Freedom

What is freedom?

.... 3 girls 

.... 1 superb photographer

.... clear blue sky

.... top of highland

.... 18 degrees weather

.... and most importantly the JUMP KICK POSE!

Anyway, this is just a teaser to my next post on the topic of Freedom. I have been extremely busy for the past one week. I am and will be continue to involve in a 6 weeks workshop until 27th of April. So till then, take care folks. 

Baking Addiction 2: Fruit Tart and Chocolate Indulgence

A few days ago, my friend invited me to her place at Bukit Antarabangsa for house warming. I promised her that I will bring some desert. And since that day onwards, I had read hundreds of recipe and planned the execution of the desert in my head to every minute of detail.

In the end I decided to go with my version of Secret Recipe's chocolate indulgence. 

If you never have this cake before, then I tell you you have yet to know what a good chocolate cake truly means. My sister and I absolutely love secret recipe's chocolate Indulgence. It is made of great chocolate cake, layered with chocolate and cream ganache, and finally covered with chocolate glaze. The contrast of the texture and the depth of different types of chocolate will definitely send you to the moon and back. 

Back in those days, my sister used to travel very often to KL for training. Whenever we met up, one thing which we never failed to do was to have a piece of Secret Recipe's Chocolate Indulgence. Sometimes we will packed a piece of the cake and brought it to the hotel room, then shared it together while lying on the bed and talking. Even when Secret Recipe finally expanded their cake business to Miri, the habit of sharing a piece of Chocolate Indulgence whenever she is in KL still holds true. I guess what truly precious is the moments of sharing something great with the love ones.

I've attempted this cake once. My extended family loved it although i find it a great challenge to slice through the chocolate cake into two layers and then re-assembling it back with chocolate and cream ganache in between. The first time I've managed to make 3 layers, but this time I only did 2 layers, as the cake is a bit brittle.

I used a simple moist chocolate cake mix for the cake layer but added a few teaspoon of dark cocoa powder to increase the depth of the chocolate.  The more difficult part was the ganache, I've adapted the recipe from a food blogger, see here. 

Light Whipped Ganache Filling

• 113gm dark chocolate (i used Beryl’s Dark Compound Chocolate)
• 58 + 174gm whipping cream
• ½ tsp vanilla essence

1. Place mixing bowl in freezer 

2. Place dark choc with 58gm whipping cream in a container over some hot water to melt the chocolate in cream. Make sure the chocolate has fully melted in the cream and let it cool down, but still fluid.

3. Remove bowl from freezer and beat whipping cream until traces of beater marks shows distinctly. Scrape in the chocolate mixture and vanilla and beat until cream mounds softly (like whipped cream). 

Now the challenge here is to not over whipped, as it will turn grainy. Which was exactly what I did. It still tasted great, but less presentable. Next was the whipped cream frosting. GOSH IT WAS A MESS. It involve simple ingredients of 240ml of heaving whipped cream, 1/2 teaspoon of vanila essence and 20 grams of granulated white sugar. Whipping was made easy with hand mixer, however to pipe and spread the whipped cream over the cake was horrible. I end up messing the entire kitchen counter.

Well, this was not my favourite piece but it was ok. If I can do it better than Secret Recipe then they better hire me k. ;)

At last minute, I've also made a super easy and  foolproof fruit tart. I saw this prepared tart crust from the baking store and cant resist to bring it home. Basically there is only 3 components, the crust, cream filling and fruits.

You can actually get all the ingredients off the shelf from the baking store, there is even this just-pour-in-water-instant-custard-mix. But I  end making my own custard cream and I didnt regret the decision. It was simple plus I can tweak the recipe according to the taste I like. Again, i followed the recipe from joyofbaking.com. Now this is what you need. 

Pastry Cream 

• 300 ml milk (whole or 2%)
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla essence
• 3 large egg yolks
• 50 grams granulated white sugar
• 20 grams all-purpose flour
• 20 grams corn starch

See the video below for the demonstration. Its has an elaborated procedure, however I find it was foolproof and seriously, its only custard, not rocket science. 

Well, again, assemble everthing once the cream cool off. You can basically add any fruit which you like, but I only have preserved peach with me. Keep it refrigerated to solidify the custard filling further.

Mini fruit tart, simple yet satisfaction guaranteed. ;)

Till next time!

