Baker Wannabe

Whew! I finally finished making the Thomas Train 3D cake yesterday. Even if it’s not really the perfect cake but I’m still quite happy with the result especially as I saw the birthday celebrant’s face as he saw the cake.

I made the cake the day before yesterday, crumb coat it at night then decorated it yesterday. I had quite a scare when it was time for me to put the icing on the cake. I tried a new icing recipe and this time the buttercream was not as stiff. It was very runny. So, when I tried to apply it on the cake, I never get the perfect smooth icing. It must be the kind of butter I used or maybe I should have added more icing sugar. Anyways, I still have to experiment and try out other buttercream recipe or another butter brand. Anyways, at the end I still manage to ‘rescue’ the cake. It was still wasn’t perfect, but I’m not beating myself for it. I’ll try better next time.

All in all I had fun making the cake and was happy with the compliments from my family, the birthday celebrant’s family and the party guests. Well, that’s enough for me to be inspired and be encouraged to bake more fun birthday cakes!

Thomas Train 3D cake. Persian Vanilla Cake with Buttercream frosting.

It’s our friend’s son birthday this coming Thursday. I volunteered to bake the cake for his party and asked the father what his son likes as a birthday cake. It seems he’s obsessed with Thomas the train so, I guess that’s the cake I will be baking for him. Thinking about making a 3D Thomas Cake this week is actually making me nervous. This will be my first time.. I’ve actually thought of just making a normal round cake, buy a Thomas train toy and stick it on the cake. But deep inside I know that this is no fun ( read: challenge) at all. So, I’m taking the challenge.. and yes, I’m nervous but quite excited.. I just hope and pray that everything will turn great. Planning to start baking a day earlier so, I won’t be in a hurry and turn out to have another  disaster birthday cake. For the meantime, I’ currently looking at different sites and getting ideas on how to do this cake.

I’ve spent the past hour browsing through a lot of baking websites. I’ve already bookmarked some of them and I’ll be adding their links here later. But as I saw all the beautiful cakes, brownies and cookies, I was overwhelmed. I’ve realized that indeed I still have so much things to learn on baking.  The ‘knowledge’ and experience that I have now is nothing compared to all these great bakers. But it’s okay, I’m willing to practice more and learn more.I just need more opportunities to bake and maybe I can go all out again after this ‘diet’ of mine.

I’m on a juice fast right now. Yes, me and my effort to lose weight. There is still hope. But with my food cravings so strong right now, I find it so much of a temptation to watch the Asian Food channel and even to take a look at this Food blog of mine. Yes,there are too many photos of cakes and desserts here.

I will come back when my willpower is much stronger and my cravings are gone. But actually when I baked the Carrot Cake below, I was already on a juice fast and for the record, I didn’t eat a slice of it. So, maybe my will power is much stronger now…

I’ve tried different carrot cakes recipes in the past. There was one delicious recipe from my sister but I lost my copy and so did she. So, I was left trying other recipes which were either too dry or too oily. And finally, I tried the recipe from Vanjo at Panlasang Pinoy. I love trying out recipes from this site because the instructions are very detailed and if you have doubts, you can also watch a detailed video with it. So, it’s like nothing can go wrong if you follow his recipes. I’ve also tried a few of his recipes and they were good.

Anyways, so I tried out my first Carrot recipe from PP’s ( Panlasang Pinoy’s) site and gave the cake as a birthday gift to our Korean Pastor. And guess what, they loved it! The wife was telling me so many times that the cake was so good. Too bad, my camera was broken at that time and I wasn’t able to take picture of it.

But last week was the birthday of our pastor’s wife, so I decided to bake a carrot cake for her too. And she was so happy and thankful for it. She told me again and again that the cake was delicious.

So here’s the carrot cake that I made.

The cake right after frosting it. It was already so late at night that I couldn’t wait for the cake to cool down. So, I immediately put the frosting.. Bad idea!

I had to refrigerate the cake for a few minutes and the frosting stopped melting.. so, I was still able to rescue it. So, this was how it looked like after being in the fridge for a few hours.

