I strongly recommend that you try making this dessert when you have time and gather enough ingredients, though there are only several items. This is one of my all time favourite desserts as it is simple to make and the taste is always wonderful. It is very healthy as well and I don’t have to worry about its fat or sugar content.
It is a kind of sweet soup with the combination of black glutinous rice with yogurt, and when you mix them together, you will have a purple sweet soup. I can have a cup of this soup at anytime of the day. The taste is a well-balanced sourness and sweetness. It’s interesting to chew the rice grains between your teeth. If you are good at recognizing tastes and flavors, you will feel the appearence of pandan essence in the soup as pandan leaves are added to the soup during cooking.
When cooking the rice, I like to let the sticky substances of the rice itself to slightly thicken the soup. Some people use either cornstarch or tapioca starch as thickening agent. I often prefer using tapioca starch.
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Like other chiffon cakes I’ve made so far, I liked this cake for its lightness and gentle sweetness. Yogurt is one reason that I was interested in baking this cake as I love the flavor of yogurt in my cake. Another reason is cranberries. I admired the bright red color of fresh cranberries, though I only could look at them in the pictures taken by others. Sometimes when browsing other love-to-cook and love-to-eat people, seeing how they used fresh cranberries in cooking and decorating their cakes, how much I wish I could actually touch somes of those little reds. Anyway, when the time comes, when I have an opportunity to travel more, farmer markets will always be listed in my priorities list of places to visit.
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Desserts are always so irresistible. However, anyone who loves desserts, especially young females, has to face with the reality that desserts are often high in calorie due to high sugar and fat content. I am not an exception. Besides reducing the sugar amount used in baking, I also search for more healthful desserts so that I don’t have to worry about how much activities or exercises I should do a day.
This is one of the recipes from my guilt-free desserts book including a lot of low-fat, low-calorie desserts, which offer you guilt-free and still yummy desserts that can satisfy your taste and your body.
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I am still feeling afraid each time I hear of curry. One of the most typical flavors and tastes of these tandoori chicken is curry. But tandoori chicken is so popular that I was very curious to know how the taste would be like. Since I never dare eat any curried-foods in Singapore for their very strong smells and tastes, but I am willing to cook at home so that I can at least control the amount of spicy ingredients I need to put into the food. For this chicken in particular, because of yogurt is used in the marinating sauce, I felt relieved with the thought that yogurt would make the curry milder.
This tandoori chicken needs to be marinated for a long time, even overnight. So I needed to prepare the chicken on the previous day. It is not troublesome at all because it took just a few minutes to prepare all the ingredients before chilling everything in the fridge. The next day we only need to heat the oven and bake the chicken.
The curry taste was still very obvious in this chicken, but it is much milder. The chicken was very tender and moist. The recipe uses whole chicken legs, but I had only chicken thighs, so again I cooked with chicken thighs only.
Ingredients:
- 4 chicken legs
- 125g natural yogurt, stirred until smooth
- 1 garlic clove, minced
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 1/2 tsp paprika
- 1/2 tsp curry powder
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon powder
- 1/8 tsp cayenne powder
- 1/8 tsp cloves
- white sesame seeds, as needed
Cooking:
- Rinse the chicken well and pat dry with kitchen papers.
- Combine all the other ingredients except for the sesame seeds. Add the chicken to the marinating mixture, soak well to coat the chicken evenly. Cover and place the chicken in the fridge to marinate for at least 2 hours or over night.
- Preheat the oven to 350F (180C) for fan oven / or 300F (200C) for convention oven.
- Place the chicken on baking pan and bake for about 45 minutes. About 15 minutes before the chicken is done, sprinkle the sesame seeds over the chicken.
I used to like and cook curry dishes when I was still in Vietnam. Not until had I come to Singapore when curry food turned out as a nightmare to me. Maybe it’s because the smell is too strong for me and almost all the Indian or Malay food stalls terrify me with the heavy smell of their food. Most of the dishes are either orange or red in color with no trace of green stuffs, which already make my mouth and stomach feel hot. I no longer feel the inviting distinctive flavor of the curry food but only try to get away from those stalls as quick as possible to avoid the strong smells.
It has been four years I’ve never eaten any curry dishes. Not until I found a recipe of potato curry which guarantees a very mild taste and flavor. When reading the recipe, I felt relieved and got the eagerness back to cook this dish, just because this curry has peas – which are green, and they are good to serve with fresh cilantro. Moreover, plain yogurt is added to this curry, which persuades me to believe that the taste will be mild.
And so, I cooked this after a very long time I’ve touched any curry dishes. The final result was a really mild curry, which was absolutely what I longed for.
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My first time baking pound cake. Though I scaled down the recipe since I couldn’t finish the whole cake with main ingredients at 1 pound each.
This pound cake was really delicious with mild sourness due to the sour cream and cranberries used in the cake.
Ingredients ( bundt pan 10”)
* Cranberries:
- 90ml lemon juice
- 2 tbs brandy
- 125g dried cranberry
* Pound cake:
- 490g (3 1/2 cups) all-purpose flour
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 227g unsalted butter, room temperature
- 380g white sugar
- 6 large eggs
- 2 tbs + 1 tsp grated lemon zest
- 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 cup sour cream / plain yogurt
Direction:
* Cranberries:
- Combine the lemon juice, brandy and dried cranberries in a small saucepan. Place over medium heat and bring to a boil. Remove from the heat.
- Let cool in the saucepan. Then drain the cranberries, keep the juice.
* Pound cake:
- Preheat the oven to 165C (if using dark pan) or 180C (if using bright pan). Grease the pan.
- Mix together the flour, baking soda and salt. Set aside.
- With an electric mixer, beat the butter and sugar until fluffy and light in color. Add the lemon zest, vanilla and eggs, one at a time, beat until well combined after each addition.
- At low speed, beat in the flour mixture alternating with sour cream / yogurt in three times, beginning and ending with the flour. Beat until well combined and smooth.
- Fold in the cranberries. Pour the batter into the pan.
- Bake at the centre of the oven for 80-85 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.
- Remove from the oven. Let cool slightly for 5 minutes.
- Brush half the juice from boiling the cranberries over the cake. Let stand for 10 minutes, then remove the cake from the pan. Then brush the remaining juice over the cake.
- Sprinkle with icing sugar before serving (optional).
