♡300g cream cheese, room temperature
♡113 g unsalted butter, room temperature
♡500g icing sugar, sifted
♡1 cup smooth peanut butter

1. In a large bowl with an electric mixer, beat the butter until softened. Add the cream cheese and beat until the lumps have disappeared.
2. Add the icing sugar, a cupful at a time and mix thoroughly after each addition, scraping down the sides. The sugar will puff out of the bowl so it’s helpful to cover the bowl/mixer with a damp towel while doing this. Continue to beat until light and fluffy.
3. Add peanut butter and beat until thoroughly blended. The frosting should have thickened slightly after the addition of peanut butter. If it hasn’t, add a little bit more cream cheese and beat until lumps have disappeared.

Anyway, Red Velvet has been a popular choice, more so than usual this week because of Valentine’s Day.

The recipe I use is this one. I’ve adapted it slightly by tripling the cocoa powder.. 1 tsp seems a little mean! 1 tablespoon isn’t much either but we aren’t really going for a strong chocolatey flavour in Red Velvet anyway. And I think 1 tablespoon is the absolute maximum cocoa powder that can be used, otherwise the vibrancy of the red will be muted.

{Hey! A page from my “secret book”, where I write my favourite recipes and ideas and recipes from everywhere I used to work haha. I have a few of these little books and they’re my treasures..}

I’ve always found Red Velvet quite strange- it doesn’t really have a particular flavour, neither chocolate nor vanilla nor anything in between, but it’s really pleasant to eat- there’s nothing offensive about it’s flavour (although its colour can be unsettling to some) and it’ll please almost anyone. Its real pull however, is the fact that it’s not very sweet and is very, very soft and moist. And of course, the cream cheese frosting (!). I use a cream cheese frosting that I came up with some time back. Most of the cream cheese frosting I’ve made in the past tend to be too gloopy and sweet so I cut back on the sugar by almost half. I think it’s the sugar that makes it really watery since it melts when it comes in contact with the cream cheese. Especially here in the UK, our Philadelphia cheese comes in those “spread” types, instead of blocks.. like everywhere else in the world. So I think it has a higher water content and will therefore be more likely to turn into sludge, so less sugar is probably best.

Oh, and a note of caution when making the Red Velvet cake, DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT use Dr Oetker’s “natural” red food colouring- it tastes absolutely disgusting! Food colouring don’t usually have any flavour but this particular one does, and it’s strong! It’s “natural” because it’s made of beetroot but it’s vile.. really. And, to make things worse, it isn’t even red- it’s brown! I ruined an entire batch of Red Velvet once because it looked and tasted disgusting. Damn you, Dr Oetker Natural Red! Food colouring paste is good and gives a nice bright red colour, but diluting it is a bit of a pain, and food colouring powder works great but it’s expensive. The best food colouring is Langdale’s Scarlet colour but it’s been discontinued?!?! Apparently there’s a non-natural Dr Oetker Red colour so if you see it, grab it! Otherwise colouring your Red Velvet red will be quite a difficult task.. Sigh.

This is my recipe for cream cheese frosting. It’s uses the same ingredients as most recipes, just the ratios have been tweaked.

♡450g cream cheese, room temperature
♡113g butter, room temperature
♡350g icing sugar, sifter
♡3 tsp vanilla, or 1 vanilla bean, scraped

1. Beat butter with an electric mixer until softened. This step is important as if it’s too cold when the cream cheese is added, there WILL be lumps and those lumps will be impossible to beat out.
2. Add cream cheese and continue to beat until combined.
3. Stop the mixer, add all the icing sugar, and start beating on low speed. Be prepared for the sugar to puff out and settle over everything. I absolutely despise working with icing sugar… Placing a damp cloth over your mixer helps to stop the sugar from getting everywhere. The mixture will look terribly runny at first, but increase the mixer speed to high, and it’ll start getting more fluffy.
4. Beat until light and fluffy, then beat in vanilla.

Choux pastry:

• 50g butter
• 60g milk
• 60g water
• 2g salt
• 5g sugar
• 60g cake flour
• 10g cocoa powder
• 2 eggs

1. Slice the butter thinly and place in a pot with the milk, water, sugar, and salt. It is important to slice the butter as if it’s left in a big block, it’ll take longer to melt and the liquid will evaporate, throwing the ratios off. Turn on the stove to medium heat.

