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Vegan Oatmeal Cookies (tofu as egg substitute)

Accepted an challenge to make dairy free baked goodies.  Tried to use tofu as egg substitute.  Texture turned out very close to real egg.  I put in too much spice but overall it is pretty decent.  Though I still miss eating real butter + egg version.

Ingredients

Quantity	Unit	Item
150	ml	gold shortening
1/2	cup	sugar
1/2	cup	brown sugar
1 1/2	cup	all purpose flour
1	teaspoon	baking soda
1	teaspoon	cinnamon
1/4	teaspoon	ground ginger powder
130	g	tofu
1	teaspoon	vanilla extract
1/2	teaspoon	lemon juice

Directions

Preheat oven to 350F.

Cream shortening & sugar until light and fluffy.  Add tofu, lemon & vanilla extract.  The consistency is actually a little stiffer than your normal batter made with egg.

Stop mixer and add flour all at once and fold in flour by hand. Then add oatmeal and raisins and mix until all are well distributed (but avoid over mixing).

Bake for 9 to 10 minutes or until golden brownie (see above picture for desire colour)

Related Link

Regular Oatmeal cookies

Detail Step-by-step Pictures

Use regular slow cook rolled oat for more texture. Raisan is optional

Sift flour with salt, baking soda and cinnamon

Vegan oatmeal cookies batter. Look just like normal cookies batter.

Dish out even portions and ready for baking!

Done! My first vegan oatmeal cookie. Still soft and slightly crumbly.

Chocolate Devil Cake – Decorated Lego Chocolate Army

Chocolate Devil Cake (decorated with chocolate ganache & lego army)

Just prefect distribution of chocolate ganache and devil cake

Where it all begins …

This is a visit to the birth place of my passion of baking and love of software development . Before moving to Vancouver, I spent F1 to F3 (similar to grade 7 – 9 in North American system) in one of the oldest all girls school in Hong Kong: Ying Wa Girls School(英華女學校). Experience from Ying Wa has fundamentally shaped my life.

I can still vividly remember in the cookery class kitchen where I saw eggs turned into pale fluffy batter and baked into delicious sponge cake.  The transformation was magical and I was hooked on baking ever since that sight!  I was one of those geek who joined computer club and spending my after school hours sitting in front computer (Apple II ;-).   It was fascinating to write some “for loops” with some “if.. then .. else” and see diagrams displayed on mono colour screen.   One day when I was walking pass connecting corridor between the lower and upper building, I looked at career bulletin board which has posting about jobs in computer. At that very moment, I was determinated that I have to be a programmer (and I was only in F1 – grade 7)!  I still feel extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to study in Ying Wa. This place has brought me so much good memory and also dearest life long friends.

This memorable building will soon be torn down.  I am sad but I know I should not feel too sad because it is all for the best.  There will be bigger and better campus for future Ying Wa Girls.

P.S. Specials thanks to Ms. Leung (from school office) who kindly let me visit the school and show me around to revisit this wonderful campus for one last time.

Last time for me seeing this old campus. Miss it so much!

I used to walked down “Ladder Street” to save a few dollars

So many more tall buildings, Sheung Wan is so different now

Google map direction told me to take this much harder path ;-)

Oh the swimming lessons in the COLD water!

Very nice shaded walk

OMG this place is still around!! We used to order lunch from here.

I was lost! Just look too different

Hong Kong – a vertical city

Yeahhh!! Finally see my old school!!!

Next time, taking that bus and stop in Peakville (and ignore google map direction =P)

Robinson Road – this still look like what I remember

This is why I am professional geek =)

Remember we used to run up those short cut stairs to 12th floor after morning assembly

Wow, there is still small patch of green in this concrete forest

Such a nice and refreshing area to relax now

The gym where I learned square dancing. Still amazed by the different variety of “sport” I’ve learned from Ying Wa

This is the old entrance where we lined up to pick up preorder lunch box prepared by school kitchen

This is still very significant. My life-long passion with baking start from here!

Inside look of classroom

Finally!! found the old desk – gotta love the “locker”

Look of the new campus

So proud of our school teams and its achievement over the years

The kind of old wooden chair I have once used is now a antique/art work.

12th floor – my first year in ying wa was studying at that top floor… oh so much more extra exercise

in the age of iBook and kindle, i still love the feeling of library

Geek pilgrimage (first apple store in HK) – remembering apple was the very first machine I learned to code

Click on the map to see how I “urban trekked” back to Ying Wa that day!

