The day I baked Banana Blueberry Muffins! (recipe from Happy Home Baking)




If the blueberries look weird, it's because I coated them with flour.


Oil+sugar+mashed banana+egg+vanilla essence













They are surprisingly simple to make (completed in slightly over an hour, on a weekday night!), smells great and tastes good. So much unlike my first muffin attempt - which was supposed to be a corn and cheese muffin. Recipe said it makes 12 but somehow mine only filled 7 muffin cups. But they rose spectacularly so I'm thinking that I'm not supposed to fill them to the brim. Haha.

This looks damn good. (Got it from Mabel's blog)

Marbled Red Velvet Cheesecake Brownies

Been using my new camera to document my kitchen experiments.

Decided to make Panna Cotta last week!

I had like almost 1 litre of whipping cream sitting in the fridge for ages and I thought I might as well make use of it. Good thing the recipe called for a huge amount of whipping cream (750ml!) which I thought was really excessive. Now I have too many servings of panna cotta sitting in the fridge and nobody in my house really eats that. :(


The 主角 for the day


I thought 2 tbsp of gelatin was quite a lot but my panna cotta turned out really wobbly.


Decided to add a few drops of colouring to make it more colourful


Blending strawberries for the sauce
After a night in the fridge, it looked like this:


You might have seen this on Twitter or Instagram. It's supposed to be pink but can't really tell from this photo :(


Without any colouring




Trying out the different art filters in my camera! This is Soft Focus.


Pop Art


Pinhole (if you can't tell, Pinhole is fast becoming my favourite art filter haha)
My next attempt - Strawberry Jellyhearts Cheesecake! I actually made both items concurrently, spread out over 2-3 days.

Tried this out at Ade's house before but the proportion of cheese jelly and biscuit base wasn't very right due to the pan size. So it calls for another attempt!




Mixer whirring away






This is what happens when you use a baking tin with a removable base. The jelly mixture seeped through the base and this was what was left FML. Luckily I only used half a packet of jelly crystals and could still salvage the situation. Created a big mess in the kitchen though.


See the glob of jelly that seeped out even after a night in the fridge




Instagram makes everything look good
Recipe for Panna Cotta from the The Sunday Times, and recipe for Strawberry Jellyhearts Cheesecake from Happy Home Baking. Oh, I replaced vanilla essence with lemon juice coz I ran out of vanilla essence at home. Hahaha.

My next attempt will be Banana Blueberry muffins because I've got blueberries in the fridge and I don't know what to do with it. Haha.

I haven't listened to K-pop for a really long while...

But Shinhwa's new title song is awesome, awesomer and awesomest!!! :D

Here's to a successful comeback! 대박!!! :)

I bought a new camera at the IT Fair a couple of weeks back and I've been trying to figure out how to use it well.

Was originally gunning for an Olympus E-P3 but it was selling for close to $1,300! :O

My other option was the E-PL3, but the only fancy thing about it was that it had a flip screen. So I settled for the Olympus E-PM1 instead. Smaller, lighter, and half the price of the E-P3!

I must say that the Olympus is not exactly very user friendly or intuitive. Took me a while to figure out the bells and whistles. There is a dial button and you're supposed to turn the wheel to playback photos, instead of using the left/right buttons. And I don't like the fact that it has no auto-rotate feature. :(

But my intent of getting a mirrorless camera was to try and learn to take better quality photos, without the bulk of a DSLR. And this means I gotta learn about aperture, shutter speed, and all that gobbledygook.

For someone who is used to a point-and-shoot camera, now I have to fix the camera lenses on, bring along an external flash and a huge casing wherever I go. It's not exactly very convenient. And I'm realizing that this is going to be a rather costly hobby if I were to be serious about taking nice photos, because the lenses don't come cheap. :(

Here are some photos that I took while trying to test out my camera. My test subject is my favourite little purple thing, Grimace! :)


'


Trying to play around with the depth of field. It's not that obvious but the top one is supposed to have a sharp background, blurry foreground and vice versa for the second photo.


My plate of food, Veron's wedding @ One Rochester

IF I CAN MAKE CINNAMON ROLLS LIKE THESE.....

最高境界!!!



And here's a Panna Cotta recipe. I've been meaning to make them but haven't found the time to do so!!!
OK must try and make it this weekend before all the whipping cream in my fridge spoils.

This is another song which I kept hearing while I was holidaying in the US!
Very strangely I never heard it on the airwaves in Singapore.
Best heard with good speakers that pump out the bass. :D

Lifehouse - Falling In

Checking out the St. Nicks Alumnae Association page on Facebook. They're moving back to AMK St 13 in June 2012! And 校长still looks exactly the same, with her rather endearing but super lor suo speeches...
Suddenly miss my St. Nicks days so much! :'(

Tried my hand at making Tofu Cheesecake on Saturday night, left it overnight in the fridge to chill and ta-dah! All nice and ready on Sunday. :)

And it's pretty easy to make! (Recipe from Happy Home Baking)

Pardon the low quality photos taken with my lousy iPhone 3GS, which is incidentally giving me tons of grief because the processor is too slow to handle my multi-tasking. I'm due for re-contracting next month. Should I go for the Samsung Galaxy Note, or the Galaxy SII? It does seem a little ridiculous receiving calls with the Note coz of it's huge size though.

I digress! On to photos!


Ingredients for the biscuit base


Crush the digestive biscuits in a ziplock bag to minimize the mess


Pack the crushed biscuits firmly to form the base. I bought a 7"x7" pan for this only to realize that my mom also has one at home. -_-


I stared at the picture trying to figure out what the stuff in the bowl is... till I remembered it was gelatin. LOL.


Beat everything as seen above with electric mixer till smooth and creamy




And this is the finished product after a night in the fridge! :D




It tastes pretty good too :) Except that I kind of overdid it with the lemon juice and it's a little sour. And I didn't follow the proportions that closely because I also added in a small glob of leftover cream cheese in the fridge. But it's not bad for a first attempt. SUCCESS!

Surfing lots of baking blogs now and there are so many recipes that I want to try! Cheese cake sticks next maybe?

Oh! And I know what to do with all that leftover whipping cream in my fridge. I'm gonna attempt to make Panna Cotta!!! Hurhurhurhur. Saw this in The Sunday Times:


The recipe calls for large amounts of whipping cream! Yay!
If successful, I'm gonna try and make Pandan Panna Cotta! Then I won't need to go to Wild Rocket or Relish for Panna Cotta anymore! Heh. :p

This is quite an interesting way of documenting your life in photos - based on the themes given! I might give it a try (if I do remember to snap photos haha) and revive my dead Project 365 blog. :D

I snapped one on 4 March - the theme was Bedside.


New Gelish manicure!! :D
There's nothing beside my bed, and I took this while on my bed, so technically it's still considered my bedside... LOL

Aha. I extended my MC for another day. Feels great not to be working. So I'm here at home again!

I heard someone got sacked with immediate effect. My boss can only speculate that this person is probably trying to find a scapegoat. So horrible right! As the in-charge, he should be the one taking responsibility instead when promises are not delivered.

Anyway, I have tons of whipping cream rotting in my fridge. Any ideas what I can bake with whipping cream?