I felt in love with red velvet cake the first time I made it, which was more than a year ago. So far I’ve re-made it several times, following the recipe on Joy of Baking website, for my home parties. Most my friends loved it as I did.
This time, I used the same recipe for making red velvet cake, but I made them into cake balls dipped into melted chocolate, and I seemed to get double joyfulness from eating these cake balls. They are delicious as the same red velvet cake plus the bitter-sweetness of chocolate. The chocolate coating, after being chilled in the fridge, became hard and they made cracking sound in the mouth. I love that experience when eating these cute cake balls. I just thought they were now more perfect to invite friends who visit our home, offering some interesting surprise with these cake balls.
Read the rest of this post >>
I made these eclairs the same way I made mini cream puffs the other day. It was still choux pastry piped into the eclair shapes using a plain tip. However, I only had a plain tip of small round tip, so it took more effort to pipe the dough into the right shapes. And the result was that my eclairs were too thin to cut into two halves, so I had to use two single eclairs and filled the whipped cream between them, like making sandwiches. One piece of eclair was dipped in melted chocolate. The eclairs were very flavorful and tasty. All are tender and seem to melt in your mouth.
These mini cream puffs are great to invite friends visiting our home. They look so cute and can be eaten whole at a time 
They are made with choux pastry, filled with cream and some berries. I used whipped cream as this is what I often have in my fridge.
Drizzling the puffs with some melted chocolate made them more flavorful to eat.
Read the rest of this post >>
This cake and mousse is just perfect. I love the way this dessert is presented. This is another first experience of mine with using ring mold to make dessert. To remove the mold after the mousse set, I used the blow torch to warm up the ring mold from outside just a little bit, then I could pull the ring up easily.
I always love the combination of raspberry and chocolate. Not only the combination of taste but also the marriage of the two classic colors made me fall deeply in love with this dessert.
The recipe can be found here.
Read the rest of this post >>
Wow, this is another experience with fresh raspberries that made me pleased.
Recipe is adapted from La Tartine Gourmande. It is quite easy to make, so, try making some soon. She took more elegant and stunning pics than ours, so if you want to please your eyes more, visit her site 
Read the rest of this post >>
Simple as it is – just chocolate and strawberries. Fresh strawberries are dipped in melted chocolate so that the chocolate makes a thin coat over the strawberries. Let the chocolate-coated strawberries stand in the fridge for just a few minutes, you will get a very impressive dessert.
I hadn’t known about the chocolate-dipped fruits until I went to Oktoberfest in Germany where I, for the very first time, was introduced to a white chocolate-dipped strawberry. My exchange friends recommended me to try these dipped strawberries and I was amazed about the texture and the fascinating combination of the two classic things.
Read the rest of this post >>
Chiffon cake is my choice when I don’t have much butter in my fridge. Almost every two weeks I go to the baking specialty store to restock my baking ingredients. From the store, I get ingredients at lower prices especially when buying stuffs in bulk.
Chiffon cake often requires oil instead of butter, and oil is always ready in my pantry. So whenever thinking of making a chiffon cake, I am quite confident about all the ingredients required without worrying about buying one or more other stuffs. This chiffon cake, like other kinds of chiffon, is very soft and light plus the chocholate flavor.
Ingredients (one 8” tube pan)
- 80g cake flour
- 16g cocoa powder
- 50g white sugar
- 2g salt
- 4g baking powder
- 40g canola oil or sunflower oil
- 48g egg yolks
- 72g water
- 2g vanilla extract
- 80g egg whites
- 30g white sugar
- 1/16 tsp cream of tartar
Methods:
- Preheat the oven to 180oC.
- Sift the dry ingredients together in the bowl of a mixer. With the mixer at medium speed, gradually pour in the oil, then add the yolks, water and vanilla in a thin stream. Stop to scrape down the side of the bowl sometimes. Beat until the mixture is just combined. Do not over mix.
- In another bowl, beat the egg whites until soft peaks formed. Add cream of tartar and sugar in a stream, beat until stiff peaks formed. Gently fold the egg whites into the yolk mixture.
- Pour the batter into the pan and bake for about 35 minutes. Remove from the oven and invert the pan to cool completely.
In Vietnam, we don’t have fennel but we have dill – a very similar tree with rather identical leaves as fennel except for the bulb. Dill is used very popularly in Vietnamese cooking. But fennel is still quite new. I have never tasted the fennel, so I really don’t know whether it tastes like the dill or not.
That why I was amazed to know that fennel seeds could be used in cooking and baking as well. This was my first experience with fennel seeds and my second trial with my cookie press. The cookies were perfect to our liking. They contained the chocolate taste and fragrance. Especially the fennel seeds created a very typical fragrance, but you can only feel that when chewing the cookie in your mouth. Very interesting with these cookies.
Read the rest of this post >>
