Yes, it’s DURIAN custard filling. You heard it right.

And this year I just want to bake some DURIAN mooncake to curb my craving for DURIAN. Now you know how much I love DURIAN.:)

Anyway, there are a few types of filling other than this custard filling, such as the durian jam (durian kaya) filling which is more time-consuming, but requires less steps and ingredients to prepare. I had seen my late father made once when I was young.

I got this Durian Custard Filling recipe from a friend 2 yeard ago, which she copied from Flavours.

Compared to the Durian Jam Filling, this filling is softer and harder to wrap.

Steaming Time: 30 minutes
Preparation Time: 15 minutes
Make 400-500g Durian Custard Filling

Ingredients A:

40g all purpose flour
150g caster sugar
10g custard powder
10g milk powder
85g unsalted butter, softed
3 eggs
60ml evaporated milk
80ml canned coconut milk

Ingredient B:

5 pandan leaves, knotted

Ingredients C:

300g durian pulp
1tbsp instant custard powder

How-to:

1. Combine ingredients A in a mixing bowl and mix well.

2. Steam the mixture together with the knotted pandan leaves(Ingredient B) for 30 minutes. The pandan leaves will the custard a tinge of pandan frangance.

3. After 30 minutes, remove from the steaming tray and leave to cool. The mixture should look like an big size egg tart.

4. When the custard is cool, add in the durian pulp and the instant custard powder(ingredients C) and mix well.

5. Chill it for easy handling. If you are not using them immediately, just leave it in the fridge, for up to a week. Or keep it in the freezer up to a month. Just make sure your dry your container with a kitchen towel before you put in the filling, to reduce the possibility of contamination.:)

Original Recipe from Flavours
Tried by: SC

Related Posts:

- Mini Durian Mooncakes

Gosh! Time flies. Mid-autumn fest has long gone and this post is late by almost 2 months.

Anyway, even though the mooncake season is long gone, you still can try to make some, if you still have a craving for mooncakes.

And this year I baked some homemade mooncakes with some homemade durian filling.

Mooncake Skin Preparation Time: About 4 hours plus

Ingredients:

350g rose flour/superfine/cake flour, sifted, another 50g for dusting and stand by.
300g golden syrup
50ml peanut oil, extra for oiling
7ml alkaline water

How-to:

1. Mix and stir briefly the golden syrup, alkaline water and peanut oil together and let mixture sit for 30 minutes as it will take a bit of time to mix well. Normally I leave them overnight, but it’s not a must.

2. Then gradually add in the flour, and stir them in one direction till they are well-mixed into a soft dough-like mixture. Again, cover with damp towel and let it rest in the mixing bowl for about 4 hours.

3. By the end of that, your mooncake dough should soft but not sticky to the touch. If it’s still sticky, add a bit more flour gradually. Remember that we had extra 50g of flour. This is the reason for it.

4. Divide them into small portions, about 50g each.

Mooncakes Preparation Time: 30 minutes
Baking Time: 20 minutes
Make: 20 mini mooncake

Ingredients:

Homemade Durian Filling
Some almond flakes for decoration
1 beaten egg yolk for egg wash

How-to:

1. Preheat your oven at 175C degree. Line your baking tray with non-stick parchment paper.

2. Flatten the small dough on your palm and put the durian filling in the center and wrap the skin around it into a ball. When the filling is too soft, it’s difficult to shape.

3. In this case, the durian filling was too soft. If I use the mould, the mooncake will collapse. Hence I didn’t use the mould. I just left my mini mooncake as mini balls or shaped them into little piglet shapes (just like the traditional piglet shaped mooncake biscuit*).

4. Decorate it with almond flakes.

5. Oil the surface slightly before putting them into the oven.

6. After the first 10-12 minutes, take the mooncake out from the oven and brush with egg yolk. Then put them back into the oven for another 15 minutes, till golden brown.

7. Remove and leave to cool on the wire rack.

One good thing about mooncakes is that you are supposed to leave them out so that they will turn soft. Otherwise they will be too hard to chew. So you don’t have to store them in air-tight containers:)

For the fish-shaped mooncake biscuit, you should be able to find the mould in any baking supply outlets. It’s rather common.

Recipe by: SC

Related Posts:

- Durian Custard Filling

This is another fun Halloween project we’d planned for 2010 Halloween:
Halloween Hazelnut Butter Biscuit

What exactly is the difference between biscuits and cookies.

Frankly speaking, imho, they’re the same

I’d like to think that cookies are small and you can finish it in one bite

Meanwhile biscuits should be bigger, shortbread-like, just like the cream crackers, gingerbread and so on. They are dough based and you can shape them with cookie cutters.

