[Ny Minute Now]

[Reposting from "Baked!" at Yummy.ph, December 7, 2009]

Since October, I've made several batches of buttermilk biscuits, mostly on weekends. They're great for breakfast—with tart orange marmalade and fluffy scrambled eggs—or for random snacking—plain or with strawberry jam.

Buttermilk is relatively easy to find in big grocery stores in the U.S. In Manila on the other hand, a quick Google search yielded me the following (very ingenious and convenient) substitutes:

• 1 tablespoon lemon juice or vinegar plus enough milk to make one cup; let stand for 5 to 10 minutes.

• 1 cup milk and 1 3/4 tablespoons cream of tartar

• yogurt or sour cream


As in the first case, instead of lemon, today I experimented with calamansi juice. And so far, the results have turned out great, nothing strange or extremely funky and sour—just flaky, buttery rounds of breakfast goodness.

Here's the Buttermilk Cheddar Biscuit recipe from Ina Garten, which I normally use:
[source: FoodNetwork.com ]

2 cups all-purpose flour; add more as needed for the board
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 ½ teaspoons kosher salt (or 1 teaspoon iodized salt)
12 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, diced
½ cup cold buttermilk, shaken
1 cold extra large egg
1 cup grated extra sharp Cheddar
1 egg beaten with 1 tablespoon water or milk
sea salt, optional

(Note: The original instructions call for a mixer. Below is the modified version easily done by hand.)

1 Preheat the oven to 425°F. Line a metal sheet pan with parchment paper (or the locally available, Glad Cook ‘n Bake).

2 Place 2 cups of flour, the baking powder, and salt in a large bowl. Using hands, work in the diced butter into the dry mix until the butter is the size of peas.

3 In a small cup, lightly combine the buttermilk and egg. Pour the wet mixture onto the flour-and-butter mixture only until moistened (you’ll most likely have a little extra liquid left).

4 In a small bowl, mix the Cheddar with a small handful of flour and add this to the dough until roughly combined.

5 Dump out onto a well-floured board and knead lightly about six times. Roll the dough out until about half an inch thick throughout. Cut out rounds with a biscuit cutter, or slice even-sized rectangles using a sharp, floured knife. Transfer onto sheet pan and brush the tops with the egg wash; sprinkle with salt if desired.

6 Bake for 20 to 25 minutes until biscuits are browned and cooked through (for a smaller batch, lessen baking time). Serve hot or warm and store in zip-top bags or in an airtight container.


Mariel Chua is Yummy.ph's official baking blogger. For breakfast, she scrambles eggs in hot olive oil sprinkled with red pepper flakes. To finish, she grates Cheddar cheese on top while the eggs are still steaming hot. On random occasions, she uses Gorgonzola.

(Orange marmalade photo courtesy of Smuckers.com)

Labels: food, home and living, recipes, Yummy

[Reposting from "Baked!" at Yummy.ph, November 2009]

I must admit, I’ve made cakes in the past that have lingered quite a bit in the kitchen, uneaten. But this lemon vanilla caramel cake wasn’t one of them. It was gone within three days of baking, filling, and frosting it.

It’s also fun to make. The steps may come across as tedious (as with anything that involves folding fluffy egg whites into batter) but honestly, the least enjoyable part will probably be the first thing you have to do when making a cake, which is cut rounds of parchment paper to line the bottom of the pans with, and buttering all sides. I find this part of baking anti-climactic yet essential. Once you get that out of the way—don’t forget to preheat the oven—the baking process is quite soft and relaxing, just like the two spongey white cakes you come up with.

This cake is a combination of two recipes, plus a lemony tweak I picked up from watching Ina Garten's Barefoot Contessa. The base is a white cake recipe from Martha Stewart, and the caramel filling is from a Fleur de Sel (a special flaky salt from France) chocolate cake recipe from GoodBite.com. A quick Google search will yield video results for all of the above. Out of convenience, I've taken to culling recipes from all sorts of websites, versus getting them from cookbooks.

This lemon vanlla caramel cake can also easily transform to cupcakes. I would suggest using a melon baller to make a small hole on top to fill with caramel, before frosting the top with your marshmallow icing of choice. Personally I love watching egg whites transform into fluffy white frosting, so I don't mind making it from scratch. Here's the quick recipe I follow, also from Martha Stewart:

Seven Minute Frosting
[Source: http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/perfect-seven-minute-frosting]

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups sugar
2 tablespoons light corn syrup
1/4 cup water
6 large egg whites
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 In the heatproof bowl of an electric mixer set over a saucepan of simmering water, combine sugar, corn syrup, water, and egg whites. Cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until mixture registers 160 degrees on an instant-read thermometer, about 2 minutes.

2 Attach bowl to a mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. Beat mixture on high speed until glossy and voluminous, about 5 minutes. Beat in vanilla. Use immediately.

You'll have a lot of extra frosting left to eat from the bowl. Enjoy!

Tell me: What's your favorite cake? Please feel free to comment and share!

Labels: dessert, recipes, TV shows, Yummy

[Reposting from "Baked!" at Yummy.ph, November 2009]
I was around eight years old the first time I realized I could feed people with the things I whipped up in the kitchen. Carpenters were renovating our home (my parents bought our house barebones, with gray walls and hardly anything built in). I went into the kitchen to toss some flour and water to make my own Play-Doh and as an afterthought, decided to flatten and toast it in a hot pan and then finally coating it in sugar. One of the carpenters ate it, which I found really amusing—and gross, because to me, it was play-dough!