2. Sift cocoa powder and flour together.

3. When the milk mixture comes to the boil, quickly dump in all the flour mixture in and stir vigorously with a wooden spoon. Beat out the lumps and continue stirring until the mixture forms a ball and stops sticking to the sides of the pan. Remove from heat.

4. Cool the mixture slightly by beating it with the wooden spoon, or by setting it aside for awhile. Once it cools slightly, beat the eggs in 1 by 1, stirring vigorously between each egg.  The batter should form a “ribbon” when the spoon is lifted. (it shouldn’t be too stiff that the batter “tears” when spoon is lifted, and shouldn’t be so runny that it flows. If too stiff, add a beaten egg in little by little, if too runny you’ll have to start over!)

5. Pipe little mounds of choux pastry on a lined baking sheet, 1 inch apart. The mounds should be about 2cm round for a bite-sized choux.  Place a biscuit round on top.

6. Bake at 18o˚C for 17 minutes then either prop oven door open and bake for another 10 minutes. Because I use a microwave oven and the door has to be shut for it to function, I compromised and baked at 150˚C instead for about 10-15 minutes, and it worked just fine. For the last 5-8 minutes, I poked holes in the bottom and flipped them upside down for some steam to escape, although this isn’t necessary. Next time, I’ll probably poke the sides as it won’t be as messy once filled with pastry cream.

7. Remove from oven and cool completely.

Biscuit topping (adapted from Ladurée sucré)

• 100g very cold unsalted butter
• 125g cake flour
• 125g caster sugar
• 30g cocoa powder

1) Place all the ingredients in the bowl of your stand mixer and beat with the paddle attachment until combined. Gather into a ball and chill for 1 hour.

2) Remove from the fridge and knead slightly to soften. Roll between parchment paper to a thickness of about 2mm. Cut out circles slightly bigger than the unbaked choux pastry mounds.

Pastry cream (adapted from chinese cookbook {I would write the name but it’s in chinese!} and Pierre Hermé)

• 250 whole milk
• 2 large egg yolks
• 40g sugar
• 1.5 tablespoons cornstarch, sifted
• 125g bittersweet chocolate, melted
• 20g unsalted butter, at room temperature

1. Place milk in a pan and bring to the boil

2. Whisk together egg yolks and sugar, then whisk in cornstarch.

3. Once the milk has reached a boil, slowly pour in the milk into the egg mixture, whisking constantly. Do this slowly, as you don’t want to scramble your eggs! Once all the milk has been stirred in, pour back into the pan and place over heat again.

4. Whisk constantly over heat until the mixture thickens then remove from heat. Let it cool slightly, then add melted chocolate and butter. Stir.

5. Pour the hot mixture into a flat baking sheet and immediately cover with clingfilm. The clingfilm should touch the surface of the pastry cream to prevent a skin from forming. Chill.

Assembly:

1. Place pastry cream into a piping bag fitted with a 0.5cm round tip. If you don’t have tips, just snip the bag to make a small hole. If you don’t have a piping bag, just place the pastry cream in a ziploc bag and snip a corner. Anything goes!

2. Pipe the cream into the choux puff either from the hole at the bottom, or if you haven’t pierced a hole during the baking process, poke a hole at the side and pipe the cream in. I expect this will make neater puffs since the cream won’t be leaking out.

3. Eat as soon as possible! The longer it sits, the soggier it gets.

PS: sorry for the slightly blurry photos!

I did a short internship at Lanka last summer for two months, and whilst I was there I made this cake many, many times! Lanka, being a Japanese-run bakery, had plenty of yummy French pastries and cakes in distinctively Japanese flavours and styles. This cake was one of the most popular cakes and rightly so! It has a biscuit crust under a dense, almond-y, and bittersweet green tea flavoured cake. I made one for my godmum’s birthday last Sunday, and had extra batter so I made a tiny 13cm cake for myself! At Lanka, it’s served as it is, but I thought it would be nice with a light fluffy layer of unsweetened double cream and dotted with some fresh blueberries and white chocolate shavings for a burst of sweetness and tartness to contrast the bitterness of the green tea.

