Cocoa chiffon cake

I've been making quite a lot of cakes lately. Soft, billowy sponge cakes are the perfect snack to nibble on in summer. Even though the actual process of making cakes requires more work than cookies, at the end of the day you are just responsible for making one 'thing'. For some reason I find the whole process of dividing up a cookie dough into individual cookies strangely tiring, so I tend to shy away from making cookies unless I have an insatiable craving or upon my friends' request.

Chiffon cakes, in particular, are a cinch to make. True, you have to whip up the egg whites, but so long as you make sure your bowl and beaters are clean and use a bit of cream of tartar to stabilise the meringue, it's almost fail-proof. It's much easier than génoise and what I love about it is that it is fantastic served on its own. You can of course glaze it but it's entirely optional.

Chocolate is my favourite flavour of all and here's my rendition of it in the form of a chiffon cake. It's essentially 'basic' - it uses only cocoa powder so it's light enough for people who aren't crazy about chocolate (and trust me, there're more out there than you think!).

Swiss roll

'The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.'

Oscar Wilde

In food as in life, simplicity ought to be the ultimate goal of our endeavours. I'm reminded, however, of Oscar Wilde's timeless aphorism - simple things are only simple superficially. In cooking, for instance, the simplest dishes require the most painstaking precision since every tiny step is going to have profound repercussions for the finished dish.

Take the humble Swiss roll, for instance. The cake we associate with childhood. At its most basic, it's just a sponge sheet rolled up with a whipped cream filling.  With only two ingredients, it's more prone to failure than a fancy dressed up layer cake. The sponge sheet has to be feathery light, moist but not gummy, and God forbid if it cracks when you roll it! No matter how many times I make it, there's always a sense of trepidation every time I make a new one.

Swiss rolls have become really popular in the past few years in Japan and Hong Kong, and you see fancy renditions involving coloured sponges and you-name-it flavours and fillings. The ones you get from good bakeries are actually very pricey, and although I'm tempted by the look of the fancy Swiss rolls every time, I could never bring myself to actually buy one!

The Swiss roll is one of the pastries where I think the original flavour is best. I get tempted by all the exciting flavours - purple potatoes, charcoal, etc. - but there's something very tempting about the pure flavours of eggs and cream. I've experimented with all sorts of sponges for the body of the roll - génoise and chiffon mainly. While chiffon sheets are wondrously soft and moist, it lacks the evenness of texture that I crave. On the other hand, génoises can easily be dry. This can be remedied by adding melted butter to the egg foam, but it's quite a finicky process and it can deflate the batter if you're not adept at it. Some American recipes suggest adding water to the egg foam to make it moist, but I find that it makes the finished sponge rather coarse in texture.

Here's my secret ingredient: whipped cream! Not only is it a dream to fold in, it also adds a creamy flavour to the sponge that complements beautifully with the cream filling. I first got the idea of using whipped cream for a génoise from Flo Braker's brown sugar génoise recipe, but I don't think she used it as a sponge sheet. Once I tried incorporating whipped cream into my génoise, there's no looking back.

Check out my cocoa Swiss roll on more pictures of rolling a cake!

Fastest chocolate fudge cake

It must be a sign of my lack of creativity that I've been shamelessly posting recipes by famous authors lately. I have been spending a lot of time on the piano rather than in the kitchen (believe it or not!) and therefore had to resort to quick, simple recipes that could satisfy my (slightly) sweet tooth.

Let me introduce you to this wonderful, super-easy quick-fix chocolate cake by Alice Medrich who many consider to be America's First Lady of chocolate. She first had an epiphany making and eating real French truffles in Paris - it was a revelation that changed her conception of how chocolate could and should taste like. Upon her return to America, she opened the famed Chocolat shop selling giant truffles as well as other chocolate confections (in California I believe). She was instrumental in awakening America's interest in *real* chocolate rather than the mass-produced, milky stuff produced by Hershey's and other brands.

The very first book I bought by Alice was Bittersweet. It answered many questions about using chocolate in dessert recipes with a depth and thoroughness that was unique. It made me understand why my brownies were so crumbly and almost impossible to hold without breaking: most recipes ask you to fold in the flour as little as possible, but as Alice points out, with the high-fat content of modern brownie recipes, you want to whisk the batter as vigorously as you can so that you develop gluten to hold everything together. I also loved how she varied the amounts of chocolate in a dessert recipe according to the percentage of the chocolate. It just all made perfect sense.

This is Alice's chocolate fudge cake from A Year in Chocolate. I have reduced the sugar amounts dramatically to highlight the chocolate flavour (rather than sugar) as well as modified the mixing method. Do not skip the divine frosting though - it's to die for.

Christmas yule log

Noël, Noël!

“Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which is translated, “God with us”. Matthew 1:22-23

As an ex-Christian-turned-agnostic, my feeling towards Christmas is somewhat ambivalent. While I think that the claims of Christianity are probably untrue, I continue to be moved by the image of a God who is 'Emmanuel' - not the terrifying God of the Old Testament whose name is so holy that one cannot even utter his name - but a God who loves us so much that he became incarnate and lived amongst us. As Umberto Eco puts it so eloquently:

If I am a believer, I find it sublime that God asked his only son to sacrifice himself for the salvation of all mankind. That's what is specific to Christianity: it isn't the fact that Christianity spent 700 or 800 years debating whether Christ is endowed only with a divine nature, or only a human one, or both, or how many persons and wills he incarnated. Such questions seem to me to belong to a futile theological game, whereas what was really at stake was understanding of the following mystery: How could God have done that for us? But if I think that God does not exist, the the question becomes even more sublime: I have to ask myself how a section of humanity possessed enough imagination to invent a God who was made man and who allowed himself to die for the love of humanity. The fact that humanity could conceive of so sublime and paradoxical an idea, on which mankind's intimacy with the divine is founded, inspires me with great admiration for it. There's no doubt but that this same humanity has done some terrible things, but it was able none the less to invent this really extraordinary story, even if God himself does not exist.

Eco's words resonate with how I feel about Christianity in general: the idea of God becoming man is so paradoxical that, on the one hand I feel that it's the most sublime conception of God imaginable, and a pathetically anthropomorphic conception of the ultimate reality on the other.

The Nativity by Federio Barocci

In spite of any misgivings I might have about Christianity (and fundamentalist Protestantism in particular), every year during this season I cannot help but think of what a wondrous idea the Nativity is. It is in this season that (Christians believe) God is born among us and experiences what it is like to be human. No wonder Christianity still exerts such a magnetic hold on so many peoples even after two thousand years.

Please forgive me for ranting about religion in a food blog - but it is Christmas after all and we should all remember why we have this season in the first place, even for non-believers. Since I will not partake in the Church's celebration of the birth of its Saviour, the best offering I could put on the table is a Christmas yule log, which I'm told is the dessert served around Christmas-time in France. It is essentially a chocolate Swiss roll slathered with frosting and decorated like a tree trunk. There's no end to the possibilities of decorations for a bûche de Noël, and I'm sticking to meringue mushrooms as the only additional decoration, although I may try some crushed pistachios next year as well.

Merry Christmas to you all! May this season be filled with joy, peace and traquillity and may we be thankful for the miracle that we are living in.

A more artistic rendition I made last Christmas...

My 29th birthday

I don't know if I'm alone here, but as I started approaching the end of my 20's, each birthday almost became a dread rather than a blessing. That said, I had a very relaxed and pleasant 29th birthday yesterday - especially since I had a stomach flu on my birthday last year! I spent the day meeting up with some of my students and chilling at uni, and had a potluck with friends in the evening at home. After dinner we watched tonnes of YIF magic videos and tried to decipher how he did those unbelievable feats. It was a day well spent and thanks to everybody for their kind birthday wishes!

First of all, the wacky birthday gifts:

Baking gadgets that I requested, courtesy of my flatmate Tim!

Also from Tim: an unusual recording of the Chopin Etudes by Evelyn Brancatt, with 24 accompanying recipes...

My favourite potato crisps and Vita lemon tea from Yuqing and Bing Bing:

Truffles from one of my students

Free vacuuming tickets from my neighbour Hitomi!

And roses (!!) from Jin Hai - the first time I received flowers outside of a recital...! I'm not sure how I should feel about it haha! :P

Cocoa génoise cake with Iron Buddha tea cream and milk ganache

Conquering génoise

I've waited for a long time to write about the génoise cake (海綿蛋糕). It's one of the most basic cakes, yet possibly the most difficult to make. It's the go-to cake in European cake-making and is often used as the building block for layer cakes. The main difficulties in making a génoise are the whipping of the eggs to its optimal (but not maximum) volume, and how not to deflate the batter when you fold in the flour and the fat. Even the most experienced bakers can fail a génoise. There're just too many variables involved, and each deviation would make a noticeable difference in the end. If my memory serves me right it was the very first cake I attempted - why a génoise, of all cakes?

Black sesame pound cake

The virtue of frugality

I still remember the first time when I made 賽螃蟹 (a Chinese dish of stir-fried egg whites) back in boarding school, a friend of mine asked alarmingly, 'What are you going to do with all those egg yolks?' - and we're talking like 9 yolks here. 'To the bin, of course,' I replied, imperious and supremely confident in my own logic. Those poor egg yolks did end up in the bin of course, and ooking back I'm totally appalled by my attitude and ignorance back in those days. I secretly think that I inherited some of that 'wastefulness' from my mum, who never hesitated to throw away leftovers at dinnertime, even when my grandma wanted to save some tidbits for the next day.

