Carrot Cupcakes with Cream-Cheese Icing

I had arranged a playdate with my friend V one Saturday, and it afforded me the opportunity to bake again (yay!).

I am not a carrot cake fan (I am a chinese carrot cake fan though...), and this recipe, with its cream-cheese icing appeared rather odd indeed. To me, dessert should involve chocolate, possibly vanilla, and maybe fruit, but certainly never vegetables. But my friend V likes carrot cakes, and I wanted something my boy could eat (he hates blueberries and raisins, chocolates are currently banned, and so are conventional cakes). So this looked like the perfect recipe. It just sounded so healthy (ignoring of course the amount of icing sugar that goes into the topping) - my boy was getting his veggies, and instead of butter it calls for sunflower oil! It was also an opportunity to use the (a) light mucovado sugar that has been sitting in my cupboard since the initial wave of shopping for nigella-esque ingredients; (b) half a tub of cream cheese in the fridge left-over from baking cheesecake.

It was a bit fiddly and wasn't as domestic goddess-ly relaxing as some of the other recipes. This one involved grating carrots, zesting lemons AND oranges, chopping walnuts. Even after the cupcakes were in the oven, you couldn't relax with a nice cuppa while waiting for them to be done, you had to make the icing, which also involved the hard work of beating the cream-cheese, sieving the icing sugar (which I halved), and squeezing some lime juice.

I must say, the cupcakes sans icing were surprisingly light (and maybe a bit boring). I had used less than the 100g light muscovado sugar in the recipe, and I think this is one recipe which you can actually use the full amount of sugar Nigella indicates. When paired with the cream-cheese icing, which on its own was sickeningly sweet, the cupcake become irresistible! One was certainly not enough. We had seconds. And more.

CA*California at Dempsey Hill

This is a little different from my usual posts.  But I had something to say and I'm going to say it here.  My husband and I decided to have a nice lunch at Dempsey Hill on Tuesday after our rather long visit to the paediatrician for our baby's 6 month check-up.  As I was dying for some ice-cream (it has been a really hot few days), we decided to eat at CA*California, which is co-located with Ben & Jerry's.

The menu looked interesting - it's a California F&B concept - and decided on some Caesar salad, Nachos & a Burger.   The food was OK.  Not fantastic, but not bad either.  The burger was juicy and I was going to say a little above average, when the slice of tomato in the burger slipped out, and we saw the hair.  A short, wiry strand, stuck to the half-eaten slice of tomato.  It was disgusting. It was wiry. 

We had half a burger left, but we ate no more.  No more salad. No more nachos. We couldn't even bring ourselves to order any ice-cream.  

We raised the issue. The waitress did not appear very taken aback when we showed her the hair. But fortunately for her, she remembered her service recovery lessons, and asked if she could get us anything else instead. Anything else? Goodness know what other horrors lay undiscovered. We politely declined and requested that we not be billed for the burger.  For a moment, the waitress thought we were joking but, once again fortunately for her, she recovered in time and said she would check. 

They did the decent thing, and agreed not to charge for the offending burger. The manager apologised and said that he checked by couldn't identify the culprit as all the kitchen staff were capped (er, so? the hair we found was short and wiry...), and once again asked if he could get us anything.  Once again, we politely declined. And did not tell him that we would not be eating anything ever again from his establishment.   

We finally got our ice-cream from Dome across the street.

For all those who are considering a meal at CA*California or Ben & Jerry's at Dempsey Hill. Be warned. 

Meringue

Far too often, I've found myself with leftover egg whites from recipes that call for the yolks only. And the most recent one being the apple pie. Usually, I just dump the whites into some soup the next day or steam it up for lunch. I knew that I could probably find many recipes calling only for whites but I really keen to launch 2 back to back baking sessions just so I could use up the whites. That is, until I read Jamie Oliver's "Cook with Jamie" and read how easy it would be to whip up some meringues.

Basically, you need to make sure that all your equipment is dry and has absolutely no trace of oil. And you do need an electric mixer for this. I imagine it would be a pain doing this by hand.

Then you whip up your egg whites still they form stiff peaks. The test, Mr. Oliver says, is to turn the bowl of whipped whites over your head. They shouldn't budge. Then you whip in your caster sugar for many minutes, until the mixture is all smooth and shiny. Don't overwhip or the mixture could collapse. You could fold in various ingredients to get flavoured meringues, but I just left it plain. It goes into the oven, and you vary the cooking time depending on whether you want it all crisp, or crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside.

I managed to get 8 huge blobs from 3 egg whites. They looked really pretty and dreamy! Once done, they were beautifully crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside. They were really easy to whip up. My mum was impressed, as she has heard and seen enough about collapsed meringues.

I'm not sure what I can use them for though. I mixed them with some ice-cream, and it was good. The crispiness of the meringues with the creaminess of the ice-cream. You can't really eat too many of them neat, as they are rather sweet. Perhaps I'll test out an eton mess recipe, but the berries will be a bother to get as they are quite pricey. Anyway, the meringues are now sitting in the refrigerator looking rather forlorn.

Apple Pie

After a wonderful tete-a-tete with my weighing machine, I had resolved to take a break from the wonderful world of baking. But my resolve didn't last long. I was reading Jamie Oliver's Family Dinners, and was drawn to the apple pie recipe like bees to honey. I tried to resist. But the picture of the half-eaten golden yellow apple pie in the book dominated my thoughts. All I could think of was apple pie. Even cinnamon would invade my thoughts (even though the recipe doesn't call for any cinnamon).

Finally, I caved in. Afterall, I rationalised, apple pie contains apples, and we are supposed to get our daily apple right? =)

So off I went baking again.

Apple pie is a whole new territory. I have never baked a pie, though I have often thought of it. I think I might have made some shortcrust pastry in Home Economics classes a long time ago, but I forget. The pastry appeared easy enough to make. All I needed to do was to dump the ingredients in the food processor and blitz.

However, the rolling it out and laying it in the tin showed up my inexperience. My dough was rather crumbly and kept tearing when I tried peeling it off the board, which I had liberally dusted with flour. Perhaps the humidity in Singapore (and the really hot few weeks we've been having) doesn't help. Of course, the fact that my pie dish was 9 inches rather than 8 inches, as required by the recipe, made it worse, as I had to roll the pastry out even thinner. But Mr. Oliver says it's OK if "it tears or breaks - just patch it up - as it will look nice and rustic". So I patched up as best I could, as my confidence was rapidly melting.

The second part of the recipe involved peeling and chopping the apples and cooking them into a saucepan with the rest of the filling ingredients (sugar, ground ginger, zest of lemon, sultanas). The recipe called for Bramley and Cox apples, but they aren't readily available here (if at all), so I substituted Granny Smiths for the Bramleys and Red Delicious and Gala for the Coxes. I also used regular brown sugar instead of the fancy muscovado/ demerara sugar.

As expected, I had a tough time getting the dough to fit the top of the pie. Witness the number of tears in the pastry. Also the pastry rim was very very thin.

The result was a not very nice looking pie. The pastry was a bit overdone and burnt at the edges because the pastry was thin, and I had failed to adjust the cooking time accordingly. But I was hopeful, because, the smells emanating from my oven were just heavenly!

I spooned out some pie, dolloped some custard on it and dug in. Oh my, it was good pie. It wasn't at all heavy. Not too sweet, either. It was almost perfect. For the next slice, I took out a tub of Ben and Jerry's Vanilla ice-cream and attacked. Ah, now, perfect...