{this beautiful plate is from the super talented Nikole Herriot}

More macarons! This time I replaced the cocoa powder with black sesame, and filled it with a black sesame-white chocolate whipped ganache. I used the same recipe as my chocolate macarons, but replaced the cocoa powder with an equal weight of ground sesame seeds, which I whizzed in my blender and sieved.. a highly tedious task! The flavour was good, although, as in the case with most macarons, I found them way too sweet! The filling is a whipped white chocolate ganache flavoured with more ground sesame seeds. I accidentally overwhipped the ganache so it split a little bit. Oh well, it still tastes good!

Firstly, I age the egg whites for at least a day to dry it out and increase its acidity. This step is essential regardless of the humidity as aged egg whites are much more stable than fresh ones.

Secondly, I switched on the airconditioning for at least half an hour before I start baking. This nippy environment is much more friendly for macarons, and will help the “skin” form properly before baking.

Thirdly, I let the piped macarons rest on the baking sheet for an hour to properly dry it out. Recipes usually state a rest period of 30 minutes, but that’s hardly enough for KL where it’s so muggy. I baked one macaron after a 45 minute rest just as a tester, and it cracked on top, so it definitely needs at least an hour- don’t skimp on the wait time, otherwise your efforts will be wasted and you’ll have lots of cracked macarons!

Fourthly, I baked one tray at a time.. I’m not sure if this helps but it doesn’t hurt either. Anyway, the bake time is short (15 minutes per tray) so the other tray would just have a slightly longer rest period.

The basic recipe is:

• 3 egg whites
• 110g ground almonds
• 170g icing sugar
• 50g caster sugar
• 2T cocoa powder

1. Sift the almonds, icing sugar and cocoa powder together, then blitz them in a food processor or blender until fine. Don’t blend for too long, the almond will become oily.

2. Whisk the egg whites in a very, very clean bowl. When it’s foamy, slowly add the caster sugar in. Beat until stiff, be careful not to overbeat it!

3. Sift the almond mixture over the stiff meringue and use a spatula to fold it it. The mixture will be quite hard initially but it will become more viscuous after several folds. Don’t worry, the meringue is meant to deflate quite a lot. The mixture is ready when it “flows like magma”.

4. Pipe 1.5″ circles on two baking sheets lined with parchment paper or a Silpat. Pipe them an inch apart. I drew a template on a large piece of paper and placed them under the parchment paper as guidance.

5. Let the piped batter rest for an hour in an air-conditioned room.

6. Bake for 15 minutes at 150C. Don’t forget to rotate the pan halfway.

The ideal doughnut, to me, is one that is not too light, something fluffy but still with a bit of a chew. A beautiful, crackly crust dusted with caster sugar (powdered sugar is pretty, but lacks the crunch of caster sugar) or, depending on my mood, a thin layer of glaze. I once saw a beautiful photo of a raspberry doughnut covered with a speckled, pale red raspberry glaze, and the image has been stuck in my head since. It wasn’t one of those bright coloured artificial looking doughnut- it looked natural and rustic and absolutely irresistable. But most times, I prefer my doughnut plain, with just a sugary coat.

The recipe I used, is once again, my go-to bread recipe. The only thing that has to be done differently is instead of shaping the dough into a loaf, it is rolled out about 1.5 cm thick, then cut out into doughnut shapes using 2 different sized round cookie cutters, or, shapes of any kind with any cookie cutter. Fry them in oil that’s 375F- this is important as it is hot enough to fully cook the doughnut without it sitting in the oil for too long, and not too hot as to burn the outsides before it is cooked in the middle.

Oh, and if you’re ever in KL, the best doughnut you will ever eat (seriously) is from a doughnut truck in Taman Tun.

• 2 C flour
• 1 T baking powder
• 1/2 t salt
• 1/4 C sugar
• 1 1/4 C heavy cream
• 100g milk chocolate, chopped

1. Sift flour, baking powder, salt and sugar together.

2. Pour cold heavy cream over the flour mixture and mix very gently with a fork until the cream is absorbed and it is somewhat combined. Don’t worry if it looks like a shaggy mess, it’s meant to be that way. It shouldn’t be wet at all though, so add a little flour if it’s slightly wet.

3. Tip the mixture out onto a lightly floured surface and pat into a circle. I don’t usually knead the dough as I’d rather err on under-mixed than over-mixed as there’s nothing worse than a tough scone.

4. Cut into wedges, there should be enough for 8. You could also use a cookie cutter to cut them into rounds, but I prefer wedges as there aren’t any scraps to re-roll. The re-rolled dough makes tougher scones as they’ve been handled more.

5. Bake at 210C for 15 minutes.