Home Made Pearls for Pearl Milk Tea

Have wanted to try out DIY the pearl myself after reading the recipe from 周老师的美食课室.  Little girl loves pearl milk tea very much, she has been requesting it ever since she was a toddler and now crazy with Chatime.  I halved the ingredients from the original recipe.

Ingredients
35g black sugar
65ml water
100g tapioca / potato / sweet potato starch
Extra potato starch

1. Stir black sugar into water, boil
2. Pour hot mixture into tapioca starch, fold til forming a dough, cool
3. Dust with some extra potato starch, roll and cut dough into thin strips, then into tiny cubes
4. Dust hand with potato starch, roll cubes into tiny pearl balls
5. Boil a pot of hot water, drop pearl balls into hot water, stir, cook for 5 min, off heat, cover lid, let pearl continue cooking in hot water

Stir in more sugar to make-do as a dessert

Or turn them into icy cold pearl milk tea

Wanna share with little penguin?

Apple Turnover

Had a strong desire on some apple dessert for the past few days, decided upon this apple turnover as I have a few puff pastry sheets which was left in the freezer.

The apples stuffing was cook fast, I able to have it done in 15 minutes :)

Apple stuffings

2 green apples, skinned, cored and cubed
1 handful raisins
2 tbsp brown sugar
1 tbsp whisky
1 tbsp butter
1/2 tsp cinnamon powder

1. Cook all ingredients except cinnamon powder in medium heat until apple turn tender and soft
2. Off heat, mix in cinnamon powder.  Let cool.

Apple turnover with 4 pieces of leftover puff pastry sheets, yum!

As I still have some apple filling left, used 2 flatten bread to finish up the rest
Verdict on this bread apple turnover, crunch while fresh from oven, but turned hard after 1 night

Cream Puffs

Cream puffs were actually the 1st baked dessert I tried during my teens or 20th, I can't remember well :p  I'd tried so many cream puff recipes, however recipes from those days were not so complete, sometimes I got the puffs baked nicely, but sometimes it would be a total failure.  Also, I didn't have a good custard cream recipe, therefore the cream puffs weren't that tempting those day but I still enjoyed eating them.

Now, with the help of internet, nothing is secret and I managed to get the recipes I wanted so easily.  I choose Masa's cream puff recipe and Carol's vanilla custard recipe (the leftover from Hakkaido Chiffon Cupcake) I promised you this combination is really really yummilicious!

Cream Puffs
Ingredients
(Yield 36 mini puffs)
60g cake flour / superfine flour
60g bread flour / high protein flour
80g butter
100ml milk / water
2 - 3 eggs, beat

1. Mix cake flour and bread flour together, sieved
2. In a sauce pan, bring butter and water to a boil or until butter melted, off heat
3. Pour all flour into hot liquid, mix well with a wooden spoon or spatula, turn on low flame, cook until a thin layer skin lightly stick to the pan, off heat
4. While batter is hot, fold in egg, a little at a time, until getting a smooth thick paste or when the batter drip down from spatula, it drips slowly in a triangle form
5. Spoon into piping bag, pipe your desire size of choux pastry onto baking tray
6. Spray some water onto the choux pastry before put into oven
7. Bake in pre-heated oven at 200C for 30 minutes
8. Cool on rack after taking out from oven
9. Serve with vanilla custard cream squeezed into each puffs

They puffed up so beautifully and cute

Little girl loves this cream puffs so much that she ate about 6 right after dinner!  Even picky eater Y said he liked the cream very much and requested 1 for supper.

Crepes

Little girl didn't go to school today as she had fever last nite, decided to let her rest at home though no more fever today. In order not to have her feeling bored, I told her we'd be making crepes. I oledi googled the crepe's recipe for sometimes, this should be a good chance to try out as it's so easy and simple. I got little girl to prepare the batter, she really enjoyed mixing the batter :)

Ingredients

1 cup flour

1 tsp white sugar

1/4 tsp salt

1 egg

1 cup milk

2 tbsp melted butter

1. Sift flour, sugar and salt
2. In a bowl, beat egg and milk, fold in flour mixture
3. Stir in melted butter, combine well
4. Let batter rest in fridge for 1/2 hour
5. Lightly buttered hot pan, scoop in batter (enough to cover pan thinly), shift pan til batter form a thin layer on pan
6. Cook til both side turned lightly brown

With a little batter left, I cracked in an egg after placing the batter onto pan, roughly spread the egg...

... the other side of the egg crepe

I made 2 sweet version with the crepes: spread a thin layer of vanilla butter cream and sprinkled lots of chocolate bits...

1 for little girl, 1 for me, yum...

Konnyaku Jelly

I bought this Konyaku jelly sometime ago from Tesco, dug out this evening to make some desserts for little girl.

Here are the sweet jellies, in 2 big molds (heart & flower), 1 small container (a box from Ferrero Rocher chocolate) with chopped grapes and strawberry.

Here are the jellies for little girl after dinner, which look a bit like a human.  Little girl ate the head 1st, then she announced to me naively: "I'm going to eat the 'bird-bird' (man's private part) now, big n fat 'bird-bird'!"  (Notice the bottom part of the human jelly) I nearly choked myself upon hearing it and both of us broke down to a teary laugh!