Well, these are just my opinion. Everyone is entitled to their own definition!

If you refer to the Wiki, you will see among the Commonwealth countries, they’re practically the same, except for the above mentioned differences. Though in Scotland, biscuits means plain bun.

However, in north America, biscuits are meant for small, soft and flaky leavened bread/quick bread, scone-like, or in the case of cheese biscuits, they mean crackers.

Therefore, at times, it’s difficult to get a stiff dough biscuit recipe(molded cookies/rolled cookies) online.

If you google biscuits/cookies recipes, it’s likely you’ll get a scone recipe or the soft dough cookies recipe.

Unless you key in the right term like molded cookies/rolled cookies.

Anyway, I got this rolled cookies recipe from this ‘Biscuit’ cook book by Seashore.

Since Halloween is just a week away. We decided to try some Halloween decorated butter biscuits for the kids.

Again I tweaked the recipe a little to suit my preference and what I have in my kitchen store.

Preparation Time: 15 minutes
Chilling Time: 30 minutes
Baking Time: 20 minutes
Make 25 Halloween Biscuits in various shapes

Ingredients A:

125g soft unsalted butter, room temperature
1 Grade A egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
20g caster sugar, ground in food processor (optional)
55g soft brown sugar, ground in food processor (optional)
pinch of salt

Ingredients B:

100g self-raising flour, extra for dusting
50g wholemeal flour
1/16 tsp baking powder
40g milk powder
20g corn flour
50g ground hazelnut
Combine and sift the ingredients with a medium size sieve, in a separate mixing bowl

Ingredients C, for royal icing:

250g sifted icing sugar, *50g extra for standby (sifted).
6 1/2 tsp meringue powder
2-3 tbsp warm water
food colouring, orange
*Royal Icing made from meringue powder or dried pasteurized egg whites is safe to consume. However royal icing using egg whites is only meant for decoration, not safe to consume.

Ingredients D:

Melted semi-sweetened chocolate chip, Van Houten
chocolate chips for decoration (Halloween ghosts’ eyes)

How-to:

1. Cream the butter and sugar till fluffy and light. You may want to grind the sugar in the food processor, as the finer the sugar, the finer the texture of your biscuits.

Of course, you can skip the food processor and just replace the sugar with 75g icing sugar. I didn’t use icing sugar, because I like soft brown sugar. It’s less sweet and more fragrant.

Or you may leave the sugar as they are. But the biscuit will have a slightly rougher texture.

In this case, I used wholemeal flour and I skipped the food processor, as the wholemeal flour will give the biscuit a rough texture.

However if you are using only plain flour, you may choose to ground the sugar to give the biscuit a finer texture.

3. Fold in the sifted ingredients B till it becomes a dough.

4. Chill the dough for 30 minutes in the fridge, so the dough will be hard and easier to shape.

5. Preheat your oven to 175C and line your baking tray with non-stick parchment paper.

6. After removing the dough from the fridge, roll it out in a floured working surface and cut them into the shape you want.

6. Arrange the shaped dough onto the lined baking trays and bake for 20 minutes at 175 C, till light brown.

7. Remove from oven and leave to cool on the wire rack.

Royal Icing

8. Whisk icing sugar and meringue powder together. Just well mixed.

9. Add in the warm water and whisk to combine. About 7 to 10 minutes. If too dry and stiff, you can add more lukewarm water by the teaspoon. When the royal icing is ready, it should look thick, stiff, and shiny.

12. To get the consistency you want, you need to add water (by the teaspoon), if the mixture is still too stiff.

Or add more sifted icing sugar if the mixture is too runny.

*That’s why I always sift extra 50g icing sugar in a separate bowl, just in case the final mixture gets too thin and runny.

13. Divide the royal icing into 2 portions and mix in your food colourings respectively for Halloween ghosts and pumpkin decorations.

Remember to cover your royal icing with a damp cloth, when it’s not used, so that it will not crust.

Recipe tweaked by: SC
Original Recipe from Jom Masak ‘Biscuit’ Cookbook by Seashore

This is one of our Halloween projects:
Halloween Red Velvet Cocoa Cake with Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting. It was decorated with the sweet little Meringue Ghosts.

The reason I used Meringue Ghosts for decoration is because they are cute and yummy.

However, the Meringue Ghosts couldn’t really stand our hot and humid Malaysian weather. If left out for too long, they would turn soft and crumble.

But no worries, I’d replaced them with Royal Icing Ghosts, which look just as cute and sweet.

