Hanim Cooks!

Ngap. Salty pretzel and sweet Belgian chocolate is irresistible. @DylansCandyBar #food #candy #nightsnack #guiltypleasure

Walnut Pesto.

I bought a bunch of basil leaves during one of my groceries trip some time ago. I needed to use just a little bit but they don’t sell it in small packet. So I stashed the rest into the freezer. It was 3 weeks ago.

Too lazy to think of what I can do with it, might as well make pesto. Didn’t have pine nut so I used walnut instead.

Ingredients

1 clove garlic
A handful of basil
1/4 cup walnut
1/4 cup parmesan cheese, grated
A squeeze of lemon juice
1 cup extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper

Method

In a food processor, blitz garlic and basil. Add walnuts and half of the cheese. Drizzle in olive oil while blitzing the mixture. Add a bit more cheese and olive oil until it reaches the consistency you want. Season with lemon juice, salt and pepper.

A friend suggested to add in some coriander leaves. You might want to make a separate batch and try it out.

Pumpkin Cake with Golden Syrup Frosting.

My (tiny) obsession with pumpkin continues. 

This has got the be, by far, the ugliest photo of sliced cake in the world. I made a mistake of putting the frosting when the cake was not cooled completely. Complete idiot. And it doesn’t help that it was such a humid day. And I didn’t get the sun I wanted for this picture. Oh whatever!

If you’re not turned off by the sight of this picture, here’s the recipe:

Ingredients

Cake

1/2 cup butter
2 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tablespoon nutmeg
1/2 tablespoon cinnamon
2 eggs
1 1/2 cup fine sugar
1 cup pumpkin puree

Golden Syrup Frosting

1/2 cup butter, soft
250g reduced-fat cream cheese, soft
1/4 cup golden syrup

Method

Preheat oven to 125 degree Celsius. Butter a 9-inch round springform pan.

In a bowl, sieve and whisk flour, baking soda, cinnamon and nutmeg. In another bowl, cream sugar and butter until pale. Whisk in egg and pumpkin puree until combined. Add dry ingredients to pumpkin mixture and mix gently until all smooth and combined.

Place the batter into the pan. Bake up to 45 minutes until toothpick inserted in center of cake come out clean. As the cake batter is a bit wet, you might need to cook it slightly longer, but maintain a low heat up to another 15 minutes.

Cool cake in a pan for 1/2 hour, then remove the springform pan and place on wire rack, right side up.

To make the golden syrup frosting, whisk butter, cream cheese and syrup until smooth. Spread on top of the completely cooled cake.

(Smashing) Pumpkin Soup.

Traditionally, cooking soup requires you to include heavy cream. Why? Because it’s more delicious that way, duh. But I decided that we can make do without the cream and I opt to use low fat milk instead. And I think it taste rather good. I use it for almost all my soup recipes but here’s one pumpkin soup in commemoration of Halloween.

Ingredients

1 tbsp olive oil
2 onion, peeled and roughly chopped
3 garlic clove, peeled and roughly chopped
2 tsp ground cumin
3 cups pumpkin puree
2 1/2 cups chicken or vegetable stock
1 1/2 cups low fat milk
Few dollops low fat plain yoghurt or sour cream
Croutons

Method

Heat olive oil in a large saucepan. Cook onion and garlic until aromatic and lightly browned. Add cumin and stir for 1 minute over medium heat.

Add 1 cup of chicken stock. Simmer for 5 minutes. Set aside to let cool slightly. Use a stick blender or food processor to blend until smooth. Transfer it back into the saucepan, add the remaining chicken stock. Add the pumpkin puree, stir for few minutes. Add the milk and stir gently until everything combines, for about 10 minutes.

To serve, ladle soup into serving bowls. Top with a dollop of yoghurt or sour cream. Sprinkle some croutons and drizzle olive oil before serving.

Serves 6.

This picture was taken sometime few Fridays back in my office pantry.  

Whipped Cream.

Don’t buy those nasty whipped cream from the dairy aisle, it’s atrocious! Make your own instead. It will only take 10 minutes tops. 

With a hand mixer or whisk, whip 1 cup heavy cream until it reaches soft peak. Beat in 1 teaspoon vanilla essence and 1 tablespoon of icing sugar until peaks form. Make sure not to over-beat because the cream will then become lumpy. 

Taste bud screams orgasm. Mmhmmm. #food (Taken with Instagram)

You can trust her. I can vouch for it. 

goddessofscrumptiousness:

The Makings of a Perfect Brownie:

1) A perfect brownie should be crunchy on top that the surface cracks the minute you sink your teeth into it.

2) The texture should be chewy and moist and fudge-like that the act of chewing every morsel of it is equally pleasurable as that of having a foodgasm.

