Back to making savoury food

It seems that my last few posts have all been dessert related so I thought it was high time that I posted a savoury recipe instead lest you readers begin to think that I subsist slowly on sweets (although, frankly, if health wasn't an issue, I would). But that's a discussion for another time.

Ever since I got back from Toronto, I've been on an Asian food kick. I'm guessing it has to do with the fact that I had lots of my mom's wonderful home cooking while I was there. So, I've been trying out a few new recipes to broaden my Asian food repertoire.

One of the latest to grace our table is Kung Pao Shrimp. As Kung Pao <insert your favourite meat here> appears on many a Chinese menu in the west, some people seem to think that this dish is a western invention that doesn't exist in China. In reality, it does. Kung Pao chicken is a classic Sichuan dish which originated in the province of the same name. The dish is actually named after a late Qing dynasty official who served as the governor of Sichuan. The words Kung Pao actually originated from his title (Gong Bao) which translates as palatial guardian. There are differences, however, between the western and traditional Sichuan versions, the biggest of which is the use of Sichuan peppercorns in the latter which help to give the dish its distinctive hot, numbing flavour. If you can't take spicy food, lighten up on the peppercorns.

Kung Pao Shrimp
From Xi Yan

900g fresh medium seawater shrimps
salt
20 dried chillies (sectioned)
ground Sichuan peppercorn
oil

For the sauce:
1 tbsp Shaoxing wine
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp Zhenjiang vinegar
1 tbsp water
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp cornstarch
1 tbsp sesame oil

1. Wash shrimps then shell them leaving the tails intact. Cut along the back and de-vein. Wipe dry then mix with salt and leave to marinate for 1/2 hour.

2. Mix the sauce ingredients in a bowl and test taste to suit.

3. Heat oil in wok. Add shrimps and deep fry until they are 70% done, start to curl and turn red. Strain and set aside.

4. Wash the wok and wipe dry. Heat 2 tbsp of oil. Add dried chillies and stir fry until they are slightly burnt. Add shrimps to wok and stir fry. Pour sauce onto shrimps and cook until it thickens slightly. Add ground Sichuan peppercorn and stir well.

Dressing up cupcakes

As previously mentioned, while in Toronto, I managed to squeeze in a class on decorating cupcakes at Bonnie Gordon Cakes. For those of you who haven't heard of Bonnie Gordon, she is the genius behind all the wonderful creations featured on the Heather Locklear movie, The Perfect Man. (You can check out pictures of her creations by clicking on the link above)

Having thoroughly enjoyed the Designer Cookie class that I took with several days prior, I was very much looking forward to this particular class. In addition, since I had scheduled a private session, I was relishing the chance to ask all the stupid questions that I had about decorating that I didn't quite want to voice in front of other people.

My teacher this time was a lovely lady named Sarah who spent about 7 years as a pastry chef at a restaurant before deciding to move into cake decorating and chocolate making. She is the person responsible for all the lovely creations featured in the photo at the beginning of this post and below. (Sorry to disappoint those of you who thought I might have been the one who made these lovely cupcakes!)

During our two and a half hour class we covered the basics of decorating cupcakes such as the right buttercream consistency for cupcakes (used to create even mounds on top of cupcakes before layering on the fondant), creating thumb roses and ribbon roses from 50/50 (a 50-50 mix of fondant and gum paste), using cutters, embossers and veiners to create decorations for cupcakes, etc. We also spent time talking about the endless possibilities for coloring the decorations such as using gel pastes, lustre dusts and petal dusts. Before this session, I had no idea the sheer amount of tools that existed to aid in making baked goods look pretty. One can easily spend thousands, and I really mean thousands, on this equipment. Don't believe me? Just go to Yahoo or Google and search for cake decorating or sugarcraft equipment to see for yourself.

In the short time allocated for the class, it was hard to complete many of the more intricate designs that Sarah had done in advance since many of the decorations you see take about 24 hours to fully dry. Still, I was able to create some simple roses, bows and butterflies to make my own cupcakes. (see smaller pictures directly below) I know I've got a long way to go, but hey, you have to start somewhere! In any case, for those of you who are interested in cupcake decorating, I've reproduced the perfect buttercream recipe below. Enjoy!

