Childhood Candy Culture

This may seem strange to say in a blog that is largely dedicated to my baking pursuits, but my 3 year old son doesn't eat candy.

We decided when he was young, that he doesn't need candy, or chocolates, or cake or other sugar-laden treats. It's not necessary for his physical development at this age. And if he's hungry or peckish, we'd much rather he ate some nutrient-rich fruit or yoghurt or other healthful snack. He has his entire life to indulge, if he so wishes, in sweet-treats. We don't need to encourage him at this age. Especially since there is a history of diabetes on my side of the family.

Of course, we can't control what he eats in school. He has eaten birthday cakes. But I'm glad to report, he exercises self-control in school, and would sometimes choose to skip the cake and he never touches the candy. He's just not too interested. (In fact, he tried some ice-cream, and told the teacher he didn't like it much.)

And at some point, we will allow him the odd cake, or chocolate as special treats and not as a matter of routine.

The fact that we don't allow candy comes as a surprise to many people. An acquaintance who heard about our practice told us straight-faced that our son doesn't have a childhood.

Apart from the fact that I don't think this person, who doesn't know us very well, has any right to pass judgement on our parenting skills, I am taken aback that she thinks that having candy is a good measure of the quality of a person's childhood.

And she is not alone.

My mother-in-law thought we were being cruel to our son when he couldn't have any of her birthday cake (look, he wasn't even interested. He was more interested in blowing out the candles.) She's gotten used to our rules now, but she's passed the word around, such that our relatives would comment on it when they see us!

We take it in our stride, as we've come to realise that the candy culture in childhood in Singapore is so pervasive. At childrens' parties, even at school, the kids would be served candy, and then given goody bags filled with candy. At sunday school snack-time, even for the little-uns, candy would be served. Well-meaning "aunties" would proffer candy to the kids to keep them quiet (even though, in about 15 mins, after the sugar high kicked in, this tactic would totally backfire).

We don't think our children need to be a part of this. And we will stand our ground. Our son my not be as chubby as the other kid who is given a slice of cheesecake every day (Yes! This is a true story!). But he doesn't have to be. He is well-nourished and healthy.

And he has enough playtime, and love to ensure that he has a rolling good childhood.

Coca-Cola Cake

It was my mum-in-law's birthday. Rather than get her the run of the mill beauty product/spa voucher as a present, I thought it would be nice to bake her a cake, especially since I know she rather likes my baking (or at least I'd like to think that).

Since I am down with the flu, I had to choose a recipe that wouldn't involve too much shopping, and that would be quick and easy. Nigella's Coca-cola Cake recipe was just the one. I had everything in my pantry, apart from the yoghurt (in place of buttermilk, which I happen to have, but I'm saving it for pancake...) and coke. I didn't have golden caster sugar either, and I haven't seen it at all here, so I just used regular caster sugar.

It was pretty straightforward to make. The only fiddly bit was having to line the springform tin with foil as the batter was very thin and would otherwise leak. I also had to leave it in the oven for about 50 mins instead of the recommended 40, and even then, I don't think it was fully

cooked through (saw damp bits after the cake was cut). But by then the top of the cake had cracked rather badly, so I thought it was time. (There must be something wrong with my oven. Will need to get an oven thermometer sometime.) Anyway, I just trimmed off the peaked sections (chef's treat!), and covered the cake up with the cola icing, which by the way was way too much and way too sweet, even though I had reduced the amount of sugar by about 20%.

The cake had a really lovely texture. Nice and moist. And you don't taste the cola at all. Though I must say, it could've done with less sugar (and I had already put in less sugar into the batter and the icing). The other disappointment I had was that it wasn't as chocolatey as it looked. But I suppose, it is afterall a Coca-Cola cake and not a Cocolate cake. I would do this again as a birthday cake or maybe as cupcakes. But not for dear hubby, as he still prefers Nigella's cheesecakes.

PS: I discovered not long after that this is actually a Southern recipe. I used to see it on the specials menu at the Cracker Barrel restaurant in Montgomery, and I had never ordered it as I thought it was a weird combination. Now I wish I had tried some during my year there.