Fresh Cranberry Coffee Cake

I received this recipe from my co-worker’s wife many year ago (when recipe was written in index card ;-)  This cream cheese base cake has inspired me to make many wonderful butter cakes. Cream cheese is the magic ingredient that makes the cake a bit tangy and smell heavenly heavenly.  If you have kitchen aid, highly recommend you use it for this recipe. I have mixed this cake by hand and resulted in blaster in my hand because of the long creaming process.

Ingredients

Quantity	Unit	Item
1	cup	butter (room temperature)
1	cup	sugar
2	teaspoons	vanilla
250	g	cream cheese
3		eggs
2.5	cup	all purpose flour
1/4	teaspoon	salt
1	pinch	nutmeg
2	teaspoons	baking powder
2	cups	fresh cranberries

Directions

Grease & flour a 10″ bundt pan.

Mix flour with nutmeg, salt & baking powder and set aside for later.

Put butter in the stand mixer bowl and use paddle attachment.  Add half of the sugar and mix until butter become airy and fluffy.   Then add the cream cheese and rest of sugar and continue to mix until cream cheese and completely incorporated with butter mixture and volume has doubled.  (remember stop the mixer and scrap down the side at least a couple times).

Add 1/4 cup of flour  to fresh cranberries. Toss to make sure  cranberries is well coated

Break the egg into mixing cup and add in the vanilla extract.  Lightly whisk the egg & vanilla then gradually add egg to cream cheese & butter mixture.  Add slowly at first (a couple teaspoon), then pour in steady slow stream.  Avoid over mixing because you will lost volume if you over beat the eggs.

Stop mixer and finish the rest of the mixing by hand.   Dump all flour in at once and fold the flour into batter.  Add in the cranberry and mix until it is eventually distributed.

Baking at 350F for 45 to 55 minutes or until golden brown.

Related Link

Ginger Lemon Cranberries Coffee Cake

Detail Step-by-step Pictures

Consistency of batter after adding all the eggs	Sift in all the flour at once
Ready for baking
Only need basic lemon icing sugar glance as decoration

Making of Berne Brot Dough

Liebesgrübchen – “Love Pits” jam filled sweet paste cookies

Aren’t these the most adorable looking cookies? These cookies are very buttery delicate and not overly sweet . The jam filling add just extra bonus touch of fresh sweetness. They are also pretty easy to make! I am happy my co-worker’s mom has shared this wonderful recipe with me. Thanks my co-worker for translating the recipe!

For those who can read German.  Here is the original recipe

Zutaten:

• 175g Mehl,
• 65g Zucker
• 1 Packung Vanillezucker (oder 1 Teeloeffel Vanilleessenz)
• 2 Eigelb
• 125g Butter oder Margarine

Zubereitung:

Für die Füllung braucht man rote Marmelade, was immer man gerade hat. Die Zutaten werden zu einem Mürbeteig verarbeitet und kühlgestellt.

Anschließend formt man kleine Kügelchen aus dem Teig, macht mit einem mehlbestäubten Holzlöffelstiel eine Vertiefung (Mulde) in die einzelnen Kügelchen und füllt etwas Marmelade hinein.

Auf einem gefetteten Backblech (oder Backpapier) 10-12Min. bei ca.175°Celsius backen.

Here is the translation! ;-)

Ingredients:

• 175g flour ( I used pastry flour)
• 65g sugar
• 1 package of vanilla sugar (I still have my very limited supply from my last Germany trip back in 2010 ;-)  You can also substitute with half a vanilla bean or 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract)
• 2 egg yolks (this is the key why these cookies are so delicate!)
• 125g butter (I used unsalted butter with a tiny pinch of salt)
• ~3 tablespoon of your favourite jam – recently I have been using Maple Syrup Pumpkin and I really like it!

All the ingredients

It is actually very simple. You put together all the above ingredients  following sweet paste method.  The key is don’t warm up and cream you better to incorporate too much air.  Just mix sugar and butter until all evenly incorporated.  Add your yolks gradually, and sift all the flour into the butter mixture at once.  The cookies dough will turn out a bit wet and too soft to handle.  You should warp the dough in plastic warp and put it in the fridge for at least a couple hours (better yet, over night).  Then they will be much easier to handle.

Dough is ready! Always remember to put in "date" & "name"!!

When you are ready to bake this cookies, just take the dough out and evenly portion the dough.  I like to use my ice-cream scoop for quick & easy portioning.   You then roll out the cookie dough into perfectly roll balls.  Then use top of wooden spoon to poke a hole in the middle for filling jam. Be careful when you are poking that hole, you  don’t want to push all the way down to the bottom because jam will be leaking!

Dip tip of wooden spoon in flour before poking a hole in cookie dough to avoid sticking

Perfectly even holes punched into the cookies dough and ready for filling with jam!

