My Christmas Cookies Go On Sale!

Last Christmas, my Mom told her friends Aunty Sheau Huei and Aunty Serene about me baking cookies.

Just so happened they were looking for 100 cookies to give to friends for a Christmas party.

So my Mom and I got busy over 3 days in mid-December, baking and decorating 100 star-shaped cookies (we also made a handful of angels — I wanted more but Mom said they took way too long to ice and decorate so she let me do about 6 of them).

Mom used Martha Stewart's sugar cookie recipe and I helped her to make the dough. The thing about cookies is that the dough
a. cannot be overmixed or your cookies turn out hard and tasteless (I had just done a batch of gingerbread that was not exactly yummy :( )
b. has to be put in the fridge to harden before you can roll it out and cut it.

Mom and I made 6 batches of sugar cookie dough and wrapped each one in clingwrap and stuck them in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

I tried to help Mom do the cookie-cutting but the dough was so buttery and soft, Mom was so frustrated I figured I should go and watch The Incredibles on DVD with my sister while Mom calmed down.

By the time my animated movie ended, Mom had baked the first batch.

"You do the icing okay?"

Mom and I decided we would do up 3 batches - white (plain), yellow (lemon-flavoured) and pink (strawberry-flavoured). She did the outline of the stars with a stiffer icing, then I did the flooding (which is squirting a wet icing over the body of the cookie and spreading it).

Mom is really bad at flooding. She hates doing it. "ARGH! It's going over my outline!" she would shout, and I would have to take the cookie away from her before she throws it in the bin.

Mom had bought a whole bunch of edible decor but we narrowed it down to a few:
- pink crisp balls
- gold crisp balls
- multi-color pastel star sprinkles
- purple sanding sugar
- and this small multi-color sanding sugar bottle she bought
- hundreds and thousands

It was fun making the plain cookies look pretty. But I got pretty tired around the 74th cookie so Mom took over.

The final cookies to be finished were the angels — I drew on their faces, wings and hair with edible ink markers!

Our clients loved the cookies and Tweeted them :)

And our net profit was $80 and Mom split it 50-50 with me, so I got $40 to buy Christmas presents with! Hooray!

And this is what 100 cookies looks like from the stairs!

Baking Souffles with Mum

It was a sunny Saturday afternoon. It was the afternoon of our Reunion Dinner and Mum was looking for a dessert to serve after our steamboat dinner.

She was baking Chocolate Souffles (yum!) She was already using the Kenwood Chef (the one from the last story) when I came into the kitchen and I asked her if I could help her do it. Then she let me do it. She asked me to turn it to speed 4 and I ran away! ( I thought the batter was going to fly!) We also made some chocolate sauce but we'll come back to that.

Souffles are sticky!! They're not like normal cakes - they contain very little flour and no butter, and they are made mostly with egg whites and are puffy!



First we had to make the batter. The batter was made with:

• Bittersweet chocolate - 8 oz said the recipe. My mom broke one 200g bar of Old Gold cadbury chocolate (mmm!). I melted it in a bowl that sat in a bigger bowl of hot water.

• 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

• 1/2 cup sugar

• 1 cup flour

• 6 eggs - you have to separate the yolks from the egg whites. You also need 2 more whites from 2 large eggs (my granny's friend just made 40 kueh lapis last week so we have more egg whites in our fridge than Sprite and Capri Sonne!)

To make the batter, Mum put the egg yolks and the sugar in the Kenwood and I turned it to level 4 it till it was really white and creamy - then we put in the flour and mixed it till the flour disappeared.



Mum scooped the batter into a bowl and mixed in the melted chocolate and the vanilla extract. While she was doing that hard part I helped to prepare the ramekins (these are these special bowls with ridges, quite low so that the souffle can rise above the top like a chef's hat!).


I had to brush the little bowls with some butter and then I had to put some sugar icing powder and then hit it around and then shake out the excess powder. Mum taped some parchment paper around the ramekins so that when the souffle rose it wouldn't poop all over the place but rise up like a nice hairdo. When she was done, I put them in the freezer till she was ready with the mix.