This cake is best served cold as our weather will cause the frosting to turn really soft. It will also start to melt, as the cream cheese consistency wouldn’t hold because of its high dairy fat content.

This cake also tastes just as delicious with French Buttercream Frosting, French Chocolate Buttercream Frosting or Cream Cheese Frosting.

Related Posts:

- Sweet Little Meringue Ghosts

Halloween is just round the corner. We’re working on our Halloween Cake Project, which we bake some cakes and decorate them in Halloween theme.

One of the them is those cute little Meringue Ghost, which I found on Joy of Baking and I couldn’t wait to try out.

This wasn’t my first time making meringue. One of the first few recipes I tried when I first started baking was Japanese Cotton Cheese Cake. And a soft peak meringue is an important step for making a yummy and soft Japanese Cotton Cheese Cake. This was how I learned to make meringue and what’s soft peak and stiff peak.

Making meringue is actually quite easy with a few useful tips to remember:

First your eggs have to be fresh. And when you separate your egg white and yolk, you have to make sure your egg whites are free of yolk, not even a single drop of the yolk. If you are using eggs from fridge, separate them first, then thaw them at room temperature for 30 minutes.

Second, your baking utensils must be really clean and free of oil. Oil will break the whites.

Third, the egg white to sugar ratio: every large (Grade A) egg white to 50g caster sugar.

My first batch was a failure because the eggs that I bought last weekend, weren’t fresh enough. Therefore, the egg whites didn’t form and I had to threw them away. Sad. T_T

In order to make my second batch of meringue, I had to rush out to buy some more fresh Grade A eggs from the nearby shop.

Preparation Time: 30 minutes
Baking Time: 80-100 minutes
Temperature: 110C degree
Make 40 1 inch meringue ghosts

Here are the ingredients:

2 large egg whites
100g caster sugar (1/2 cup)
you can grind it in the food processor as suggested in the original JOB recipe, but I didn’t and my meringue turned out fine.
1/4 tsp cream of tartar
some chocolate chips for the ghosts’ eyes

How-to:

1. Preheat the oven to 100-110C degree. Line the baking tray with non-stick parchment paper.

2. Whisk the egg whites till foamy, then add in the cream of tartar and continue whisking till soft-peaks* are formed.

3. Mix in the sugar gradually while you continue whisking. This way the sugar can dissolve more evenly. However, if you have ground the caster sugar to powder form in the food proccesor, you can add all the sugar in at one go and whisk the mixture till stiff-peaks* are formed and look glossy.

*Soft-peak
When you lift your beater, your mixture will curve and droop.

*Medium-peak
The tip of your mixture will curve only a little, but not drooping.

*Stiff-peak
The tip of your mixture should stand pointing upward, and will not curve. When you overturn your mixing bowl, the mixture remain firm and will not drop.

4. Fill the meringue into a piping bag with a 1/2 inch round tip nozzle.

5. Gently squeeze the filled pipping bag in a circular motion, lift off slowly and you will get a little ghost-like shape with a slight curvy tip.

6. Decorate the meringue ghost with the chocolate chips for the eyes.

7. Bake in the oven for 80 to 100 minutes (1 1/2 hours) at 100-110C degrees till the little ghosts are hard when you touch. And it can be removed easily without sticking to the parchment paper. Otherwise, just continue baking for another 20 minutes so.

With the low temperature, your meringue ghost should not turn brown too much, except maybe only a slight gold tip.

8. Leave them to cool in the oven for maybe 5 minutes and immediately store them in air-tight containers while they are still warm and dry. Otherwise they will turn sticky and soft again due to our Malaysian hot and humid weather.

9. If you happen to leave them too long outside, and they become sticky to your fingers and crumbled, don’t freak out. Just put them back into the oven and bake at 110C degree for about 30 minutes or so. However, they will not be as crispy as it should be.

Original recipe from Joy of Baking & 101cookbooks
Tested by SC

Cute Little Icing Figurines, set of 7

Price: RM15.00

Product Code: WIF

I found a Brownie Cookies recipe my little Martha Stewart ‘Food Everday’ magazine, which I bought some time back.

It’s really a good food magazine with many interesting recipes that are easy and quick to prepare.

Anyway, back to the recipe…

Sadly, all the measurement are in cup rather than gram, which I have problem getting them accurate at times.

So what I did is I changed the recipes as well as the measurement to suit my preference and based on whatever ingredients I have in my kitchen store.