I continued to cook like that for the first few years of my 'cooking life' (starting in boarding school) but gradually I started to think more (and harder) about where food came from. Not just where this particular sea salt was harvested, or whether my chicken is a Bresse - it's thinking about the lives of the animals who sacrificed themselves (unwillingly) for our sustenance and carnal pleasure; those farmers, fishermen and workers who worked an imaginably hectic life day and night so that we can just buy our food instead of having to hunt/fish/butcher/grow our animals or produce. It dawned on me that making the most out of one's ingredient is almost a moral imperative - a Kantian categorical imperative even.

So, I gradually tried to make the most of what I had. When I buy a whole chicken, I would save the feet, wing tips and head for making stock; I would save rendered chicken, pork and beef fat in individual containers so that I can cook with them; I would save grated ginger from squeezing ginger juice for frying rice with later; I would save excess tart crust for nibbling; I would add the peel when I poach apples or pears; I would try to pack most unfinished dishes when I eat out, and so on. Not only is it a healthy thing to do, being thrifty with every bit of your ingredient also means that you gain extra flavours at no additional cost. All those skins, peels and rendered fat can 'add' to your dishes in myriad ways and could have much, much better use than a knee-jerk tossing to the bin.

Of course, this is not to saying that I've reached the point where I would try to turn all those unused egg shells into something else - I heard that they are actually pretty good for you, by the way. But I do try to exhaust an ingredient as much as I can. This week I made some black sesame soup (芝麻糊), which is basically black sesame pureed with water and sweetened. Since I had to pass everything through a fine muslin cloth to remove all the 'bits', I was left with a lot of ground sesame. I then used this leftover sesame paste to make a black sesame pound cake. The leftover paste still had some moisture in it and helped keep the cake moist as well.

Earl Grey chiffon cake

The English people are known for their love of tea. Even with the onslaught of coffee chains like Starbucks and Costa in recent years, England is still by and large a tea-drinking nation. Even though it's a terrible stereotype, I did hear the expression 'Would you like some tea?' countless times during the seven years I spent in England (with fond memories, of course). Like coffee, tea refreshes your spirit but doesn't give you the unpleasant jittery attack you get with coffee. It's much more calming and soothing and fits the English national character perfectly - moderation and restraint.

I grew up drinking mainly Chinese tea of course, and I don't think I had heard about the two main types of tea consumed in England, English Breakfast and Earl Grey, until I moved to Wells when I was 16. I remember finding the taste of Earl Grey very intriguing - it had an unmistakable aroma that took me some time getting used to. Its distinctive aroma comes from the addition of oil extracted from the rind of the bergamot orange, a citrus fruit that grows mainly in Italy.

Bergamot orange

Whipped cream cake

There's this saying that people are either cooks or bakers, and that they're entirely different breeds. My first attempts at preparing food was of course cooking rather than baking. When I attended boarding school in Wells, England, the food served at the dining hall was so appalling that I just had to cook something, even though my cooking was probably no better. I remember the very first thing I cooked was 'lemon chicken' - I chopped up chicken breasts crudely, threw it into the wok, and then added this synthetically fluorescent bottled lemon sauce into the wok. Easy accomplishment, I thought, but my momentary self-inflation came to a halt when I put the first bite in my mouth. It was dreadful. I realised there and then that cooking was nowhere as easy as I had imagined. Since that first failure, I cooked almost every day when I was at boarding school (and therefore stank the entire boarding house) and gradually got the hang of it. It wasn't until I moved to London for my undergrad, though, that I learnt about Chinese cooking more systematically by reading excellent food writing and recipes by 江獻珠 and Fuchsia Dunlop.

Moving to London, I occasionally dined at French restaurants which offered cheap lunch deals. A favourite restaurant I used to go in my first year was Deca in Conduit Street near Oxford Circus. Even more than the appetisers and the mains, I was truly captivated by the wonderful world of French desserts. I still remember how unbelievably fresh and fruity their sorbets were - they tasted more 'real' than the real thing! There was also this heart-shaped white chocolate mousse which was encased in tempered chocolate that was just immaculate. A three-course lunch at Deca cost £12.50 so long as you stuck to tap water and avoided wine, which was incredible value for the level of cooking . I got more and more interested in Western desserts, but I didn't start giving a go at baking until my third year of undergrad. The very first dessert recipe book I baked from was Gordon Ramsay's Just Desserts. While it's full of gorgeous recipes, it focuses mostly on restaurant-style, high-end desserts and wasn't so helpful for a novice baker like myself.

Coffee chiffon cake

I've always found it bewildering that in America 'coffee cake' doesn't mean what it appears to mean. While chocolate cake means... chocolate cake, coffee cake has nothing to do with coffee flavour at all. It's simply a cake eaten with coffee - usually a large, flat cake, and often with loads of crumbs on top - think of New York-style coffee cake. I suppose this usage of the word isn't so outrageous when English teacakes aren't really tea-flavoured either!