World Breastfeeding Week 2008

It's World Breastfeeding Week (WBW) this week ( 1-7 Aug 08). This year's theme, "Mother Support: Going for Gold", is something I believe very strongly in.  

It is not enough to say that breastmilk is the perfect source of nourishment for infants and young children ("the gold standard" so to speak), mothers must be given support so that they are in the best position to make breastfeeding a reality for their children.  

Support should not be confined to the first days in hospital with the hospital lactation consultant.  Many mothers give up breastfeeding shortly after returning home, due to a lack of awareness and information on optimal breastfeeding practices.  More needs to be done to help mothers sustain exclusive breastfeeding for at least 6 months post-partum, and to continue breastfeeding for two years and beyond (WHO guidelines). 

Through my breastfeeding experience, I have come to realise that support must come from a variety of sources.  Mothers must start to learn about breastfeeding before the baby is born.  It is a suprise to many that breastfeeding, though a very natural act, needs to be learnt.  As mothers, we should do as much as possible to learn about it so that we can give our children the best start in life.  In a similar vein, hospitals need to provide "practical instruction" on breastfeeding in the first few hours and days after the birth of the child.  Someone needs to physically show the mother what needs to be done.  Counselling needs to be available even after the mother returns home, as many problems arise in the weeks after delivery. 

Home support is also critical.  My husband and mother, who took care of me during my confinement month, were extremely supportive of my desire to breastfeed exclusively.  Never once did they suggest that we feed our baby formula.  In my exhausted and hormonally-driven emotional state, I think I might have given in had the idea been brought up.  Even then, I faced difficulties.  

Beyond this, we need to see more support at the workplace, and within the community. Working mothers must be able to regularly express milk in a conducive environment during the workday so that her baby can be fed.  She must certainly not have to use the toilet to express her milk.  We do not prepare our meals in the toilet, so why should it be OK to prepare her baby's meals there?  She must also be able to nurse her infant in public without being asked to cover-up.  How would you like to be told to eat under a blanket? Breastfeeding is not obscene.  In anycase, usually very little of the breast is exposed and you won't notice it unless you are trying hard to look, you leering pervert. 

The Singapore Chapter of the Breastfeeding Mothers' Support Group is celebrating WBW. More information is available at their website.  If you are a breastfeeding mother, please support their activities. If you are not, do take some time to learn about breastfeeding, and what you can do to help our mothers help our children get the best start in life. 

How NOT to melt chocolate

Determined to satisfy my chocolate craving, I decided to make Nigella's Instant Chocolate Mousse, which is found in Nigella Express. I was inspired by one episode on her show, which showed just how easy it is to make this stuff. You basically melt dark chocolate together with marshmallows, butter and a bit of water, then mix it together with some cream.  You can view it here on youtube.

It looked so easy! And I suppose it should be, but, this is where it becomes evident that I am only a novice cook. 

There is a technique to melting chocolate, which Nigella doesn't go into in her recipe. TWO key points: 

FIRST: the operative words are GENTLY and SLOWLY.  And you only need the chocolate there for a short while. My flame, which I thought was low, was probably too high, and I left the chocolate there for too long. So instead of melting, it started to get lumpy and grainy. I later read that what was happening was that the chocolate was beginning to "scorch".  What I should have done was to add some vegetable oil or shortening. Instead, I decided to pour in a little bit more water.  Which leads me to the second point,

TWO: Chocolate HATES water and if you want to melt your chocolate with other ingredients, including water, you have to add the water at the start of the process and in the correct proportions. NEVER EVER add it while you are melting it. The chocolate will "seize" - separate and clump. Which was a process I observed first hand...

Still blissfully unaware of the disaster at hand, I thought, perhaps the chocolate just needed to be folded into the cream.

Here is where I committed error number three.  The cream was to be whipped till thick. But I think I overwhipped it. Well, it didn't look overwhipped, in fact, it looked perfect. But once I poured it into the chocolate and started mixing it in, the mixing process tipped the cream over the "overwhipped" edge and it started separating! 

This was when I realised that my chocolate mousse didn't look anything like mousse. It looked just like oily chocolate clumps. I miserably ladled the chocolate mixture into glasses, hoping for the best, but realising that it was definitely not going to look like Nigella's beautiful mousse.

