Chocolate Bottom Banana Cake

All along, I've not been adventurous when it comes to using bananas in bakes. It's always the same ole banana cake recipe that I use over and over again. So when I saw this recipe, I thought to myself.... time for a change! Furthermore, this seems to be a somewhat healthier version, as it uses less eggs (only 1!) and less butter.

But it seems like after listening to feedback from my tasters, the good ole version of the banana cake wins hands down. Actually I also prefer my version. But this is a good try nonetheless.

What you need

• 113g butter (softened)
• 200g sugar 
• 1 egg (lightly beaten)
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 3 medium bananas (mashed) 
• 212g plain flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp salt
• 14g cocoa powder 
• depends-on-how-crazy-u-are-abt-chocolate-gm of chocolate chips

What to do

• Preheat oven to 180 ºC and prepare a 8” Square pan, lined at the base only.
• Cream butter, salt and sugar till light and fluffy. 
• Drizzle in the egg, vanilla and mashed bananas, beating thoroughly.
• Sieve in the flour, baking soda and baking powder to the creamed mixture and mix it well.
• Divide the batter into half. Add the cocoa powder to one portion of the batter. Spread that portion in the bottom the baking tin. 
• Spread the remaining plain batter on top the cocoa batter, and sprinkle top with chocolate chips.
• Bake for about 40 minutes till done. 

Orange Sugee Cake

Recipe shared by Happy Flour, thanks fellow blogger!


What you need

• 110g butter
• 35g caster sugar
• 1/4tsp  salt
• 3nos. egg yolk
• 1/2tsp vanilla paste
• 1/8tsp almond essence(optional)
• 50g cake flour
• 1/2tsp baking powder
• 1/8tsp baking soda
• 60g semolina flour
• 15g ground almond
• 15g diced almond
• 2tbsp milk
• 2nos, egg white
• 40g caster sugar
• adequate almond flakes

What to do

• In a mixing bowl, cream butter, salt and sugar until light and fluffy.
• Slowly beat in egg yolk, vanilla essence and almond essence until well combined.
• Fold in flour, semolina, baking osda and baking powder, and milk till combined.
• Cover and set aside to rest for 30mins.
• Preheat oven to 175C.
• Use a cake mixer, whisk egg whites till frothy.
• Gradually add in the sugar and whisk till stiff peaks.
• Fold in 1/4 of the meringue into butter mixture until combined.
• Then fold in the rest of the meringue in 2 portions until well combined.    
• Pour batter into a greased oval pan.
• Scatter almond flakes on the surface.
• Bake in a preheated oven for 30-35mins.
• Remove cake from tin and cool on a wire rack.
  

Ian is 11!

Ian turned 11 on Christmas day. As usual, he asked for a chocolate cake. But it's so boring! LOL... anyway, to make the Birthday boy happy, I did a chocolate cake for him, but the filling was cherries. In other words, it was a black forest cake in disguise. 


Bought a Angry Birds chocolate mold in one of the sprees and decided to "play" with this new toy. So I made the Angry Bird figurines. Not difficult, but time consuming to colour all the parts. Anyway, I had fun and the kids had a hand in filling up the molds with chocolate. They also got to be creative with the leftover chocolate. :) 

Banana cake

This is a recipe that I always go back to. It's truly a good, no-fail recipe from Prima website. But I reduce the amount of sugar. the baked cake is moist and buttery. My adaptations in brackets below...


What you need

• 260g Self-Raising Flour
• 220g Castor Sugar (reduced to 180gm)
• 180g Butter
• 260g Banana (pisang hijau) (I used del monte bananas, make sure they are ripe enough so that it's more fragrant)
• 4 Eggs
• 30ml Milk
• ¾ tsp Baking Soda
• ½ tsp Vanilla Essence
• 1 tsp Emulsifier (optional)

What to do

• Cream butter and sugar at medium speed till light and fluffy.
• Add emulsifier and mix well.
• Add eggs a little at a time and mix till batter is smooth and creamy.
• Mash bananas and stir into the milk.
• Fold in the mashed banana mixture and vanilla essence.
• Sift  Self-Raising Flour and baking soda together and gently fold in.
• Pour the batter into a greased lined round baking tin (8inch) and bake at 170° for 60-70 mins.

Blended Orange Cake

Another simple recipe that I attempted on a weekend. Too bad tho, my blender is too small to contain everything, so I ended up blending stuff in 2 batches.

On to the cake... it smelled really nice and the texture is beautiful, but a stronger orange flavour will be perfect. I guess next time if I were to bake this, I'll add additional orange zest.

Thanks to Doria for sharing this recipe. As usual, my modifications in brackets.


What you need

• 1 pc orange
• 1 cup sugar (I used 3/4 cup)
• 1 cup oil
• 3 eggs
• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 tbsp baking powder

What to do

• Preheat oven at 150 degrees.
• Cut orange into cubes. (I removed the orange flesh and placed into a bowl, and cut away the white pith (skin area coz it is bitter) and cut the orange skin (zest part) into smaller pieces.
• Place cut up orange, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup oil and 3 eggs into the blender and blend till fine.
• Pour mixture into a bowl.
• Sift in flour and baking powder. Whisk in and mix well.
• Pour batter into greased mold and bake for 40mins. (mine were cakelets, so I baked for 30mins) 

Condensed Milk Cakelets

Due to longer hours at work nowadays, I've been on the lookout of easy-to-bake cakes. So I was so happy and grateful to spot Zu's bake of condensed milk cake! The recipe originates from Patricia. I finally found the mojo to do a little baking this weekends, and I'm so glad I did.