3) A perfect brownie should never contain any leavening agents such as bicarbonate of soda or baking powder (unless you want a cake-like brownie, then I believe one should just eat cake instead). Any brownie recipe that includes these sacrilegious additions is well, a sacrilege!

4) The proper mixing of all the brownie ingredients is also a factor. If you just mix all the ingredients together and dump everything into a baking pan, the brownie top won’t be as crunchy, unlike when you separate the egg whites from the yolks, beating the whites with sugar just until thick and frothy, much like a runny meringue before mixing with the rest of the ingredients is the secret to a crunchy top… I promise!

5) And lastly, of course a perfect brownie should taste like it is blessed by a Mayan god cacao connoisseur. It should be ooh-ing and screaming chocolate. So use the best quality chocolate bar or cocoa powder.

Crunchy Top Fudge Brownies

Ingredients:

1 cup unsalted butter

1 cup good quality cocoa powder (I use a German brand cocoa powder -Heintz, you can use a Dutch-processed cocoa powder… means it is alkalized)

1 1/2 cups brown sugar

2 cups granulated sugar

4 eggs (medium), separated

1 teaspoon salt

2 cups all purpose flour, sifted

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 cups dark chocolate chips

*2 cups whole walnuts (optional)

Procedure: 

Preheat oven to 350’F. Line a 9”x13” rectangle baking pan with baking parchment.

- Melt butter in a medium sauce pan over low heat. When melted, remove from heat and add cocoa powder, mix until smooth.

- Add brown sugar, salt, vanilla, egg yolks and flour. Set Aside.

- Using a hand mixer/wire whisk/stand mixer, beat egg whites until frothy. Then slowly add the granulated sugar until meringue gets into a soft peak stage.

- Fold the meringue mixture into the chocolate mixture. Then mix in the dark chocolate chips and walnuts (optional).

- Pour into prepared baking pan and bake for 50 minutes to an hour or until when toothpick inserted in the center of the brownie comes out with moist crumbs (not wet brownie batter).

- Cool in pan for 15 minutes, then lift from the baking pan and cut into 24 square pieces. Cool cut brownies on wire racks.

- Store in an air tight container. Laid flat and layers separated by parchment paper.

Makes 2 dozens

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Peach Pastry.

This dessert will be perfect if I had some slithered almonds and icing sugar in my kitchen pantry for decoration. But I think this is good enough.

I finally got around to translate the recipe in my head into writing - only because someone actually asked for it, gasp! Hope I didn’t screw anything up. 

Simple Custard.

I use this simple recipe as a base for my pastry desserts.

One advice - always stir the custard when it’s on heat so it won’t burn. And do not leave it out of your sight no matter how boring it is staring and waiting for it to thickens; it’ll only take roughly 7 minutes anyway. Ok, that’s two advices. 

Who has the time to make puff pastry from scratch, right? A little bit of help goes a long way.

Sunday Lunch: L. Table by Lavender Bakery.

Tried a different eating place over the weekend. Didn’t take much photos because I didn’t think I’ll be posting it here. It was a quick lunch so we can move on to do some household shopping. 

I’m no food critic but to put it in short, food was good, staff were polite (I was there on Sunday during peak hours FYI) and nice ambience. Just don’t be deceived by the madness of queues outside because those people are buying fresh pastries on display at the entrance - once you’re inside the restaurant, the environment is surprisingly calm.

There’s smoking area outside too in case you’re wondering.

I recommend you to have a meal there. 

L. Table by Lavender Bakery
G.213 Ground Floor
One Utama Shopping Centre
+603 7728 6933

Cinnamon Rolls.

I made this sweet, sweet delicious buns for my friend’s tea party.

The recipe is simple but the explanation is a bit lengthy - only so that you’ll get it right.

Just thought I let you know that the recipe calls for yeast so naturally you will need to spare some time to let the dough rise. Don’t make this if you are in a hurry. 

Serve ‘em warm. 

Stick licking good Gelato on sticks at Stickhouse. 

Hazelnut + chocolate gelato coated with dark chocolate sauce and pistachios. 

Ahhh.. Living a good life.. 

I do not have a name for this dish so I’ll just call it.. 

Pizza: Hanim’s Style.

..only because it is fashioned behind the premise of the infamous dish called pizza. How original. Anyway..

I haven’t got time to make pizza dough so I used wholemeal pita bread instead. Drizzle some olive oil and tomato sauce, slap on some smoked salmon, low fat ricotta cheese, olives, arugula, basil, and sun-dried tomatoes. Bake in oven at 165 degree Celsius till it looked “cooked” enough. 

Lunch, in less than 15 minutes.