Recipes from and for the people I love
..no gift can thank you enough.
These are some of my favourite books which i know you’ll enjoy.
Amazon is shipping them off to your doorstep soon!
PS. i hope this doesnt make u start a cookbook shopping spree, collecting cookbooks is a dangerous addiction.. D may kill me!
PPS to smms, u can email me at nfarhan29@yahoo.com.sg
You make Sunday roast..
..recipe from your favourite cookbook..
..read between cool sheets with the air conditioning on (can anyone stand the mid year heat and humidity in Singapore now??)
..Tea was homemade Valrhona cookies after a long nap with a glass of very cold milk.
More to come with recipes.. And photos of the mess in my kitchen after cooking a meal. I’m exhausted from all the cleaning rather than cooking!
I made a vow to myself to start baking from the books I currently have till I have mastered the recipes and techniques before buying another. There’s still that voice in me that’s screaming “I need another cookbook!!” But lucky for H, I surpress that monster. Though it still comes out once in a while especially when I feel the need of some cheering up. Cookbooks have it all, beautiful words that read like a novel, pretty photos, glossy pages, excellent design, hard covers, slippery jackets, big and heavy, and everything else I love in a book.
So anyway I am going to cook my way thru my cookbooks and what better way to begin than with the pastry master himself. I had some cream that was going to expire soon so these truffles were perfect. You need just 4 ingredients: chocolate, cream, butter and cocoa powder. I used Valrhona Equitoriale 55% which was S$9.50 for 300g at Sia Lik. I used only one container for the whole recipe so its quick and easy and not much cleaning is involved in making the ganache. The cocoa powder part is a little tricky though.
Black-on Black Truffles
Adapted from Chocolate Desserts By Pierre Herme
260g bittersweet chocolate
1 cup heavy cream (I used Bulla’s Pure Cream)
31/2 tablespoons butter
cocoa powder for dusting
How I did it:
Melt the chocolate in microwave on high for 40-60 seconds in a plastic container with a cover like an old plastic ice cream tub or tupperware, timing may vary according to your microwave. My chocolate was at room temperature and my microwave is quick so I had to watch it to make sure the chocolate didn’t burn. It took slightly under a minute. Add in the cream and stir to blend, then the butter a tablespoon at a time. Stir to melt. You may need another zap in the microwave if your cream was very cold to start with and the chocolate and cream mixture has become too cold to melt the butter. Leave the ganache to cool at room temperature for a couple of minutes. Cover the container with the lid and leave in the fridge to set(now u can make sense of the tupperware bit right, less washing up and the ganache is in an airtight container), about 3 hours or overnight if its convenient for you. Put your cocoa powder into a bowl and dust your hands with the powder. Scoop a tablespoon of the cold ganache onto your palm and roll to form a ball, this can get a little messy. Toss it back into the cocoa powder and gingerly toss it around to coat. Put straight onto serving plate or in a covered parchment lined airtight container and kept in the fridge for consumption later.The ganache itself is very yummy. But please let it set to let it live to its full potential as a fat round truffle.
Addition: I think the cream wasn’t such a good idea because of the high fat content (read:45% milk fat) the ganache ended up solidifying to quite a hard block, akin butter. And I had one hell of a time rolling it into balls. In the end my truffles looked like chocolate rocks. Ugly chocolate rocks. I have to be brutally honest. I found it easier to roll when it rested a mere 2 hours in the fridge than when it rested overnight.
For help always turn to Martha. All photos courtesy of MarthaStewart, I gave away all the truffles before having the time to photograph them. And yes, they were VERY ugly.
On a separate note, I have so many photos from the bolywood veggies outing, here’s a sneak:
Somehow snails move seem to move very fast when you’re trying to squat, adjust your manual focus, hold your umbrella and try not to get the camera wet.
Erm Shafia (my cousin), somehow your umbrella followed me to Kranji. I think you left it at my mom’s house and I somehow picked it up and brought it home with me then its sort of found its way to my car. I only looked at it at bollywood veggies and somehow figured out it belonged to you. Let me make it clear here: when I went to medical school, it WAS NOT called Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, it was called Faculty of Medicine.
Because wordpress doesn’t allow me to shrink my vertical photos without blurring it, here’s a gigantic photo of the kuih bingka. Oh the kuih bingka. If I can create an idiom today, it would be: “never trust a bingka with a flat top” Bingka is a Malay cake made of grated tapioca, coconut milk and sugar and it should definitely have a craggy crispy top! I also had a delicious, small overpriced loaf of banana cake that was oh so delicious, I’ll share my favourite recipe soon and more photos, including the “warriors” that run Bollywood veggies.
I spent today moping bout my too short a weekend like a love lost.
This is a fabulous book. I started looking around for chocolate sources in Singapore, so this is what I found. Its for my own reference if and when I can get around to buying and making something from the book!
I think women love chocolate more than men, (support me here..). I asked H is he liked chocolate, there was too long a pause before he said yes. H doesn’t have a sweet tooth, I think I’ve mentioned this before. He’s more a savoury man. More chocolate for me then 
The suppliers (where they sell in 6.6 pound bags, about 3 kilos) I found at valrhona.com were:-
EURACO FINE FOOD PTE LTD
BLK 219 / HENDERSON RD / INDUSTRIAL PARK
159556 SINGAPORE
VALRHONA FAR EAST
BLOCK 215, HENDERSON ROAD #1-3, HENDERSON INDUSTRIAL PARK
159554 SINGAPORE
Please don’t ask what and why I want to buy a 3 kilo bag, I don’t have the answer yet.
You can also check out smaller quantities at http://www.b-i-y.com/valrhona.htm which is a small bake shop near KK hospital (Quizas, any inclination to walk down and have a look?) Extracted from their site, the price of their darkest (most expensive) chocolate is:-
| Feve Araguani Boite | 72% | 500 gm | 54 | $23.80 |
The other place is Sunlik. Apparently based on my research on blogs, a 1 kilo bag costs $30.
Sun Lik Trading Pte Ltd
Contact Details
Physical Address: 33 Seah Street
Singapore 188389
Phone: +65 633 80865
Fax: +65 633 92685
Email: mailto:sunlik@pacific.net.sg
I am eyeing these recipes in the book: chocolate mousse, chocolate rice pudding as I still have a bag of arborio from my risotto foray, chocolate coated caramel almonds, caramel rice crispies..
Recent Comments