Cranberry and Pistachio Biscotti

Wanted to do something for my colleagues for Christmas and decided to bake something... and picked this recipe for Cranberry & Pistachio Biscotti.


I tried a Martha Stewart recipe some years back that wasn't very successful but this one turned out really well! Pretty easy too! The thing that took me a long time to do was shelling the pistachios - yes, I'm told you can buy them shelled :P

Don't they look really Christmasy? And the fact that it all disappeared in 2 hours, I'm guessing means that it tastes pretty good too...

This is my last post for this year so Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!

Lemon Squares

I decided to try baking something new before heading to Karen's place for a girls' get together one saturday afternoon. I got the recipe from here.


Pretty much followed the recipe wholesale except I added the zest of about 1 whole lemon. It was very sour, exactly the way it was meant to be :D Only thing was I should have put some of the zest into the base instead of all in the filling...

Easy and dependable recipe - try it if you like sour stuff!

Strawberry Tiramisu

I can only say that I *assembled* this dessert coz it doesn't require any baking at all! I got the recipe here.


It was pretty easy to make, and something that you can prepare in advance and just throw in the fridge until it's time for dessert. Not your usual kind of tiramisu as it's layered with strawberry puree but the mix of strawberry with the coffee from the espresso is actually quite an interesting taste...

Tang Yuan with Ginger Soup

I have this unreal obsession with tang yuan... actually pretty much anything of similar consistency - onde onde, mochi, ang ku kueh etc. After being convinced that it's really not that hard to make, I embarked on the adventure of making my very own tang yuan.

Exact measuresments are quite non-existent for making tang yuan, believe me I tried searching on the internet. But having made some myself, I kinda understand why.

Anyway here are the vague instructions :
(1) Add water to glutinous rice flour - enough water to make the dough into a kneadable consistency
(2) Roll into balls of desired size.
(3) Drop the tang yuan one by one into a pot of boiling water. Take the tang yuan out of the pot once they float.
(4) Slice up some ginger and boil in a pot of water, adding sugar to taste.
(5) Put the tang yuan in a bowl of ginger soup and...

Voila! Homemade Tang Yuan in Ginger Soup -


Aren't my little balls of tang yuan just so pretty??

Next challenge will be to make tang yuan with fillings... or maybe even try making onde onde (as the recipe is nearly exactly the same).

Cooking / Baking : Christmas 2006

Tis the season for cooking and baking! Ever since I posted about the food I cooked for Halloween, I've had many requests to cook for pot-luck parties... which is how I ended up cooking furiously this Christmas season.

First cooking frenzy was for Christmas at Karen's place... I made Buffalo-Style Chicken Fingers (recipe here). Picked this recipe because it could be prepared the day before, left in the freezer overnight and baked in just 20 mins. I think my freezer container wasn't quite air-tight enough and all the cripsy bits got soggy. Sigh.

I also made Bacon and Cheddar Stuffed Mushrooms recipe (here). This was pretty effortless... but I was a bit annoyed as one packet of mushrooms were mouldy so I ended up only making half the amount that I was planning to make.

And inspired by a friend's suggestion, I decided to try making Baklava (recipe here). For those who have never heard of Baklava, it's a Greek dessert with alternating layers of filo pastry and chopped nuts with honey syrup poured over it. This was extremely time consuming - chopping the nuts, buttering each layer of pastry, doing laying the nuts and filo pasty one layer at a time... I would rate the end result as just barely decent for a first attempt. Not sure if I would try it again though...

Second cooking frenzy was for Christmas Eve dinner at Victor's house. By request, I made Shepherd's Pie which I've made many times before with relative success. And I've made it so many times now that I don't really follow any one recipe strictly... This is real comfort food on a rainy X'mas Eve :)

Also did a portion of Spicy Chicken Wings which I've made many times before... seems to get less spicy each time round as I get lazier with measuring out the ingredients for the marinade... and made more Bacon and Cheddar Stuffed Mushrooms (which were all eaten up before all the guests arrived!).

Christmas baking this year didn't turn out as well as last year. I attempted to make Cranberry-Pistachio Biscotti from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook (recipe here).

The recipe sounded easy enough... but the biscotti turned out to be more like cookies (i.e. it didn't have the dry-ness that biscotti is supposed to have) so I decided not to give any away... which means that I'm stuck eating a whole container of Cranberry-Pistachio all by myself!

Seems like all the stuff I made this Christmas falls under the category of HKBHJ (ho kua boh ho jiak) - Hokkien for "doesn't taste as good as it looks"...

Cooking : Halloween 2006

Haven't had the chance to cook or bake in quite a while so I jumped at the chance to cook for the Halloween party that we had on Saturday. For last year's party, I baked a cupcake graveyard with tombstones, gummi worms and Oreo crumbs as sand. This year, I decided to go the savoury route... and I figured if I was going to cook, I might as well go all out :)

To fit the occasion, I prepared a few common dishes with an added Halloween twist.

Inspired by a cooking show I saw recently, I wanted to make "Pigs in a Blanket" - cocktail sausages wrapped in puff pastry... but gave it a gory twist...


It's supposed to look like severed fingers with a bandage wrapped around it :)

And for the Deviled Eggs, I added an olive and a drop of ketchup to make it look like eyes :)

Also prepared a Baked Pasta in case people were craving carbs...


And my usual Spicy Chicken Wings...


Yup, I prepared quite the spread :)

Baking : Earl Grey Tea Cookies

Had a request for Earl Grey Tea Cookies so I whipped up a batch recently -



Here they are cooling on the wire rack just after baking...







...and here they are sitting pretty in the jar. Had enough to fill the jar and a few left over for myself to munch on :)