Egg tarts

The other day, I was at the bakery with Cassie and she asked if I could buy her some egg tarts.  Unfortunately, they were out, so I promised that I would buy her some more the next time we went to a bakery.  Unfortunately again, I didn't get a chance to go to the bakery again, so I decided to just try making them.

Thanks to Mr. Google, I found several recipes.  After a bit of research, I decided to buy frozen tart shells, the egg custard recipe from this site, and the baking method of this site.  It probably would have been better to use the recipe from the second site, but I couldn't figure out if the recipe was asking for milk powder or evaporated milk liquid, so I gave up and tried a different site.  However, the reviews from the all recipes site said that the temperature was too high, so hence I merged the two recipes.


Here are the ingredients:

2/3 cup white sugar
1.5 cups water
9 eggs
1 dash vanilla
1 cup of evaporated milk

Here is the way I baked them:
1.  Boil the water and sugar until the sugar is completely dissolved.  The scientist in me kept shrieking "I'm making a supersaturated solution!!!!"  (Ignore that sentence if you have no idea what I'm talking about)
 Let the sugar water cool to room temperature

2.  Preheat oven at 390 degrees F.

3.  Open the package of frozen tart shells, as per the instructions on the box.  Not difficult at all.

4.  Beat the eggs and strain into the sugar water.  Mix well.

5.  Stir in the vanilla and evaporated milk.

6.  Strain the mixture again, and pour into the shells.  The two straining steps are VERY important.

7.  Pour into the shells and bake.  Now here is the picky part.  The baking is done in two phases.  In phase one, I baked the egg tarts at the preheated temperature for 15 minutes, until the edges of the tarts were golden brown.  Then I decreased the temperature to 360 degrees F, and watched the egg tarts carefully.  One they started to puff a bit, I opened the oven door about 2 inches.  According to the website that I read, this prevents the egg custard from super-puffing and then deflate into volcanoes while cooling.  I let the egg tarts bake until the custard was completely solid.  The test is to stick a toothpick into it, and if it doesn't fall, it's done.

8.  Let cool and enjoy!

One extra note.  There was way too much egg custard, but I haven't figured out how much to decrease the egg custard by.  I baked six small foil containers of just the egg custard, which tasted pretty good by itself as well.

Cassie got so excited when she saw the trays of egg tarts.  Ken came home and ate 5 in a row.

One potato, two potato...a pile of potatoes!

My husband came home the other day with a 10 lb sack of potatoes, amongst various other ingredients that I had not asked him to purchase.  He simply said "do something with it."  That sounded like a episode like "Chopped", where chefs are asked to cook dishes from a random assortment of ingredients, so I brainstormed a bit.

I headed over to my favourite recipe site (all recipes), and searched up "russet potatoes".  Perogies came back as a hit, and since I haven't eaten them for a long time, I decided to go for it.

The recipe is here, if you're interested.

To start off, I scrubbed and peeled 9 potatoes.  The recipe called for 8, but I wasn't sure of size.  I ended up using about 5 lbs, which in hindsight, was way too much.

(Yes, I know they are not perfectly peeled.  I'm lazy, k?)

Next step was to cube the potatoes and boil them.  My method of boiling potatoes is to place them in cold water, high heat until on full boil, cover the pot, and then turn off the heat.  I then let the whole thing sit for about 15 minutes, and the potatoes come out perfectly without me worrying about the pot boiling over. 

While I was waiting for the potatoes to cook, I started working on the dough.  I first assembled the wet ingredients:

And then mixed them together.  Then I assembled the dry ingredients.

Then I mixed everything together.  I'm glad I didn't use my Kitchenaid, as it would have definitely been over-capacity.

(I really don't know why my image is rotated.  Fortunately, dough is dough, regardless how you look at it.)

While I let the dough sit for 15 minutes, the potatoes were ready, and I went ahead smashed them, and added the seasonings, minus the cheese sauce.  Instead, I added some milk and a lot more grated cheese.  Yum.

By then the dough was ready, so I rolled out the dough.  The directions said to split the dough in half, but I split it into 3 balls, which made it easier to handle.  The dough was very soft and easy to handle.  After rolling it out, I used a cup and started to cut out circles.

From on there, it was like making gao zhi, and I had no problems there.

The recipe said it would make 60 perogies, but I ended up with 75.  I froze most of them, and kept about 15 to cook for dinner at night.

To cook, I followed the advice of some reviewers and boiled them until floating, and then pan-fried them in butter until crispy.

To be honest, it actually looked pretty good. 

 I gave the girls some to try, and they really liked it!  Which is odd, because they both don't like eating potatoes.  They were going to eat all of them, until I saved five for my husband.  I would say that this recipe was a success!

Oh, and I had a LOT of leftover mashed potatoes.  So I made Shepherd's pie.  =)

Hello, I'm still alive

I've been so lazy in updating my blog, I've finally decided to stop uploading pictures onto facebook, but instead update my blog, and post that on facebook.

