An early birthday at Jamie's Italian Canary Wharf

I promised the shortbread-lover that I'd start this post with a little shout-out, so here goes:

"Hello, Dominic Lam!"

May has always been a big birthday month for us -three girls, three birthdays, three bulls. Ever since I can remember, May has also always been the month for exams so birthday celebrations have always been a bit of a jigsaw puzzle for us. One of my pieces of the puzzle this year was a rather early birthday celebration at a little Italian place that I had been wanting to visit for awhile now.

Jamie's Italian
Churchill Place Mall,
Canary Wharf,
London, E14 5RB

There's definitely a novelty that comes with eating at a restaurant owned by a celebrity chef. The travel and food channel has always been a favourite of mine and I remember when it started airing some of Jamie Oliver's cooking shows - unlike most other cooking shows that time, these episodes featured a laidback, rather scruffy looking Englishman that made cooking look incredibly easy. Nothing ever seemed overly complicated with him. I suppose I identified with that, being someone who loves the freedom of just tossing anything and everything into the pan to see what happens.

The first thing you'd notice when you step into the restaurant is the relaxed vibe that it exudes - it's warm and inviting but without any of the stiffness that sometimes comes with the fancier restaurants.

After a rather extensive session of "hmmming" and "harrring", we finally order, some of us choosing to start with some antipasti.

Pumpkin and burrata with chilli, sage and herby shoots.

Truffle Salami - artisan salami, mildly flavoured with truffle and black pepper

Diana and I couldn't resist ordering some crsipy fried squid with garlicky mayo, something we picked out even before it was recommended by our waiter. We both loved the "really garlicky mayo" that was an excellent complement to the crsipy squid. My only gripe is that I wished the portion of squid was a little larger.

Rabbit Ragu Pappardelle. I have to admit, I'm the type of person who likes to take a quick look at a restaurant's website before I visit it and this was the dish that stood out for me when I took a look at the menu on the website. I wasn't disappointed - the slow-cooked rabbit was tender and flavourful but not overpowering and one cannot help but be a little amused by the curly pasta.

Seafood linguine. The restaurant also runs a daily specials menu and we picked this one off it.

The very aptly named Fish in a Bag

Truffle Pasta.

Some other pasta dishes and mains that made it to our table were the wild truffle risotto and the lamb chops.

Nothing, however, prepared me for dessert.

When they brought out this gorgeous looking cake, I couldn't believe that it was homemade. I cannot think of anything better - a cake made out of frozen yoghurt in my favourite flavour (green tea!) and some of my favourite toppings (strawberries and chocolate brownies!). Absolutely perfect. The fact that my friends had thought up something like that (and proceeded to produce such a divine cake) made me feel extremely loved. I'm probably not the most sentimental person by nature, but oh boy was I touched.

Jamie's Italian is good for special occasions - food is of a high quality, service is pleasant and while it's perhaps a little pricier than the average Italian restaurant, there's that added novelty of sitting down to a meal at a celebrity chef restaurant. The menu seems to be seasonal as the last time I checked, some of the things we had aren't on the menu anymore but any form of seafood linguine or ragu pasta would be a good way to go. What I'll remember most about the visit though won't be the food or the service but the way good company managed to take my mind of a less-than-pleasant first final exam and make me feel like I was queen of the world.

Very Berry Shortbread

After our black forest cake adventure, we had a little extra berry filling left. While it sat in a little bowl at the corner of the refrigerator, I toyed with the idea of making a berry pie and even entertained the thought of attempting a swissroll of some sort. In the end, it was the simple shortbread cookie that won out (after a housemate not-so-subtley hinted that he could really do with some shortbread cookies).

I made a lemon-orange-less version of the shortbread cookies and topped them off with the berry filling from the summer black forest cake.

I'd call them a lazy person's version of scones - it's got all the buttery goodness of the scones, without the extra technique involved in producing them.

Another one of those perfect late-night-study snacks.

A Summer Black Forest Cake

Cake and ice cream - they were real treats growing up, only making appearances when birthdays came around. Back then, before the days of indulgent mousse-filled triple-decker cakes from large chain bakeries, the black forest cake was the crowd pleaser. In some households, it was probably second only to to the equally crowd-pleasing jelly-topped pandan cake. The black forest cakes of my childhood were probably more a celebration of whipped cream than anything else - I can picture in my minds eye, the marachino cherries and the chocolate curls adorning the thick layer of cream on top of the cake. With that said, I still absolutely loved how the cream would give way to the soft chocolate sponge. Yes, I was all about the chocolate, often scooping out the cherry filling and leaving it at a little corner on the plate.

"What would boys like?"
"Chocolate"

We were going through some cake recipes, trying to pick one for Hanad's birthday and the black forest cake came to mind. Chocolate for the boys - check. Fruits to help the girls feel just a little bit better about having cake - check.

We decided to add a little summer spin to it because we simply couldn't resist those lovely strawberries that we get this time of year.