Preparation Time: 20 minutes
Baking Time: 18-20 minutes
Make: 60 cookies

Ingredients :

70g self-raising flour, sifted
40g wholemeal flour
40g ground hazelnut
2 tablespoon cocoa powder
a pinch of salt
1/8 baking powder
a pinch of baking soda (optional)

120g bittersweet chocolate chip

150g unsalted butter, room temperature
100g brown sugar
100g caster sugar
3 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla

How-to:

1. Preheat your oven at 175C degree and line your baking trays with baking paper.

2. Warm your chocolate in microwave for 20 seconds. Then add another 20 seconds till it turns soft and starting to melt.

Give a stir. It should be smooth and runny. If it’s still lumpy, warm for another 5-10 seconds, stir and let cool.

Or you can double boil it, instead of microwaving. Just stir till it melts.

3. Sift the self-raising flour, baking powder, baking soda, cocoa powder and salt together into a small bowl. Then add the wholemeal flour and ground hazelnut and mix briefly till well-mixed.

4. Whisk your butter and sugar in another mixing bowl, till fluffy and lightened.

5. Mix in the flour and melted chocolate alternately. Always begin and end with flour. Flour, chocolate, flour.

Make sure the mixture is well-mixed. You may whisk briefly for a bout 5 seconds.

6. Use a teaspoon to spoon the mixture onto the baking trays and leave a space about 2 inches between cookies.

7. Bake for about 18-20 minutes. Use a toothpick to insert into the center of the cookie comes out clean.

8. Remove and and place on a wire rack to cool before transferring into jars.

To my surprise, the cookies taste great and very crunchy, even though I’d tweaked the recipe quite a bit especially the ingredients’ measurement.

My husband and the kids just couldn’t popping them as tea snack, while I like them with a glass of cold milk just before bed.

Recipe by: SC

Apart from ginger, pulut is another of my favourite ingredient. I love everything with pulut such as ‘Bak Chang’/Glutinous Rice(肉粽), nasi kunyit, ‘ang ku kueh’, kueh talam and many more.

Unfortunately, I have to reduce my intake of pulut (glutinous rice) delicacies due to my sensitive digestive system!

A few years ago, I used to have ‘ang ku kueh’ (红龟粿) for breakfast almost every day, except on weekends.

However, one day I noticed the ‘ang ku kueh’ sold at my work place is no longer tasty. The skin was not as chewy as before and the filling was tasteless like plain sugar paste.

It’s really difficult to find delicious and authentic ‘ang ku kueh’ these days.

Now, every time, I see ‘ang ku kueh’ at any stalls, I have to think twice before buying them.

The only logical option was to make my own. Of course, not being an expert in kueh-making, I had to do tonnes of research – for good recipes, how to make my own filling and preparing the glutinous rice skin. Sound intimidating? Once you get the hang of it, it’s actually quite simple.

For the filling, you can get canned red bean paste. Being a hands-on person, I preferred to make my own. Red Bean Paste. I used about half-a-day to prepare it and kept it in the freezer.

Then, I made the dough for the skin on a different day.

Makes: 18 ang gu kueh/ ang ku kueh
Dough Making: 30 minutes
Assembling & Moulding: 20 minutes
Steaming: 8-10 minutes.

For skin

Ingredients:

200g sweet potatoes, steamed and mashed
380g glutinous rice flour, sifted. Extra for dusting.
200ml water
50g caster sugar
3 tbsp vegetable/corn oil, extra for oiling
1 tbsp tapioca flour
2 big banana leaves, some cut into 18 small pieces (8×8 cm) and boiled in hot water briefly
2-3 drops red food colouring
1 medium sized ang ku kueh mould

For the small boiled dough:

50g glutinous rice flour
40ml water
*This boiled dough is to make the skin more elastic and less likely to break apart when assembling and moulding.

How-to:

1. Steam your sweet potatoes till soft, and mashed them up. The finer the better.

I used yellow sweet potatoes. Or you may use the orange or purple coloured sweet potatoes. Then you don’t need food colouring.

The sweet potatoes is to add flavour to the skin and give it a more chewy texture.

2. When steaming the sweet potatoes, you can make a small dough with about 50g glutinous rice flour and 40ml water. Then boil the dough in hot water till it floats. Set aside to cool.

3. Mix your glutinous rice, tapioca flour, sugar and mashed sweet potatoes together. Add in the water bit by bit with the small boiled dough and start mixing them together and knead them into a dough.

If your dough is still too sticky, add some glutinous flour. The dough should not stick to your hands.

3. Then add in the oil one teaspoon at a time, and knead till it’s smooth and shiny.

4. I split the dough into 2 portions. I left one portion as it is. I added some red food colouring to the other portion and mixed it well.