The remaining of un-sweeten jelly, placed in a shallow pan, kept for some plan I had for bento n lunch :)

M&M Peanut Butter Tang Yuan 湯圓

My aunt introduced this recipe to me a few year ago, wrapping M&M chocolate in the glutinous dough.  This year, I tried it with M&M peanut butter chocolate.

It was pretty easy to roll M&M into the dough, even little girl was having fun doing it.

Here r some plain baby tang yuan without the M&M stuffing, rolled by little girl.

Verdict:  It was too delicious, QQ outer layer with a bit gooey sweet choc and slight salty peanut butter, we didn't even remember to snap a photo of it!  Little girl down lot of it, even complained that I should have left some for her to bring back home!

Happy Belated Winter Solstice Festival!

Iced Korean Campbell Grapes

Remember my posting on Iced Grapes?  I'm using the Korean  Campbell grapes this round and with the skin on.

The verdict:  Marvelous, tasted like iced wine without the alcohol.  This idea was from bro, he went to Korea last month, bought the grapes, kept in fridge, which fridge was set too cold, the grapes turned into ice, he told me how tasty it was, of course I gotta mark it myself.

These grapes tasted like kyoho 巨峰 grapes from Japan, we seldom see kyoho in Malaysia, I believe it is too expensive to import as it is oledi quite expensive to consume in Japan.

I went to this place - Katsunuma near Tokyo (actually not so near, it is about 112.5km from Tokyo and we took about 2 1/2 hours by train) 6 years ago with hubby.  It is a vineyard, thus full of all types of grapes all over the hills, with beautiful sceneries.  There were lot of farms put on big sign of 巨峰食之放題, which meant "eat all u can of kyoho grapes".  We paid 1000 yen each, the farm keeper passed us 2 containers n scissors, we were able to chose, plucked/cut and down a few bunches of kyoho grapes.  That was the 1st time we tasted kyoho grapes, and both of us loved it since then.

Here r some photo we took from this beautiful place.

Look at those grapes...

A closer view, looks so big and delicious, right?

Grapes that we cut down fresh from its tree, posing before getting into our tummy :)

A cute grape bus we found near the train station.

See what I mean, this was how much it cost in Japan, which is about RM207 for 1 bunch!!!

Peach n Longan Jelly

At Seremban ...

LG:  Ma-mah!  Ngo oi jing jelly.  (Grandma! I wanna make jelly.)

GM: Hou ah! (Ok!)

MIL took a pack of Pearl Mermaid jelly powder out, I opened a can of longan and another of peach.  While MIL boiling n cooking the jelly, little girl and me cutting peaches into small pieces, and placed all fruits into the jelly molds.

We made 5 trays of fruit jelly...

... and one bear-bear.

We'd a photo taking competition of the jelly after dinner...

1st photo - by me

2nd photo - from little girl

Last one, from hubby

So, which one do u like most?  I like little girl's.

Iced Grapes

MIL likes to buy grapes to little girl, and the fruit stall auntie in Seremban Market too likes to give her a bunch of grapes whenever we passed her stall, so I always have plenty of grapes sitting in the fridge waiting for little girl to consume.  However, it is always way too many for little girl to eat, sometimes some of the grapes will turn moldy when I remember and it was so wasteful.

Thus, I'd found this way to maintain the freshness of grapes and little girl likes this even more, which is turning the grapes into ice grapes (little girl gave it a new name lately: Winter Grapes).  Well, kids just loves cold icy stuffs.

Just peel the skin off, put them into container and let them sit in the freezer.

One of my friend told me that she used this method on kiwifruits, strawberries, mango, etc, her daughter loves it too.

I made this strawberry jell-o this afternoon and threw in some skinned grapes too, another way to finish up the grapes fast.

What will u do to the extra grapes?

P/s  I make grapes enzyme b4, nice, just like sparkling grape juice with a hint of alcohol.

Strawberry and Grass Jelly

We had this for dessert sometimes ago (when macbook was at service centre), each of us took a pic.

The 1st one was by me from the kitchen:

The 2nd one by little girl, she insisted she wanna had a shot too!  Took it by standing on a stool ;)

The last one belongs to hubby, he took it while we enjoyed it with some strawberry syrup.  Nice-huh!

 

Strawberry daifuku

These was the 1st attempt of strawberry daifuku I made last friday.  I tried the recipe from Bento Pet. It was not difficult to made the mochi but it was tough to make the daifuku round, I think I need more practices.

I made another batch with the left-over anko this evening, they are better looking now ;)  (Those in white with pink heart).

I mixed a few drops of strawberry syrup into the mochi to make the pink colored mochi.  And since I was out of anko for filling, I dipped the strawberries into melted chocolate and let it cold in the fridge.

Little girl helped me molded these pink hearts with the remaining mochi, she was having lots of fun, rolling the mochi, molding the hearts, playing with flour....  She even said she will have a few hearts for her breakfast tomorrow.