I think I'm also justified in saying that coffee-flavoured desserts aren't so common in the West. While vanilla, chocolate, lemon, etc. are dominant flavours that you can find across the board, coffee-flavoured desserts are much rarer - maybe ice cream? When coffee is used in desserts it's mostly for enhancing the flavour of chocolate. Other than that I can't think of many desserts that are purely 'coffee'.

Not so in Asia! Coffee-flavoured desserts are among the most popular, ranging from coffee-flavoured Swiss rolls to coffee shortbread. I find this intriguing because Western people drink a lot more coffee than Asians, so you'd expect that coffee-flavoured desserts would be a staple in the West too (rather than in Asia which is by and large tea-oriented). Maybe they already drink enough coffee as a beverage to want it in anything else? :P

There's a marked differences in the kinds of cakes Asians and Westerners like, too. While butter cakes or pound cakes are the most common in the West, Asians like their cakes soft and light - i.e. sponge cakes. Westerns usually find this kind of cakes too dry and plain, and would slather them with syrups (an idea which might prove abhorrent to Asian cake-lovers...). In fact, most Asian cake recipes centre around génoise and chiffon cakes. While genoise cakes are often used as the base for layered cakes, chiffon cakes have an impressive range of flavours and are usually eaten on their own.

Matcha génoise

Matcha green tea butter cake

As an Asian who has lived in the West for a long time, I have a soft spot for western desserts. As much as I like classic flavours like vanilla, chocolate, coffee and butter, I absolutely adore Asian-inspired western desserts. Most Asians are familiar with ice cream flavours like black sesame, red beans, or even tofu. In these East-meets-West creations, the texture is still western, but the flavour is unmistakably Asian. The one flavour that has really taken off in the West, however, has got to be matcha (Japanese green tea). Many westerns enjoy matcha ice cream (even Häagen-Dazs produces it!) as much as coffee or vanilla ice cream, and desserts like matcha biscuits, matcha crème brûlée, and matcha opera cake are popping up everywhere.

Apart from the appealing colour it lends to desserts, matcha is full of healthy antioxidants and helps balance excessive acidity in our diets. However, I find most matcha-flavoured desserts created by western recipe writers way too light-handed - kind of like how Asian recipe writers tend to be unforgivably stingy with the amounts of chocolate they use in chocolate desserts. I suppose something like matcha or chocolate has to be in your culture for a long time for a people to be brought up with it and therefore appreciate the assertive flavours that may seem overwhelming at first.

Food blogging and flourless chocolate torte

I'm a bit apprehensive writing this first post. Even though I love food and give it a lot of thought every day, it's something else when you have to write about it, let alone starting a blog! However, the idea of starting a blog to document (as it were) what I cook and bake has been germinating in my mind for some time. Since there's no better time to embark on it than now, I'm sharing a flourless chocolate torte recipe as the first post of my blog.

For those who know me, I'm a shameless chocoholic. I love chocolate in all its myriad forms - chocolate bar, truffles, ice cream, mousse, cake, hot chocolate - so long as it is made with a good high-percentage chocolate, rather than the milky stuff known to most people as 'chocolate'. I'm kind of a loner among my friends in this respect since most of them find real chocolate too bitter - and in some cases even too acidic. I've therefore secretly made a list in my head dividing my friends into for and against-chocolate camps so that I know who to share my chocolate creations with! lol

Compared to fancy desserts like a frosted chocolate layer cake or chocolate cookies, a flourless chocolate torte showcases the qualities that make chocolate a 'food of the Gods': the voluptuously melting mouth-feel, the earthy aromas, and the indefinably enticing flavours. The plurals here are important I think, since we are blessed with so many fine chooclates from so many chocolatiers worldwide, and each chocolate bar has its own distinct flavours and aromas that there's really no such thing as a 'common chocolate taste'. Mass-produced chocolates of course do have a flat, familiar flavour that most people associate with chocolate, but there's just so much more to the humble cocoa bean!

In something as 'basic' as a chocolate torte, there's not much to mask the flavours of a high-quality chocolate that you have chosen. Most recipes call for chocolate (a hefty amount, of course), eggs, butter and sugar. That's it. For my version, I have also included some espresso to complement the flavour (chocolate and coffee have synergistic powers!) as well as some whipped cream to keep the cake moist. I learnt this secret to a moist flourless chocolate torte from Shirley Corriher's Bakewise: apparently the milk solids in cream partially interfere with the setting of the batter and therefore the torte would end up moister. I've also kept sugar to a minimum so that all you taste is the unadulterated taste of pure chocolate. There's no butter in this recipe so it's relatively low-fat. Strictly for chocolate lovers!