Blogging at Work

I am co-managing a second blog at the moment. My company had designated a person under me who focuses on internet marketing initiative which basically revolves around content generation, managing social media sites like facebook, twitter and blogs. This initiative aimed at creating some hypes in the market and of course increase brand awareness. Yes you heard me right, my company paid people to be on facebook 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 

So one of the initiative is to come out with a lifestyle blogs which focuses on health, genetics and informatics. Since I am ahem-season blogger-ahem, and blogging is a thing which is close to my heart and what I'm absolutely passionate about. I have spent a fair amount of time hand guiding my colleagues to implement the blog for the past one week. This includes doing some magic with the html, writing scientific articles, photoshop-ing images etc.  

Anyway do check out the blog. I wrote an article about Therapeutic life style changes a few days ago and I have a few more under my sleeves waiting to get published. Feel free to leave comments but please do not link my personal blog to the site. I don't want my curious boss to sniff around and figure out I'm blogging during working hours. :)   

Anyway, I guess this is the first step towards my serious writing (which I am harping on for ages but never have the time to do it), although the content are pretty much scientific or product oriented, but at least it forces me to write in a discipline manner. 

Level 75 and going strong!

This is a geeky post, you can close this page now if you don't like computer games. 

I was facebook-less for more than 28 years of my life, until recently my friend can stand no more of my stubbornness she went ahead create an account for me. 

"It doesnt matter if you don't use it actively, just use it to see our pictures online", my friend said. Well, that's true, as Gods know since when everyone started to post picture online as though the word "privacy" never existed. And 99% of the time I have no idea what donkey pictures of me my friends had showcased to the rest of the world. Anyway, that's not what I wanted to write about today. 

Back in those face-bookless days, I did felt left out at times when all my friends are busy seeding, planting and harvesting crops in their virtual world. To make it worse, i am a BIG FAN of time management games like farmville. However its ridiculous to create a facebook account just because I wanted to play those games. I am way too proud to do that.

Then I found Farmerama, which is a farming games that doesn't required a facebook account to play. Since that day onwards, I'm hooked. I spent countless of hours on my farm, clicking and clicking non stop, repeating the cycle of seeding, watering, planting, harvesting, selling etc. everyday. But I'm not alone here, there were like millions of players out there from different corners of the world who farm religiously like me everyday. I have 24 "neighbours" and we chat every now and then. And the funny thing is I have a pair of  husband and wife and a player who have 2 farms in my neighbour panel!

  

My farms!!! Click on the picture to see in full size 

When it first started, Peter was greatly annoyed with my never ending clicking. There was one time, I went away with my girlfriends for an overnight trip to Malacca. When I called my dear husband that night, the first thing I said to him was:

"can you help me to plant?" 

And that sent him to a fit of rage. 

Anyway, we have reconciled and established a mutual understanding. I can click till the cow goes home as long as he is still the first in my life. ;)  

A few weeks ago, I celebrated a great achievement of Level 75, and my name was published on the honors board. 

Yeah yeah, I am such a show off. 

Baking Addiction1: Caramel Brownie

It has almost become a norm that there will be some photos /post of my baking addiction after every weekend.

So here comes my most recent (last Saturday) spur of the moment caramel brownie. How the combination came about is simply because i love brownie and i love caramel, separately on its own. Well, what's the harm of combining two of my favourite food into one? I'll get double happiness!

I never realized that it is so simple to make caramel sauce. It was so easy and fast that I cant believe people willing to spend like 20 over bucks for a bottle of caramel sauce. But bear in mind that, caramel sauce is definitely not for health-cautious people. Its made of all the fatty ingredients: SUGAR, BUTTER and CREAM!!!

I followed this simple recipe from Youtube. 

1. Simmer 1 cup of granulated sugar over low heat in a pot until the sugar turns into brown liquid. Keep stirring using a whisk to prevent the layer underneath from burning

2. Move the pot away from the stove and add in 6 tablespoon of unsalted butter

3. whisk until dissolved, add in cream, continue whisking until it turn into creamy brown caramel sauce. 

4. Cool it down for 5 minutes then pour it into air tight jar

The end product tasted exactly like the off the shelf caramel sauce from supermarket. I add a teaspoon of it to my coffee and it tasted like Starbucks coffee. * floating on cloud nine * 

For the brownies, I followed recipe from my favourite baking website, www.joyofbaking.com. I love the fact that the baker gives very detailed description, no room for ambiguous.  

This is a very moist brownie recipe, if you like dense and rich texture, then this recipe is the perfect one! You can get the details of the recipe at http://www.joyofbaking.com/brownies.html. The only part which I have improvised was the type of chocolate. I used dark compound chocolate and dark cocoa powder (Vanhouten) instead of the semi-sweet ones. Well, do cut down the sugar portion if you want it to be less sweet. For some reason, the recipe created by the Caucasian are usually pretty sweet by Asian (or maybe its only me) standard. Maybe they have a sweeter tooth than us. ;)

So here comes the end product.

