Sausage Buns, Singapore Style

Having been away from home for almost a year, I had a huge craving for my favourite sausage buns which I usually eat for breakfast at least once a week during my days at NTU. Those were the days that seemed so long ago!

Anyway, my first try failed spectacularly as I was lazy and bought the Tesco crusty bread mix. My bread rolls turned out crusty and hard like rock buns! After poring through more websites, I finally found a great one that had many workable recipes and better still, was written by a fellow Singaporean.

Sweet bun recipe: makes 9 buns

Source: Happy Home Baking

150g bread flour
150g cake flour
5g active dry yeast
3g salt
125 ml milk
1 egg
60g caster sugar
50g butter
1 egg beaten for glazing

- Mix all dry ingredients in mixing bowl. Add the milk, egg and butter. Mix well into dough.
- Knead dough in bowl till the gluten is fully developed. It takes about 25 min by hand, and dough remains very sticky throughout kneading.
Tip: to know if dough has been kneaded enough, test to see if dough can be stretched till tissue-thin. Don't be tempted to add more flour to make the dough less sticky!
- Cover kneaded dough with cling film to seal in the moisture. Let the dough proof till it is double in size. (takes about an hour at 30 deg C) Press finger into dough and withdraw to check, finger compression mark should remain and not spring back.
- Take out dough, punch out the gas produced and let the dough rest for about 15 min at room temperature.
- Divide the dough into 60g portions. Shape and add fillings. Let dough proof again for 15 min or double in size.
- Glaze the top of the bread rolls with beaten egg.
- Bake for about 15 min in a preheated oven at 190 deg C.

Cream Puffs (Shu Cream)

I blame the japanese drama "Zettai Kareshi (Absolute Boyfriend)" for making me salivate with the protagonist's incessant baking of cream puffs and thus starting my cream puff craze. How can anyone resist not having one after seeing Riko baking tray after tray of golden brown cream puffs filled with luscious custard cream? I knew I definitely had to have one, but there was none to be had in Dublin. Thus began my baking craze.
(Credits: Photo of Zettai Kareshi from Dramawiki.)

Now everyone knows that there are loads of recipes on the internet, but trying to find one that works for you is like sifting through a haystack. I was thus surprised when the first recipe I found on About.com worked so well and was so easy to make that I had my first yummy cream puffs in an hour. The custard cream was still not satisfactory though as I didn't like the taste of the flour in the cream filling.

After a bit more experimenting with the filling (I realise that Bird's custard powder is more agreeable with the palate), my cream puffs have finally been perfected and ready to go.

Recipe: makes 8 - 9 puffs

1) To make the choux pastry puff: -

3 tbsp (45g) butter

2 tsp caster sugar

1/2 cup flour

1/2 water

2 eggs

- Preheat oven to 375F or 190 degC.

- Beat eggs in a bowl. Put butter, sugar and water in a pan and bring to a boil.

- Add flour into the butter mixture, stir quickly and remove from heat immediately.

- Add eggs in gradually while mixing well.

- Put dough into plastic bag/pastry bag and squeeze out as small mounds onto baking tray. Dip finger in cold water to smooth down the tops of the mounds.

- Bake for 30 min. Open door a little for 5 min, then take out of oven to serve.

- You can use a piping bag with a metal nozzle to poke into the puff and squeeze the custard cream in, or just cut a small hole at the side and squeeze the cream in.

2) To make the custard cream: -

1 Tbsp custard flour

1/2 pint milk (about 240 ml)

2 Tbsp sugar

- Blend custard with a little water to make a paste.

- Boil milk and sugar, add flour mixture.

- Cook to right consistency and flavour with vanilla essence.

Digital Scrapbooking?

In my quest to create a lovely new banner to match my spanking new site, I scoured through the WWW and came across a novel concept - Digital Scrapbooking! Took me quite a while to learn how to use photoshop to do it (had the software for a couple of years now and yet never really learnt the power of photoshop) but thanks to a simple tutorial by Overstuffed and digital scrapbook paper by Joyful Heart Designs, I had my banner up and working in an hour.

So there it is, my first ever self-made banner and step into the world of digital scrapbooking! (You probably can tell that I'm pretty proud of my new banner!)

Don't worry, I'll be posting up my baking exploits soon. =)