5. Dust your working surface and hands with some glutinous rice flour. Roll your dough into 1 inch thick long dough. Cut into 18 small pieces, about 1 to 1 1/2 inches wide.

6. Prepare 18 red bean paste balls, about an inch in diameter.

7. Flatten the small dough in your palm, about 2-3mm thickness. Then put the red bean paste onto the middle of the flattened dough and wrap into a ball.

8. Dust your mould with some glutinous rice flour before you mould your kueh.

9. Grease your 8cm x 8cm banana leave surface before placing the moulded kueh on it.

10. Put your ready-to-steam ang ku kueh into a tray covered with banana leaves. Leave a 2-inch space between each kueh to prevent them from sticking together.

11. Brush your moulded kueh surface with a thin layer of oil.

12. Steam for about 8-10 minutes. Don’t over-steam, or the ‘ang ku kueh’ will be too soft and start melting. When your ‘ang ku kueh’ get too soft and starts to flatten, the pattern will look distorted.

13. Remove your ‘ang ku kueh’ from your wok and leave them to cool.

This was my second try.

During my first try, I tried using the blue pea flowers juice to make the blue colour ‘ang ku kueh’. But it didn’t turn out well.

When the blue juice mixed with the yellow sweet potaoes, the ‘ang ku kueh’ turned green. That’s how I got my first non-pandan green ‘ang ku kueh’.

I learned that the hard way. However, I believe you can get non-pandan green ‘ang ku kueh’ by mixing the yellow sweet potatoes and purple sweet potatoes together. It’s a lot easier.

This recipe was referenced from a few sources:
My Asian Kitchen & Amy Beh’s Ang Koo Kueh
Tried out and photographed by: SC,

Related Posts:

- Red Bean Paste(红豆馅)

Red bean paste is commonly used as a filling in many types of Chinese pastries such as mooncake, red bean bun, red bean dumpling, Nyonya delicacy like ang ku kueh(红龟粿), Shanghai delicacy such as Shanghai bean paste cake(豆沙锅饼) and many more.

Cooking Time: 60 minutes
Sifting and Mashing: 30 minutes
Frying Time: 45-60 minutes, for 500g red beans.
You may need more time if you are preparing a bigger batch.

Ingredients:

500g Red Bean
50g butter/ground nut oil
120g finely granulated sugar, you may add more, if you prefer sweeter
1 tbsp maltose
2 pcs pandan leaves

How-to:

1. Clean the red beans and pick out the impurities.
You can soak the red beans overnight or for at least 2 hours, though I didn’t soak the beans at all.

Soaking the red beans overnight will shorten the cooking time.

2. Together with the pandan leaves, bring the red beans to boil in the pot, and let it simmer till beans are soft.

The water level should cover the beans with an extra inch of water above the beans. If the water dries out too quick, add warm or hot water only.

3. When the beans are soft and have opened up, take out the pandan leaves and use a sieve to separate the paste and the skin. Use a spoon to mash the beans on the sieve. The skin will be caught while the fine watery paste will pass through the sieve into a pot. Keep the skin.

4. Separate the paste from the moisture with a cloth sieve. The paste will remain in the cloth sieve while the water will drain into another pot.

Don’t throw away the red bean water. Just add in the separated skin and some sugar, then serve cold. It’s healthy and cooling for a hot sunny afternoon.

5. Now, you have your fine and smooth red bean paste. Warm your frying pan and melt the butter.

6. Add in the red bean paste into the melted butter and stir.

7. Add in the sugar and keep stirring. Don’t let it burn and stick to the pan.

8. Since most of the water has been drained away in step 4, it won’t take too long for the red bean paste to dry – roughly 30 to 45 minutes.

9. Finally, add the maltose into the paste and keep stirring. Mix well. The paste should have a dough-like consistency, soft but not sticky.

Recipe by: SC

Related Posts:

- Ang-Gu-Kueh / Ang-Ku-Kueh红龟粿

Most commercial baking powder we buy from the store usually contains aluminium, sodium aluminum sulfate.

So why not making your own aluminium-free baking powder. It’s as easy as ABC.

Ingredients:
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp cream of tartar
1 tsp corn starch* (optional)

There, you have 3 tsp of baking powder!

Just make sure you sift them thoroughly so that they are well mixed.

*Corn starch is to prevent the baking powder from reacting before used. If you are using it immediately, then you don’t need the corn starch.

And it’s recommended that you should just make enough each time you need it and don’t store them for too long.