Pandan leaves are widely used in Southeast Asia to flavour sweets and desserts. Most of our local kuih are cooked infused in pandan leaves. Pandan is also a popular flavour for cakes here. In Malaysia, apart from the common vanilla and chocolate flavoured cakes, you'll find pandan cakes as well in bakeries, markets and even commercial packed ones in the supermarkets. It's easy to plant pandan, just poke the entire plant with the root into the soil and it'll grow. They don't need much care. I have a pandan plant in my garden and it's very handy to have fresh pandan leaves off your garden when you need it for asian cuisine. I am thinking of planting more pandan since I use quite a lot of it in one go.
This Butterscotch Cream Pie is sure to please anyone who is in the mood for plenty of sweet and creamy butterscotch.
The recipe is adapted from Karen DeMasco's The Craft of Baking. I was intrigued with the concept of this book as the author teaches you how to create your own recipe from a combination of basic recipes. I like how the author made the recipes to be versatile so that it can be used in other recipes. For instance, the crust of this pie is made from the crumbs of ginger snap cookies. If you ever get bored of eating ginger snap cookies you could turn them into this wonderful pie.
If you already have a bottle of ginger snap cookies lying on your kitchen counter, this will be an easy and quick pie to make. You will only have to bake the crusts and pour the cooked filling into the pie and refrigerate it for a few hours before serving.
First off, whilst we are still in the month of January, let me take this opportunity to wish all a very Happy New Year!
If you're looking for a good chocolate chip cookie recipe, I say look no further because they are readily available for free on the internet! I cannot believe how delicious these cookies are!
First up is the Cornflakes Chocolate Chip Cookies by Momofuku Milk Bar. You will be pleased to know that not only is the chocolate chip cookies recipe available but many other recipes of their signature cakes and they are all for FREE! After trying several recipes, including the chocolate chip cookies recipe here, all of which taste phenomenal, I was convinced to buy their book. It is worth every penny even though some of the recipes can be found on their website. Crunchy on the edges and chewy in the center, the cookies have a caramel like sweetness from the melted marshmallows and each bite is buttery, crunchy and chewy.
Next, is a soft chocolate chip cookie from Baking is a Science, a fun and insightful blog by a home baker on the chemistry of baking. There are interesting posts on the writer's baking experiments where the writer provides useful explanations of how different ingredients react differently and why they would produce different outcome in a recipe. According to the writer, the secret in achieving soft and chewy cookies is to use bread flour instead of regular all-purpose flour. The writer experimented with different flour in her chocolate chip cookies and she liked the cookies with bread flour the best as it was crunchy on the edges and moist and chewy in the center. Unfortunately, the blog is down when I tried to access it today.
Both cookies were good but there was a clear winner between the two since most of my tasters and I included liked one more than the other.