In the end, the chocolate mixture didn't look or taste anything like mousse. But, surprisingly, it wasn't all ruined. It was still edible, and because of the marshmallow, didn't harden into a rock of chocolate.  And since I used good chocolate, I could still nibble on it to fulfill my chocolate craving.

I have since learnt how to melt chocolate (see this very useful video, and article) and I can't wait to try out the recipe again.

Blueberry Muffins - Take 2

Blueberries are in season now! I wasted no time in making up a batch of blueberry muffins. I usually use dried blueberries for this, and they taste quite wonderful. With the fresh blueberries, they were exquisite. The blueberries burst in the muffins and bled their wonderful juice into the muffin. Really very very good. Too bad my boy doesn't fancy blueberries.

I'm totally inspired to find more blueberry recipes otherwise I'll just be making blueberry muffins and blueberry pancakes this entire blueberry season...

Milk & Cookies, Yummy in my Tummy

The school holidays have come round again, and there are only so many outdoor activities you can do with a 3 year old. It was time to bake some cookies and I picked Nigella's recipe for Butter Cut-Out Biscuits (i.e. cookie biscuits, not American biscuits).

These biscuits were dead-easy to make. But make sure you have some time on your hands as you will need to chill the dough in the refrigerator for at least an hour. First, you cream together the butter and sugar, then beat in the eggs before mixing with the dry ingredients. (As usual, I used a bit less sugar than in the recipe.) You form two fat discs with the dough, and clingfilm them for chilling in the refrigerator.

After an hour, we retrieved one disc, rolled it out and started stamping. My boy had great fun with this part. We used number-shaped cookie cutters (just as Nigella had done) and also some other small shapes. We were able to cut out so many cookies (running out of space on the baking sheet), that we decided not to use the other disc of dough, but to freeze it for use some other time.

They took hardly any time to cook and tasted really buttery and had a nice meltingly smooth texture to them. Beautiful with milk! It felt so old-fashioned and comforting.

We iced some of the cookies for effect (since the recipe calls for it and it looked so pretty in the picture). But I left a good number plain as I did not want Junior to get a sugar-high and start with the tantrums (which he did anyway coz he stole a few iced biscuits).

I will definitely be doing this again, seeing that I have the other disc of dough in the freezer, but this time, no icing necessary...

Lily's Scones

I bought a new baking board, and with friends coming over for bible study, I thought that it was finally time to make some proper scones. Nigella has just this one scone recipe in the Domestic Goddess, which she describes as "the best scones I've ever eaten". But she would say that wouldn't she? Anyway, my previous attempts at scones weren't too successful, so I was hopeful this time round.

Apart from the usual suspects of flour, butter and milk, the ingredients also included shortening, cream of tartar (which, according to Nigella, gives the appearance of cellulite, but which also gives them a "dreamy lightness") and salt.

First you rub in the fats with the dry ingredients. Then you pour in the milk, mix briefly before turning it out to knead. The hard part I found was kneading the dough, especially since the mixture is very sticky. Your hands will get really icky but bear with it and you will soon be able to roll out the dough and stamp out the scones with a cutter. I managed to form 15 pieces (the recipe says it makes 12), but I think it was because I rolled the dough out a bit thinner than the recipe called for. Then you egg-wash it before you put it into the oven.

These take 10 mins to cook. And are lovely. They are firm on the outside, and really soft and light on the inside. Wonderful on its own or with some jam and cream. They are the best scones I've made. Though I think, because of the salt and shortening and the lack of sugar, they taste more like Biscuits (a la the American South), than scones. Frankly, these remind me more of my Alabama days than my England days. In particular, the Blue Plate Cafe (Memphis, TN) and the Loveless Cafe (Nashville, TN), where I had some of the best biscuits ever. Until I tasted their biscuits, I was not a fan of biscuits. Then, I was made a convert. I prefer my scones sweet, so I will continue to look out for a good scone recipe. But I will definitely do Lily's scones again, coz they're the closest thing to Blue Plate and Loveless I've got in Singapore!

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.