I used corn oil instead of butter and I whipped the eggs till light, before adding the condensed milk, oil and flour, in this order. Be very careful not to overmix, or else it'll result in a very rubbery texture. Also I added chocolate paste to it just for fun. :P Finally I used my under-utlilised donut tray and these little gems were so well-received! I was worried that it would turn out too sweet, afterall, it was a whole can of condensed milk, but as I made them really tiny, it was acceptable to me. Of course, for the kids, they wouldn't mind the sweetness at all.

Here the original recipe and my adaptations in brackets.

What you need

• 1 can (395g) sweetened condensed milk
• 4 eggs
• 120g all purpose flour (I used half cake flour, half plain flour)
• ½ tablespoon baking powder
• 50g unsalted butter, melted and cooled (I used 50gm corn oil)
• icing sugar, for dusting (I skipped this)

What to do

• Preheat the oven to 180ºC/350ºF; generously butter a 22cm* (9in) ring cake pan. (i used SPAM on the donut tray)
• Place all the ingredients in a large bowl and mix well. Pour the batter into prepared pan and bake for 20 minutes, or until risen and a skewer inserted in the cake comes out clean (my cake took 35 minutes to bake). (I whipped the eggs till light and then added the condensed milk and chocolate paste and finally the flour and baking powder, the cakelets took only 10 mins to bake)
• Remove from the oven and place on a wire rack to cool completely before unmolding.
• Dust with icing sugar before serving. (I skipped this as the cakelets were already sweet enough)

Chocolate Banana Cake

I can't believe I've forgotten to post this cake! I was looking at my previous posts and realised that one cake is missing.... the cake I baked for my hubs' b'day. Thank goodness he's not a reader of my blog. :P


So here it is... Chocolate Banana Cake.

Happy Birthday Chris!
ok, i admit the decoration sucks. Did not expect the text and balloons to turn out so ugly. Probably will be the first and last time I use this stencil.

It's chocolate galore!

Yes, MORE chocolate!
and yes, it's a very tall cake....

Cupcake pops!

I ordered this cupcake pop mold from Elyn with Cherilynn's Birthday in mind. I had thot it'll make a cool giveaway pressie to her classmates in school on her birthday. Little do I know that my princess actually did not think it'll be a good idea. She preferred to have a whole cake and candles for her birthday celebration. And I also came to know that there's a handful of muslim students in her class, which meant that I would have to prepare something different for them. So in the end, we decided to scrap the idea and just celebrate with family members.


I had fun "playing" with the cupcake pop mold and coating the pops with chocolate. Well, it did get a little messy in the beginning during the shaping part and I took sometime to figure out that the flaws during the shaping would probably be well covered by the coating of chocolate at the later stage. Also I had overlooked and did not manage to get the sucker stickers for these pops. In the end, I improvised and bought straws to replace those sticks. They worked fine, but maybe a little soft and won't be able to handle the finished pops if they were to get any bigger. However, after all were done, I realised that these cupcake pops were really photogenic! The kids love them, so I'll probably make another batch of these soon.

Durian Mousse Cake

This is for Cherilynn's 9th Birthday. She could not decide what to choose for her cake and I suggested cupcake pops since I bought the mold from Elyn. Well, the day before her birthday celebration, she said she did not want the cupcake pops, coz she wanted a full cake with candles and all. I guess for her, birthday means candles blowing and cake cutting more than anything else. :P (well, I still made some cupcake pops, more of it on my next post)


What to do? I can't say no to the Birthday gal. Rushed to buy the durians (猫山王）that cost a good $13/kg. So, here it is, durian mousse cake requested by my princess....

Happy 9th Birthday!

Yumz!

Happy Valentine's Day! - Mixed Berries Shortcake

Well, I can't think of any better pressie for my significant other except giving him what I *think* i can do best... a cake!


Had enough of heavy/dense butter cakes and decided to make a spongecake instead.

Base layer was strawberries with chantilly cream and then middle layer, blueberry filling... see it peeping out? LOL

Topped it with more blueberries and strawberries.

The strawberries and blueberries were so fresh!

So here it is, a mixed berries shortcake with chantilly cream. Why mixed berries, you may ask, well I saw some gorgeous blueberries on offer and decided to incorporate them into the cake. Great decision, as the blueberries were sweet and huge!

Ian is 10!

My Christmas baby is no longer a baby. He turned 10 on the 25th. This year, we came back from a holiday just 3 days before Christmas and I think age had definately caught up with me as I felt so tired that I could not muster enough energy to bake him a cake. So I had told him that he'll be getting a store-bought one. He's fine with it, just that he specifically asked for a chocolate cake (and had we not eaten enough chocolates in Australia????). Anyway, when I woke on Christmas day, I decided maybe I should bake him cupcakes instead. So I did. And to make my task even easier, I told the kids that they'll get to decorate their own cupcakes. Of course, they were more than happy to do so. It was fun. This was the cupcakes they did. The middle one, which I had to place the candle in (which explaned the hole) was decorated by me. I used white chocolate and dark chocolate to coat the tops and left the decoration to them. This was how the cupcakes looked when put together.

The following day, on the 26th, I had a baking class to attend. It was by the lovely Sharon Wee, who came back to Sg for a holiday. She's currently based in Sydney and runs a home-baking biz there. For this class, we had to make some figurines and also cover a fondant cake. I got to learn how to properly ganache a cake and of course, fondant-cover it. It was a good learning experience. And it also gave me the chance to produce a "proper" cake for Ian. And so, i did up the cake with him in mind. Here's how it turned out. I'm pretty happy with the results, what do u think?

Little penguin figurines...

Here's how the cake looked as a whole.

Another angle.

Just the top.

The penguin trying to "climb" the bow. Wad a cutie. :P

Looking for more food? LOL

Chocolate Rice Kueh Bahulu

Was in the mood for something sweet ....

Recipe found here.