Perfect Buttercream

1 cup sugar
5 pasteurized egg whites
2 cups butter, room temperature
2 tsp vanilla

Warm egg whites and sugar, whisking continuously over a pot of simmering water. When sugar has dissolved and egg whites are hot, whip meringue in a bowl of an electric mixer until cooled, thick and tripled in volume. Add butter in chunks mixing continuously. When butter if fully incorporated and the buttercream has a smooth silky look, whisk in any desired flavourings.

Fill a piping bag fitted with a round tip and pipe buttercream on tops of cooled cupcakes.

Kaiseki Sakura

As I've now mentioned twice on my blog now, my family and I dined at a wonderful Japanese restaurant last week in Toronto. The restaurant, Kaiseki Sakura, serves an omakase meal which I like to think of as a Japanese version of tapas. In reality, however, the only similarity really is that you get to eat a series of dishes in tasting portion size. Omakase literally means "Chef, in your hands" and when you order one of these, you don't get to choose what you eat. Instead, the chef will make whatever he feels like serving but at most good restaurants, this usually means he will create dishes that showcase his freshest ingredients or those that are in season.

At Kaiseki Sakura, diners get to choose if they want a 5, 6 or 7 course omakase meal. For some reason, however, these numbers do not equate to the number of plates you get served. For a 5 course meal, you get served 7 plates and so on and so forth. For smaller eaters, an a la carte menu is also available. Since there were quite a few women at our table, my family chose to have a 5 course meal, which was also titled Four Seasons.

To start, we were served an amuse-bouche of aubergine and fig puree topped with pomegranate seeds in a martini glass. Unfortunately, in my haste to eat, I forgot to take a picture. Hopefully, the next few pictures will help make up for this!

After this starter was our first real course, which we realized was meant to represent Spring. This was a dobinmushi served in the beautiful Japanese teapot that you see in the picture above. I must say that notwithstanding the quality of the food that we had, part of the fun of the meal was also in the exquisite presentation. For this dish, we were instructed to remove the top of the teapot, which also doubles as a tea cup, remove the lid to the pot and squeeze some lime into the soup within. The soup is then poured into the tea cup for drinking. Finally, the ingredients used to make the soup, including shrimp and mushrooms, can also be eaten.

It comes as no surprise that Summer follow Spring and just like in real life, this plate, in all its multi-hued splendour, did not disappoint. Since I accidentally threw away the piece of paper on which I wrote down the description of each meal, I'm afraid that I'll have to do the description from memory. As such, its likely that I'll miss out several of the ingredients that go towards making each dish so special. For Summer then, the plate consisted of two small servings of fish. The first was a seared salmon with garlic oil on a bed of heirloom tomatoes. The second was a sea bass topped with konbu (sea kelp). The decorative swirls that you see on the plate are made from various kinds of beet and the small leaves are made from deep fried sweet potato.


To go with this dish, we were also given a portion of fresh wasabi and a small grater on which to grate our own wasabi. Yes, even as a paying guest, you have to work for your food!


Before we knew it, Summer was over and Autumn was upon us. This dish, unlike the first few we had, was much more substantial in size and consisted of fewer than 7 different elements. There was a small shot glass of a tart soup that truth be told I can't remember much about except that it was the one thing that I did not like as much. There were also little clusters of edamame tempura, two pieces of unagi sushi, some sea urchin, a shrimp covered in seaweed powder, two meat balls and small pieces of sweet potato covered in crab roe powder. Again, you'll notice that the plate is garnished with some "leaves", again made of sweet potato and appropriately coloured to mirror the shades found in nature.

By this time, I was starting to get really full but I really couldn't pass up on Winter, which was a hearty stew of braised beef tongue served with bread from the famous Thuet bakery in Toronto. While I've had beef tongue before, prior to this, I never knew that it could be so tender. In fact, if you had told me it was just a regular cut of beef, I would have believed you.