Before that, I spent weekends and summers at my aunt’s bakeshop. She let me tinker around and even let me use her candy thermometers, trays, and random ingredients—even the expensive ones. I made my own pink lollipops wherein I boiled sugar and water and waited until the thermometer pointed to ‘hard crack’; put in a few drops of red food coloring; poured the scorching mixture onto metal sheet pans; and then lay Zest-o straws over the hot sugar, slightly melting them in the process. I also watched my aunt create intricate Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle birthday cakes, and she let me make my own cheese candies and butter frosting to decorate a small cupcake (or two) to take to my best friend’s house on a playdate. Thanks to her, I became aware at an early age how delightful and delicious butter could be (as opposed to lard or shortening).

Over the years, I would be in and out of the kitchen. But it wasn’t until these last two years that I’ve seriously perused a career in food. The plans may still be blurry at this point, but so far, I’ve taken to blogging plenty of times about the things I’ve made in the kitchen. Food was always in the background, no matter what job I held. Well, at some point, I did work in a restaurant as a hostess and maître d’ during my early months in New York. And when I started working in an office again, I brought freshly-baked banana chocolate chip muffins and nutella to share with colleagues. When I found myself jobless, I baked more muffins and brownies as I nursed my wounded ego and jumpstarted my freelance career.

Fast-forward to more than a year after and much to my delight, I was recently called in to blog for the new and improved, Yummy.ph! So here I am, chronicling my foray into the baking world, with lots of sweet (and at times savory) musings along the way.

As if right on cue, my mother also gifted me with a brand new Kitchenaid stand mixer: the 90th Anniversary Edition in Candy Apple Red. Certainly I no longer have an excuse to not officially tinker about in the kitchen. So far, since it arrived, I’ve made chocolate cake, buttermilk biscuits, carrot cake, lemon vanilla cake, chocolate chip cookies, and oatmeal raisin cookies with it. And I can’t wait to talk about and share with you all these sweet treats. Meet you back here next week!

Labels: childhood, dessert, family, food, home and living, New York, New York minutes, work, Yummy

For the first time in years, I walked into a room overwhelmed by what people were wearing. If you read this blog regularly, you would know how back in college, I had a different way of dress (very sporty, casual, versus the preppy branded/dark minimalist look of the 90s) that had been a source of insecurity for many years. It was only when I started working that I snapped out of this self-pity of sorts and found myself in a position wherein I could actually tell people what to wear, at least on their faces and hair. At the height of this job, I'd also enjoyed a closet chocful of clothes, a table of accessories, a room filled with shoes lined up to the walls. It was a pretty cool time, I must say.

Then came New York, and some slight changes in my wardrobe: At first, picking up where I'd left off, dutifully, like many city folk, toting the skyscrapers in my purse doing the whole subway-flat-office-heel switcheroo.

At the American preppy (with touches of stylish Italian) job, I'd adopted the more casual and straightforward fashion and incorporated even more color in my closet. For the first time in wintry Manhattan, I was in an office vibrant with hues of the primary color wheel that cut through the sea of black. I loved it. And even when I'd lost that job, I kept the colors (and skills).

Finally, I dropped the whole 9 to 5 shebang and settled into this comfortable style of mostly flats, jewel-toned tanks, soft knits, jeans, and shorts...almost like college again!

The other night was different though: If more than a decade ago I would look around and desire a particular type of fashion I had no access to, this time around—even though I felt that all-too familiar tinge of self-consciousness—it was mostly a feeling of discomfort, along the lines of, Uh-oh, do I have to start wearing heels again? (I do have a plan to retrain myself to wear them this year, especially after buying these shoes over the holidays.) Do I have to go back to that? (I do have it in me to be ridiculously overdressed on a whim, again, going back to insecurities of being underdressed in yesteryears past.) Do I have to start taking a bath again everyday? (That's what happens when you work from home, fellas!) I saw the dresses, hair and makeup, as if for the first time, and oddly felt fidgety.

Now that I intend to stick around here for a while, these are probably valid points to consider, perhaps for another transition in my life with certain elements that I have to establish, understand, and accept before embarking on this new journey. If you ask me point-blank, I love my life right now: the flexibility, the train rides, the kitchen sessions and frequent trips to the supermarket. If I'm going to give up all of that—and torture my feet in the process—it simply better be worthwhile.

Labels: fab friends, fashion, New York, New York minutes, stuff I buy, work

Nothing, and I mean NOTHING beats New Year's Eve in the Philippines. An honest-to-goodness, true-blue Filipino celebration features plenty of food, local fireworks, sparklers and explosives of all shapes an sizes—some I'm pretty sure are illegal any place else. As midnight approaches, people flock the streets and welcome the new year with a reverberating barrage of all of the aforementioned, and then everybody reconvenes at the dinner table, continuing to eat (and drink) to their heart's content.

At my future laws' home on New Year's Eve, I saw the longest Judas Belt in my life EVER. I am not kidding: It stretched out from their house to the end of the street! For my foreign readers out there, a Judas Belt is just like the same piece of men's accessory, but in place of rivets and holes, lies a strip of triangle-shaped explosives meant to go off one after the other—a domino effect like no other.



The contraption pictured above, on the other hand, is a homemade line of kwitis—a particular exploding sparkler meant to be lit individually. My fiancé and the boys at his home dutifully set this up for 30 minutes, and watched it go off in less than a minute in a series of pfft-pfft-pfft sounds, like missiles being launched in movies.



And this loud bonanza is supplied and made more fun with tables filled with round shaped fruit and food, to represent good fortune and plenty of money in the coming year. Below is my future mother-in-law's homemade ube halaya [purple yam flan]. Yum!


Speaking of mouth-watering treats, I plan on re-posting the entries from my Yummy blog (including the latest Polka Dot Brownies) here in the next few days, to get the blog juices flowing and get the year off to a sweet start :) HAPPY 2010, EVERYONE!

Labels: holiday, love Manila