The rick chocolate brownie drizzled with caramel sauce, a match made in heaven. The plating above is for photo-shooting purpose, the plate below is for my consumption.

With extra caramel sauce!!!!

My first ever rock concert

Yes, you heard me right. I went to a ROCK concert! 

Behold, Evanescence in da house!

At first, i thought to myself that even if its a rock concert, maybe I should just sit down and listen while the crowd can go crazy jumping up side down as they wish. 

Peter nearly dropped his jaw when I told him that. 

"Don't you know that there is only free standing in rock concert?"

Of course I don't know, if yes i wouldn't have wore my office attire (knee length tight fitting dress) with high heels to the concert. 

It was indeed an eye opener experience. Girls dressed up in Gothic style with heavy black eyeliner and fishnet stocking, while guys look totally punk. It made me felt even more out of place.

Anyway taking all that aside, for a rock concert, i must say that the atmosphere live up to its expectation, the whole house was on fire, the audience was shouting non stop, the band was beyond magnificent, and Amy, oh Amy, she sang with such a fiery passion which nearly burned down the house. She didn't miss a note, didn't lose her breath, perfect pitch, absolute performer.   

I love the moment when the prelude of "Bring me to life" played on air, the crowd just went insane. When it reached the chorus, everyone was singing in unison as though it was rehearsed for many many times before.  

Surprisingly, the one who caught 80% of my attention that night was the drummer. It was amazing seeing the way he lifted the drumstick over his head, dancing in circling motion as his hair flying fiercely all over the place. Now, i completely understand why rocker need the Rupenzel's long hair. It was simply the package. 

However, every coin has two side. The bad part of the experience was the SMELL and the SWEAT. The cigrate smell, the sweaty smell, and the heavy pungent musky body odor of groups of you-know-who people nearly sent me to hell. To make it worse, occasionally you'll get bumped skin-to-skin by some hairy SWEATY arms. It was so disgusting that made me wanna kick some balls on the spot itself.

Anyway, that pretty much sum up my first rock concert experience, would I go to another Rock concert in future, definitely yes, but is there any rock concert which provides seats?

Singing in my dream

This is a post about a very strange dream I had last night. It was so strange that I find it hard to put it in words. It defies any logical sense, yet the scenes were vividly clear stapled in my mind. 

I dreamt that I was a pilgrim, a wanderer. I was travelled with the flock of the same kind in the wilderness. We eat what the earth offers to us, we wear the modest piece of garment, we sleep on a mat underneath the wide open sky.

Have you ever sleep outside in the wild? Without a roof or tent. The velvety sky overhead, the twinkling little stars, the wide, dark and open horizon, it all reminds me of how small we human are in the grand scale of universe. All the senses were sharpened and elated with the realization, how the cool breeze caress the exposed skin, how the animals making their sounds from afar, every little sound becomes crystal clear. Its a peculiar feeling which worth everything to remember.

The nearest real life experience I can remember is when I was still 17. I was with a group of friends organizing youth camps across multiple districts in Sarawak during every single school holiday in that year. There was one night, after the whole day labour at the camp, we all lay down on a basket ball court and chit-chating the night away. Although many years has passed since that night, but I've always remember how magical the feeling we shared that night together sleeping under the stars.

In my dream, there was this scenes whereby I was looking at this man from afar. He was gifted with the tongue of angel. Wherever he goes, he was surrounded by many. People listen to him attentively as he speak with authority at the same time gentle as a child. In one instance, he turned his head and looked straight into my eyes. The glance made my heart skip a beat. But I don't know who he was and what's the story between us, I didn't dreamt long enough to find out. 

I remembered something bad happened, and everyone was asleep. I woke up and saw the bad guy (don't ask me why i know he is bad), but for some reason he couldn't hurt me. And then my mouth started to twitch uncontrollably, a beautiful note came out from the deepest part in me, a place where i didnt even know it existed. The notes forms melody, a song, which praise the Almighty. Then everyone woke up and listened to me, they were all mesmerised by the song, including the bad guy. He was weeping for some reason. But I continued to sing, and sing and sing, as if its the most important to do in my whole life. 

It was the second time in my life that I sang in my dream. I was in ecstasy. 

Then the alarm went off, and I woke up from my dream. Feeling weird from head to toe. 

Then i told Peter that I sang in my dream. With a constipated face, he told me that I was making some ghostly noise, or howling when i asleep last night, whatever it was, it was definitely not singing.

The end.