make a new batch of gelatin mixture if it gets stained by a contrasting colour.


* I find agar-agar firmer and sets faster.


* Best made on the day of serving. 


* After keeping in the refrigerator overnight I found the glossiness reduced, its surface looking a little sandy and the fruits had dried out a little. After 2 days they cracked from dryness.

*MUST use skinned mung beans or else the paste will be a greyish colour and lighter colours like yellow to paint on for mangoes or pink for rose apples will be difficult to achieve in a pretty shade.