Baking-wise, I haven't had much time to bake other than the usual chocolate chip cookies, but the other day I did have time to make some cornbread. 

You can find the recipe here.

I pretty much followed the recipe with a few alterations:
1.  I added frozen corn to the dry ingredients
2.  I also sprinkled more frozen corn to the top, as well as 1.5 tbs of white sugar for a nice crunch.

The result was a very tasty cornbread that was gobbled up by my little critics.  Ken had an event at Church that night, and I gave him some to share.  He came back with an empty container, and said that it was very popular.

Here's a picture:

It's so tempting to make them into mini-muffins next time, but it takes so much time to butter the pan, and using muffin layers means less crispy edges to eat.

Cavendish hat

I get the majority of my knitting and crochet patterns from Ravelry. I really love that site. It has a full database for all sorts of patterns, which is really easy to use. It also has a yarn database, which is useful when I have yarn but I don't know what to do with it.

So I was searching for a pattern to make a hat for Cassie. At first I wanted to try some intarsia, which is knitting with different blocks of colour, but I failed miserably at it, and was too discouraged to try again. So I found a pattern from Lion Brand for a Cavendish hat. Here's the link for those interested (http://www.lionbrand.com/patterns/90276AD.html).

Anyways, it took me about a week to make the hat, but actually I wasn't working on it very often. The ribbing took me forever. The cables weren't that difficult, but I'm glad I didn't use a cabling needle. It's much easier to just grasp the stitches by hand, and maneuver them around on the needles.

The final product is quite nice. I wish I had a softer yarn to work with, as I cheaped out and used Bernat softee chunky for the hat. To make the hat more girly, I added a large pompom. I don't have a pompom maker, so the pompom looks a bit rough. I might have to trim it down, depending on whether Cassie likes the pompom or not.

Ok, this time I'm really back.

So it's been quite awhile since I last posted. I didn't think people actually read this blog, but I feel like I should maintain this one.

So, I've taken up knitting, thanks to a friend of mine. Crocheting is great for mini-projects, but I love the look and feel of knitted projects, especially for clothing. My mom taught me to knit quite awhile ago, but I never figured out how to cast on, shape, etc. So, thanks to google and ravelry, I now officially know how to knit.

It's never good to learn another technique, because now I have at least 4-5 ongoing projects. Usually I have one large project with several small ones.

Here are a couple examples of things that I have made in the last while:

Here's a slouchy hat that I made for myself, modeled by my younger daughter. This was a really simple pattern, with a bit of cabling. This is my second cabling project, and it was really fun to do. I think it only took me about 6 hours to knit. I got a lot of compliments when I wore it the first time. Thanks to the same above mentioned friend, I frequent yarn shops, and I got a really nice cashmere/alpaca yarn blend for my hat.











I'm getting too lazy to post more pictures, but I've also made a scarf for my MIL, and a cowl for my mom. I'm currently making baby sweaters, as well as cardigans for my two little critics. For more details, you can always check my ravelry website. My username is anata112. Whenever I have time, I really want to do some lace knitting as well. If you ever have the time, try googling lace knitting images, and you can see why I'm so addicted to knitting.

In terms of cooking, another friend of mine gave me a cookie press for my birthday. Needless to say, I had lots of fun playing with it.

Really nice cookies and very yummy. I used a very basic recipe (butter, sugar, flour, vanilla, salt). They were all gone the next day. My two little critics tried to sneak cookies off the counter when my back was turned. Now I know that even my younger daughter can reach the kitchen counter.








Hopefully I'll be able to post more often about my current projects!

After a long hiatus...

Hi Everyone!

I'm baaaaaaaaaaack! It's been crazy in the last few months, including moving our home. Things have settled down and I have time for baking and crocheting again.

Today I'm going to start off with a crocheting tip. For those of you that ever have to do decrease stitches (aka sc2tog, dec, etc), there are various ways to do them. Decreases are found often in amigurumi. One way is to just sc together the two stitches. Another way is to also sc together two stitches, but to just pick up the front loop for these two stitches only.

I don't really like either method because it looks a bit messy to me. I've recently discovered that instead of decreasing in the usual method, skipping a stitch ends up looking more nicer. I don't have pictures to show yet, but I'll post some if my last two paragraphs are too confusing.

Anyways, onto cooking. My family are huge fans of apple pies, so I make them often. Probably not often enough. Today, I decided to try making mini-apple pies in my muffin pan. Here's the final result:


Not bad. I'll have to do a taste test with some vanilla ice-cream.

Happy New Year!

The holidays have past and I haven't updated for awhile. Due to a number of things going on in my personal life, I'll have to put this blog project aside for the next two months. Sorry!

I'll leave one more tip that I learned this past week from my MIL, my mom, and my husband's aunt:

When making Chinese soup from pork bones, always add a bit of chicken meat as well!

Interesting...