Here I was trying out to mix different colored icing in the tubes. Result? Multi colored cupcakes! It’s not that bad, but I could have used lesser tint from the food coloring to make the cupcakes lighter and more appealing to the kids. These cupcakes were served to the kids during one of the church sunday school parties.

What was amusing was that, the cupcakes were all colored differently that the kids were kinda confused which cupcake color to choose. So I guess next time I’ll keep it simpler and just stick to 1 or 2 different colors.

I’m so much in the mood in cooking dishes I’ve never tried before. So, the recipe for today is Pad Prik Nua or Thai Chilli Beef. This is a spicy dish that Hubby and I love to order whenever we are at the restaurants or stalls here in Thailand. So, I thought, why don’t I learn how to cook this.  I searched through the net and found this recipe.

Ingredients
Beef fillet or tenderloin, partially frozen, then sliced into thin strips — 1 pound
Garlic, minced — 2-3 cloves
Salt and pepper — to taste
Fish sauce — 2 tablespoons
Oyster sauce (optional) — 1 tablespoon
Brown or palm sugar — 2 teaspoons
Oil — 1/4 cup
Thai or jalapeño chiles, minced — 2-3
Red bell pepper, sliced very thinly — 1
Method
In a large bowl, mix the beef with the garlic, salt and pepper and set aside to marinate for at least 15 minutes.
Mix together the fish sauce, oyster sauce and brown sugar together in a small bowl to form a sauce. Add a little water if needed and set aside.
Heat the oil over high flame in a wok or deep skillet. Add the chiles and red pepper and stir fry rapidly for about 30 seconds.
Add the beef and its marinade and stir fry rapidly for another 1-2 minutes, or until the beef is just cooked through.
Reduce heat to low, add the sauce ingredients and toss to coat the beef. Remove from heat and serve hot with jasmine rice.

But since I don’t have red bellpepper and small chillies , I substituted it with dried chillies and a dash of chilli powder. So, here’s my version of the Thai Pad Prik Nua.

I will have to await for the verdict of my food ‘critic’ later. But I’m sure he will be surprised of another new dish on the dinner table.

My kids and I love pasta! Whenever I make pasta for lunch or dinner, my kids will always be so excited. So I make it a point to cook pasta at least once a month for the kids. I give credit to my sister who taught me how to make spaghetti. Oh my sister makes the most delicious spaghetti and I just copied my recipe from her. Though my spaghetti will never be like hers since we don’t have the same ingredients here in Thailand, but at least I’ve learned the basic and can make something that the kids love.

I’m still so interested to try out making fondant icing. I feel like if I know how to make this icing, cake decoration would me limitless. I mean, I can make my own cake toppers and cake decorations. As mentioned in one of my posts, they don’t sell a lot of cake decors here in the city we live in. So, I’m limited to putting the different sprinkles and making the stars or shell borders from my buttercream frosting.

Anyways, I still have to look for my fondant ingredient and that’s the glycerin. Yes, we’ve been to Malaysia a few times but I never got the change to drop by a baker’s shop there. Hopefully on our next trip. So, my next mission is still on : Fondant Icing.

I love coffee! I started my love affair with coffee when I was still at the University and we had plates ( not the dishes but design projects) to finish until the wee hours in the morning. I never like black coffee and I’ve always like my coffee sweet. Those were the years when Great Taste coffee released the Gourmet Coffee series and that’s when I was introduced to Cappucino, Amareto, Latte and etc.  Of course, they were just 3 in 1 cheap sachets but they were good enough for me. That’s when I drank coffee not just to keep me awake the whole night but just by the sheer pleasure of it.

And fast forward to the present time, my love for coffee continues and my pleasure to taste different kinds of coffee – Malaysian, Vietnam, Kona, Colombian, Brazilian and etc. So, when I got my coffee espresso maker from Ikea, I tried to make my own latte ( art latte for that matter) and I’m so addicted to it now!