J's bday 2011

J's birthday feast this year features the following menu :

Chicken pie!


The pie crust was made from the night previously, and the filling was cooked concurrently while I was baking the cake. As always the timing just never went as planned so that this pie was then consumed as a late breakfast rather than an early breakfast treat as planned :D

The pie also served as the lunch too, as the cake was proven taking too long and too much effort to put together. And resulting in some horrendous looking monster wandering in such a wasteland lol



Luckily the dinner wasn't that hard to put together :



Now, that I think of it, the menu was exactly the same as last year's birthday menu @_@
I guess I better get creative with the menu next year xP

Minecraft birthday cake! (wannabe)

Once upon a time, the story has it, that a birthday boy is in craze of a game called minecraft.

Thus, his loving wife then ventured to do her first ever cake designing mission: to create a minecraft world cake =D

The game world layout was then surveyed, sketches been made, actual pencil-ruler graph design of the cake layers were drawn.

The cake of choice was dobos torte, the birthday boy's favorite cake. The amateur baker thought that was perfect as each cake layer could represent the minecraft map different layer.

And so the quest began...

The original design of the round dobos torte was modified into 20 x 20 cm rectangle layers.

And then one by one the layers were cut according to the laid out plan :



The base and the second layer :



The third layer :


The jig-saw-like-topmost layer:



And finally all those layers put together :



Looks like a quite promising terrain map right? =D



But, then began the turn-out-to-be-not-so-piece-of-cake task of frosting them all :



And after putting together the topmost layer partially (and randomly) covered in caramels...
and adding a thing that's supposed to be J'sminecraft character... (which now that I think of it looks kinda like a mummy with the layers xP)



but waittt, J's minecraft world has a tall tower for animals to spawn and fall down to earth later (don't ask me, it's his world design)



And of course making the tower and the character from piling thin cake layers one after another wasn't really a good idea as shown in this picture of almost falling tower :D



The tower goes down just some milliseconds after this picture is taken, and the character had the exact same fate too :D
We happily ate them all of course =9

The cake was yummy as always, but it was then concluded that we'll just stick to the original dobos torte design next time to maximize the layers of cake we'd eat in each portion :P

And so this story is concluded with my utmost kudos to all the bakers out there who successfully bake and decorate their cake resulting in utmost beauty unlike my own first (and only ever?) design cake.
I'd never underestimate your work again!

Roti tawar whole-wheat

Bahan :
2.5 cup tepung serbaguna
1.5 cup tepung whole wheat
1.5 tbsp gula
1.5 tsp garam
1/2 cake yeast (1/2 pak ragi)
30 grm butter
1.25 cup susu + 1.5 sdm air.


hangatkan susu + air, campurkan 1 sdm gula dan yeast, tunggu sampai berbusa-busa
campur di baskom : tepung-tepung + gula + garam, hancur-hancurkan mentega dengan tangan ke terigu.
tuangkan campuran yeast ke terigu, aduk sampai membentuk adonan (tambahkan 1.5 sdm air lagi atau lebih sampai semua terigu tercampur ke adonan)
Uleni dengan cara pemalas :D (tutup dan tinggal 10 menit, uleni 10 detik, ulangi 2 kali lagi, lalu ditinggal sampai mengembang menjadi dua kali)
tinju adonan sampai kempes, bagi dua, masukkan setengah ke freezer karena untuk porsi berdua untuk sehari setengah adonan cukup :D
gilas 1/2 adonan sisa membentuk kotak selebar cetakan yang akan dipakai. Gulung searah panjang adonan, taruh di cetakan. Tinggal semalaman di kulkas/ tunggu sampai mengembang dua kali lagi.
Panaskan oven 150 derajat, panggang 15-30 menit sampai permukaan atas coklat banget dan permukaan bawah diketok terdengar kosong.



recipe source