Remember to leave some space in between because this dough will spread

Baking in 350F oven for 10 minutes.

Taiyaki (たい焼き)

Finally I got this fishy pan!!  I bought this from Seoul.  During travel, I always like to bring back bake-ware as souvenir for myself.  Not only this is practical and useful, using that tool/utensil bring your back to the trip.  It also brings back fond memory where I have bought that and how I sometime has to guess what certain tool is for  from language that I  don’t understand.

This is such a basic and simple snack to make!  Including making my own home-made custard filling, it only took 35 minutes to make this yummy “fishy” cake =).

Fishy Pan, simple basic batter and home-made custard filling

Here is the Taiyaki Batter from Cooking With Dog – How to Make Taiyaki たい焼きの作り方:

• 100g Cake Flour (3.53 oz)
• 2/3 tsp Baking Soda
• 2 tbsp Sugar
• 1/2 Egg (30g/1.06 oz)
• 100ml Water (3.38 fl oz)

You just need to mix together the above ingredients (make sure no lumps!).  Then lightly oil the heated pan and pour in batter, add favour filling of your choice (red bean paste is awesome too!). Add more batter on top and cook in medium high heat.  Cook until fish is pretty and golden brown!

Really pretty! Love'em

Highly recommend you check out the following youTube video for detail steps!  Really helpful!

Sweet Christmas Gift – Christmas Cookies

So glad that I can make use of the cookies making I’ve learned from Chef Macro from the Pastry Training Centre of Vancouver.

My own Scottish shortbread & gingerbread stars are certainly tasty but can look a bit boring in a huge cookie plate.  By adding cookies with names that I am still learning to pronounce, all of a sudden the whole cookie plate looks a lot more interesting.   The top snow white cookies with silver balls decoration is Pfeffernüsse.  The shell like cookies next to Pfeffernüsse are Spekulatius.  There is my personal favourite: Elisenlebkuchen  (but I am still hopeless in saying that German name correctly =P).  At the centre is my own creation of rolling Scottish shortbread little balls into match (green tea) powder and icing sugar.  There is also very neat looking checker-board cookies.  I even created those four tiny swirl pattern cookies with side trimming (did not waste a bit).  That is a pretty impressive collection eh?

The following is gift set of six different kind of cookies:

• peppermint candy cane biscotti with chocolate drizzle
• Vanille Kipferl (yes more German name, you know the theme of my baking course ;-)
• marble cookies
• “BMW” style checker-board cookies
• Pfeffernüsse
• Spekulatius

Finally as fun activity for my good friends’ kids. I made a stack of “Winnie the Pooh” gingerbread cookies for the little ones to decorate. I had a blast decorating with them. They probably enjoyed the 6 bowls of different type of candies lay out for decoration more than the actual decorating part. That is just the greatest Christmas memory that I will always cherish.

Instead of buying a gift card or another electronic gadgets for your friends, consider making them a batch of home made cookies. It is a lot of fun making and consuming =)

Late Fall Apple & Cranberry Pie

Made the crust with Crisco classic pie crust recipe a couple weeks ago and it has been sitting inside the fridge waiting for the right filling.  Finally I saw really a large bag of local BC Spartan appples and I knew I have found the perfect filling.  The apples were small (only 2 inches tall).  it was a lot of work to peel and cut the apples but it all worth every single minutes peeling & cutting!

Started with rolling out half of the double crust recipe for bottom of 9″ glass pie dish (which is a cheap *must have* bake ware!)

Bottom of pie crust

6 cups of apple peel and sliced.  I also added a bit of lemon zest (for added fresh favour) and juice from one lemon to prevent the apple from browning.   I have also added 1/2 cup of dried sweeten cranberries into the apple to naturally sweeten the pie filling without adding more sugar.

Prepare 6 cups of apples

In a small mixing bowl, add 1/4 cup of all purpose flour, 1/3 cup of brown sugar, 1 teaspoon of cinnamon and 1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg.  Mix until everything is all blended and no more lump of brown sugar

Thickening sugar/flour mixture for apple filling

Mix flour mixture with apple + cranberries and the filling is DONE!  Cannot get any  simpler than this eh!

Filling ready

Cover the top with remaining pie crust – do remember to roll out the top crust a bit larger than bottom. Since the filling is pretty high, you need large to to fully cover.  I did very very basic side trimming so it looks a little interesting.  But after baking, the side trimming pattern did not show =P

Covered top crust with slightly decorate the edge

Brushed with 1 teaspoon of melted butter and sprinkle about 1 tablespoon of sugar on top.  This ensure the top of crust will brown nicely.   Covered the edge with foil to avoid over-baking the side.

Ready for baking!