Since the menu was titled Four Seasons, I was assuming that after winter we would be served dessert. Unfortunately for my already overbloated stomach, I was wrong. Before dessert, we were served ochazuke which I think of as great hangover food. Its essentially a Japanese style porridge which is usually served with savoury toppings such as furikake or nori. This version was served with a preserved plum paste and garnished with nori as you'll see below. I had to skip most of this dish since I was full almost to the point of bursting but my family thoroughly enjoyed this.

Finally, the course that I'd been waiting for dessert! Thankfully, dessert was on the small side but what it lacked in size, it made up for in satisfaction. The dessert plate was actually a composition of three treats - black sesame cookies, a green tea mousse and a red bean pancake. Just the way to cap a perfect meal.

The omakase menu at Kaiseki Sakura changes every month so you can be sure I'll be back the next time I'm in Toronto to check out what the chef has in store.

Kaiseki Sakura
556 Church Street
Toronto, ON M4Y 2E3
416.923.1010

A new arrival

I'm back from my trip to Toronto and I had an amazingly good time. For starters, it was one of the few times that my whole family got together for an entire week and after almost 11 years away from home, I must say that this was a rare treat indeed. I also got to do many cool things on this vacation including enjoying a fine omakase meal at a great Japanese restaurant and attending two cooking classes, one on decorating cookies and the other on decorating cupcakes. To top it all off, my sister gave birth to her first child. Yes, I am now officially an aunt!

Now, a momentous occasion like this most certainly calls for some sort of celebratory baking. T put my newly acquired skills to the test, I chose to make some baby-themed sugar cookies. Making sugar cookies are easy as pie but in order to create the perfect canvas for decorating it is important that your dough is well chilled so that minimal spread occurs during the baking process. I choose to refrigerate my dough after cutting them out into shapes for about 15 minutes before baking. It is also important not to over brown the cookies in the oven - they should be removed as soon as the edges start to pick up some colour.

Similarly, it is important to achieve the right consistency for the royal icing. The icing used to outline the cookies should be of soft-peak consistency whereas the icing for the floodwork (for the inside of the cookie) should be of a runny consistency. For my cookies, I used cutters in the shapes of a baby pram, a rubber duckie, a square and a flower, and decorated them with white and pink royal icing. I still need some practice to get my outline edges perfectly straight but overall, I was pretty happy with these given it was my first time making decorated cookies like these on my own.


For those of you who may be interested, here are also some pictures of the cookies that I made during the previously mentioned cooking class. If you've never tried making cookies like these, do give them a go. I have to warn you though that's its seriously addictive. The good thing though is that given the range of cookie cutter shapes available, there's always an excuse to make some.



Sugar Cookies

6 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
3 tsp baking powder
2 cups unsalted butter
2 cups sugar
2 large eggs
2 tsp pure vanilla extract

In a large bowl, sift together flour, salt and baking powder. Set aside.

Use an electric mixer to cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Beat in eggs. Add flour mixture and mix on low speed until thoroughly combined. Stir in vanilla extract. Wrap dough in plastic; chill for about 3o minutes.

On a floured surface, roll dough to 1/8 inch thick. Cut into desired shapes. Transfer to an ungreased baking sheet and refrigerate until firm about 15 minutes. Bake at 325F until edges just start to brown, about 8 to 10 minutes. Cool on wire racks. Cookies may be stored at room temperature in an airtight container for up to 2 weeks.

Makes a seriously huge amount of cookies

Royal icing

5 tbsp meringue powder
3 oz water
1 lb icing sugar

Measure all ingredients into a bowl and beat on the lowest speed of your mixer for 15 minutes for full peak royal icing. After mixing, the icing should be covered with a damp cloth if being used and well-covered when being stored.

Doh!

In my last post, I had said that I was on vacation this week and hoping to make up for my lack of posts the week before. Some of you may be wondering, therefore, why I haven't updated in a quite a few days now. Reason is, in packing for my trip to Toronto, I stupidly forgot to pack my camera's USB cable so I can't upload any of my pictures... Arrgh!

I do have a few things saved up for next week including a write-up on a wonderful omakase restaurant here in Toronto, pictures from a cookie decorating that I've taken and a recipe for a crepe cake that I made for my family. Until I get back home, however, I'm afraid that there won't be much happening on this blog. Stay tuned!