The Quest

I am always on the lookout for better tasting, simpler ingredients, easy instructions recipes, and well recently I had the opportunity to try out some. So here are the best of the best (so far, as I will always be willing to try out new recipes)...

First there are the cupcakes that I made for Teresa's birthday! I've always wanted to make really scrumptious cupcakes that not only taste good, but look amazing! Well if you look at the photos, the decorations could definitely use more practice, but I must admit these are the best tasting cupcakes (that is the cake part)! They were soft and flavourful, there was vanilla cupcakes and chocolate cupcakes. I have to say the chocolate ones really blew me away! Usually I am never satisfied with how chocolate cake tastes, but this one was absolutely perfect!

The frosting, however, was another matter entirely. The chocolate frosting came out beautifully, easy to spread and with a nice shine to it. But the butter cream frosting that I used to make designs and decorations... just looking at it made me not want to eat it.... sorry, that happens to me sometimes, I will judge food on the way they look.... but I think the biggest thing is that I knew what ingredients went into it, and added to it that the colours didn't really come out like how I wanted them to..... so all of that just ruined them for me. Having said that, I kept this info to myself, and people did end up eating them.... hehehehe... and I asked what it tasted like, and one person told me that it tasted like eating butter..... only that it's sweet..... so I am still looking for the best frosting recipe, let me know if you know of one for me to try and pass my muster.

Next up....

Recently, a friend of Tien's has been giving us loads and loads of yoghurt, so much so that we were wondering what we should do with them. After giving out some tubs to our friends, we were still left with way too much, so we decided to make fried chicken wings with them. It was a rumour that we had heard that we could make really yummy fried chicken by marinating them in yoghurt and then fry them.

Here's what I am looking for in a yummy fried chicken wing, the skin must be a beautiful golden brown, and so crispy that you can pull it all off in one go. Also the crispy skin should not taste like skin, it should seem like it's all just the batter..... don't know if I am explaining this right, but look at the photo here, the skin is still intact after we fried it with the batter, this will taste like tempura, if the batter and skin separate.....

I am told the reason for this is because the oil is not hot enough. But as we tried out our first batch of chicken wings we can attest to the fact finding the right oil temperature to fry our chicken wings was difficult, especially since we tested out the oil with one chicken wing at a time, and then when we did do a whole batch in the wok, 5 chicken wings or so, the oil was not hot enough again......

As we were trying to find the right temperature, we were also wondering how exactly to go about frying the chicken wings, do we just plop each wing in right from the yoghurt batter or do we have to roll them in flour? And then do we still need to roll them in bread crumbs afterwards to get the crunchy flakes? Or should we make a paste by mixing flour/cornstarch with the batter? Some recipes even say to rinse the yoghurt batter from the chicken wings before frying....

Well just to let you know, we tried EVERYTHING! And the best thing to do is to shake off some of the yoghurt batter and then roll lightly in flour and then place in fryer. It's all quite simple, only we made it complicated..... kind of like life..... =P

But the fun thing about experimenting in the kitchen, is that eventually you'll get it right. We finally got the oil temperature, and the batter and the best amount of time to leave it in the oil to make sure it cooks thoroughly....

Next, N.T. and I made a cake for Tien, we decided to go with a traditional chocolate cake. I did consider doing another cake as I had already done chocolate cupcakes, but I was thinking that the frosting for a chocolate cake would be easier, and I could always fall back on my cupcake frosting if this cake's recipe didn't really turn out good..... ha ha, thinking ahead! =P

While making it, we were a little worried as the cake batter looked almost like cookie batter.... it was so thick and almost like dough or clay...... like we could have probably molded into whatever shape we wanted..... however we decided to try anyways as we had time and also it might surprise us!

Well it certainly did, it only took 20 minutes or so for the cake to cook thoroughly and then we left it to cool, there it is cooling on the rack......

Then we frosted it with a chocolate mocha frosting, however we couldn't taste any of the coffee liquor that we added, and we also added instant coffee, but still could not taste it....

We then had to construct a cover for the cake as we wanted to surprise Tien with it, however we didn't bother buying actually cake carriers/boxes, so we did it all out of tin foil, which in the end kind of looks like we were going to cook a turkey or chicken! hehehehehe....

At first we were planning on telling Tien it was a chicken that we were marinating, however we thought that it would be very weird if we carried our own chicken to the restaurant.... =P So we told her we made her a cake, but we didn't show her what it looked like, and here she is surprised by the cake! We also added crused white chocolate on the top, just to let it have some contrast.

That's all for now.