Baking Person

I went back to Columbus a couple of weeks ago. It was great to spend time with my boyfriend and buckeye friends:D. Before the trip, I wanted to bake something for my boyfriend's birthday. He wanted fruit tart but there was no way for me to take it to my 8-hour-long roadtrip. So, instead, making most of my ripe banana and apple bags, I baked apple banana cake! As usual, I found a recipe online and modified it to do with what I have in the kitchen, lol. I put one extra apple to make up for having less bananas. The apple chucks were taking up probably half the volume of the batter. It turned out moist and a bit fragile. Some pieces were breaking apart when cutting it into individual pieces. It is the top golden cake in the picture. Yes, I ate the little corner of the piece on the far right. It was applicious though! I would recommend this cake to all the apple lovers. I always thought I am more of a banana person but the combination of two was not so bad:D. I still have some apples and banana left. What should I bake this time???

I also felt like baking muffins. I just bought raspberry jam so I filled up a mini muffin pan. There was still a little bit of batter left so I poured it into the cake pan. The muffins were very tiny. I guess it was either I didn't add enough baking powder or the jam was too heavy. The one in the cake pan turned out flat and smooth as you can see from the picture. At first, I thought of writing a message on it but the chocolate syrop tube was too thick for that. Easy fix, draw a smiley on it. It looks like a person now. It is just a first step to bake a character cake. I will welcome any requests. I need some inspirations for this project;P.

Tea break

I finally used my new hand mixer! I found out it is too strong to mix some powdery stuff even if I set it as 1, which is the lowest. It blew away some sugar and butter at the beginning. Except for that part, I am liking my new cooking device;). It is definitely saving some preparation time for me. Wait for me to come up with my own baking recipes!

Well, I started off with earl grey cake. My mom gave me her recipe through her blog. I imagine we will be good competitors in the food blog world. Anyhow, I mixed sugar and butter, added flour and tea leaves, and shoved it in the oven! I think it took longer for me to measure ingredients than mix everything. Actually, I could not whip the butter and egg until it turned whitish because the hand mixer was just so strong that I was afraid to lose too much of the mixture all over the kitchen counter. I learned something from it so I stirred the mixture before I turn on the hand mixer in the later steps.

The best thing about it is the cake was delicious! It was sweet and addicting. What was even better is to share good food with people. I shared it with my roommates like how my old roommate used to do--I miss her baking, lol. Everyone liked the cake and we took some ramdon pictures. Two of them brought their sweets to share and it turned into a late night food party. I'm so glad I didn't live by myself. The other roommate suggested me to have a baking basket in the kitchen. She said I could wrap individual pieces and leave price tags on them. For a second, I thought of it but then I remembered how my roommates used to share their bread, cakes and cookies at M-Castle. If there is any left, I will probably just leave it on a kitchen counter and let people take it. If I really need to fundraise for something, I might temporarily open a little bakery. For instance, I really want a certain cooking tool or something. I believe sharing what I bake with people is part of the joy. My next challenge is cake with soy milk or soya drink according to the label. I will welcome any crazy ideas for it:D. I am thinking of soy milk cheesecake but I haven't decided on the details yet.

Here is a picture of my tea cake on top and some delicious brown rice balls wrapped in shiso leaves. Shiso is apparently called beefsteak leaf in English but I have never seen beefsteak in a regular grocery store so I will call it shiso here. It has a strong herbish flavor in it. We use it when we wanna make things take kinda refreshing. My roommate is really good at decorating things. He made those little rice balls into wonderful artworks. I was full but still had to try one of them:). It's a food critic's destiny. Taste it or leave it... Just so you know my cake does not go well with those rice balls. They were two separate things.