The hard part of the souffle is getting the egg white right. Mum's writing this part:


1. Put the 8 egg whites in a mixing bowl with a pinch of Cream of Tartar. (if you're beating by hand with a balloon whisk, use one pinch of salt instead of the tartar)
2. Turn the mixer on with the whisk on, and beat it, adding 1 tbsp of sugar, till the mixture is stiff.
3. Then add another tbsp of sugar and beat egg whites till stiff peaks form.
4. Fold in 1/3 of the egg white into the chocolate batter. Once completely folded, use a rubber spatula and fold in the rest of the egg whites.


5. Take the ramekins out of the freezer, and pour the batter in till it reaches just beneath the rim. Put the ramekins in a baking tray, and bake at 205 deg C for 10 minutes. Then lower heat to around 190 deg, and bake for 15 more min till firm. (PS Oven should have been pre-heated to 205 deg Celsius.)
6. Remove from oven and poke a hole in the centre, and pour in chocolate sauce.*

To make chocolate sauce:
4 ounces of bittersweet chocolate bar or chips
1 cup of heavy cream

Warm the cream in a pan over the stove. In a bowl, break chocolate into pieces or pour out chips. When cream is hot (don't let it boil) remove from fire and pour over choc chips and stir till chocolate is melted. Pour chocolate sauce into a jug and pour chocolate sauce into centre of souffle.




We baked the souffles that night. They were very nice. Everyone had a great time eating them. Mom made 2 of them with Baileys which is like a wine but more yucky. My grandma loved it.

Mum says it will be a very long time before she makes them again because they are really troublesome. But very yummy.

Baking Banana Bread, Mom and Me

It's Sunday and my mom has 10 loaves of banana bread to make for JE's mom.

Don't ask me why 10 but basically it means
• a lot of bananas (more than 80!!!)
• a lot of flour
• a lot of sugar
• a lot of hard work, sweat and washing up!

Mom looked like she could do with some help so I offered my kind assistance.

First, she peeled the bananas and mashed them with a fork. I would have done it for her but ... I HATE BANANAS!

Next, she had to measure out the flour (1.5 cups for each loaf), which she had to sift with 1.5 tsp of soda. She let me sift and I am very good at it now. I made mountains out of flour hills.

Then I helped her to melt the butter. Each loaf needs 4 tbsp of melted butter, so she cut them up into small slices, and put them in a bowl and I filled a bigger bowl with hot water (ow) and put her bowl into that bowl and before you knew it, there was a yellow pool of melted b-u-t-t-e-r! (yum)

Next Mom let me use the Kenwood Chef. Now, you must know something about this Kenwood Chef: it is 20 years old. T-W-E-N-T-Y! That's more than twice my age. That's me x 2 + 2. It was my grandmother's and my mom took it over when my granny passed away :,(


But anywaaaaaay, Mom put the mashed bananas (yuck) in the mixing bowl, added 2 eggs (without shells haha), and 1 cup of sugar. I helped her to mix it all up till the batter was nice and smooth. Next, we added the melted butter, and then the flour. Finally we added

• 2 pinches of salt
• 1 pinch of nutmeg powder
• 1 pinch of cinnamon powder

(that's a lot of pinching)

I mixed it nicely up for Mom, then I brushed the loaf pans with some melted butter.

Meantime Mom pre-heated the oven to 180 deg Celsius (that's like SIX times as hot as a normal day in Singapore).

She poured my batter into the loaf pan, and slid it into the oven.

I watched the banana bread rise. And rise. And rise. It was so hot I thought my face was going to burn!





After 25 minutes Mom stuck a skewer into the centre (fat) part of the loaf. "Done?" she asked me. There was still a bunch of wet goop on the skewer.

"Noooo!" I said, "not yet!"

So we let it bake for another 7 minutes, and finally, the skewer came out clean.

Mom took the loaf out of the oven and it smelt just AMAAAAAZING. Pity I don't like bananas.



After that, she let me make 6 banana muffins with chocolate chips (I made one for JE as a free "sample" to go with her mom's 10 loaves).





Yum! Can't wait to bake again with Mom. Next time, it BETTER not be bananas.