Based on Linda Greer's Black Forest Cake I Recipe

Ingredients:

Cake:
2 1/8 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups white sugar
3/4 cups unsweetened cocoa powder
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
3 eggs
1 cup milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Filling:
2 cans black cherries
1/2 cup white sugar
1/4 cup cornstarch
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
juice of 1 lemon
8-10 strawberries
whipped cream


Preheat oven to 175 degrees Celsius. Grease and flour two 9 inch cake tins.
In a large bowl, combine flour, 2 cups sugar, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Add eggs, milk, oil, vanilla and beat until well blended.
Pour and equal amount of batter into the prepared cake tins and bake for 35 minutes or until a wooden toothpick inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean.
Allow the cakes to cool before removing them from the tins.


Drain cherries, reserving 1/2 cup juice.
Combine the reserved juice, cherries, sugar, cornstarch and strawberries in a saucepan. Cook over low heat until thickened, stirring constantly.
Stir in vanilla and add lemon juice. Allow to cool before using.

Spread a generous layer of berry filling on one of the cakes before topping it off with the whipped cream. Gently place the second cake on top of the first one, creating a sandwich.

We made it a little easier on ourselves by only having two layers of cake - horizontally splitting the cakes to create more layers seemed a little too ambitious for us. The strawberries gave the filling a freshness (and a little something to remind us of the better weather) that I loved while the slight zing from the lemons provided a foil to all that sweetness.

"But where's that whipped cream topping?", you say.

We decided to use a simple chocolate frosting to finish off the cake (yes, even more chocolate for the boys!) and let everyone have free rein of how much cream they want with their cake. I think the birthday boy enjoyed this little interactive bit - treating the can of whipped cream like a weapon and taking joy in completely covering his cake with a mountain of cream.

So there we go, my grown up Black Forest Cake - less cream-laden, marachino cherry-less and absolutely delicious.

"Lord of all Biscuits"

The rich tea biscuit is everything that a decadent chocolate chip cookie is not - it's light as a feather and is perfectly capable of just blending into the background. They are probably just a step up in terms of standout ability from cream crackers. In fact, until about a year ago, I always thought that rich tea biscuits were made from tea extracts or something along those lines.

It's funny how these things quietly sneak up on you - one day after having my very first rich tea biscuit out of lack of choice, I fell helplessly in love with the simple wallflower of a biscuit. To think that I had been missing out all this while.

So if you, like me pre-rich-tea-enlightenment, always pick the more attractive looking cookies from the middle shelf at the supermarket over the plain janes stacked in the bottom row, I say give those plain janes a go - you might be pleasantly surprised.

Queen Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

"I'm coming over to bake cupcakes"

And that was that - another Wednesday afternoon spent in the kitchen with Ju Vern attempting to turn out adequately attractive cupcakes for someone's birthday and a charity bake-off. The cupcakes came from a simple recipe from her mum, quirky-ly titled "Queen's Cupcakes". While it slipped my mind to get the recipe from her, I did manage to find a similarly named recipe with the help of good old Google (really, what would the world do without google?).


Queen Cupcakes, taken from Bake Space with a cream cheese frosting

Ingredients:

Cupcake:
100g flour
75g butter
75g castor sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
milk to taste
50g raisins

Cream cheese frosting:
75g butter, softened,
75g cream cheese
1 tsp vanilla extract
sugar to taste

Preheat oven to 190 degrees Celcius.
Sift flour and baking powder.
Cream butter and sugar until light and creamy before adding the lightly beaten egg to the mixture.
Add vanilla essence and fold in flour and baking powder. Add milk until the batter has a soft dropping consistency. Mix in raisins.
Fill 3/4 of each cupcake shell with the batter and bake for 25 minutes or until golden brown.
To make the frosting, cream butter, cream cheese, vanilla extract and incremental amounts of sugar. Adding sugar a bit at a time and tasting as you go along gives you control of how sweet you want your frosting to be.
Allow cupcakes to cool before spreading the frosting.

The cupcakes are a breeze to make - the perfect recipe to fall back on when you need to make a quick dessert. It's also a good basic recipe to play around with (I suspect that adding some lemon or orange juice in place of milk would be a good twist). The bit that we didn't find so easy, however, was the decorating of the cupcakes. While cream cheese frosting is absolutely delicious (yes, even on its own) it's quite tricky to work with. Colouring doesn't mix very well with it and it doesn't have that stiff consistency that usual frosting or icing has.

So some lessons learnt that afternoon:

1. Mixing more and more food colouring into cream cheese frosting does not make it look better - in fact, what you get is crazy looking, psychedelic frosting.
   
2. Cream cheese frosting dissolves makeshift paper funnels.
3. It may be a good idea to invest in a basic cake-decorating kit.

The thing about the cream cheese frosting, though, is that it's so good that you forgive it for being difficult.

I've come away from the experience wanting more than ever to spend some time experimenting and learning how to make my food look gorgeous. Perhaps I've watched one too many episodes of Masterchef or read far too many amazing food blogs - whatever it is, I think it's time I learnt a thing or two about presentation.

Any suggestions on where to begin?

Apple Crumble Pie

Before moving to the UK, apples were well, just apples. I could never tell one variety of apple from another, all types just merging into one. To be completely honest, apples were never really my thing. The thing is, you can't help but know your apples (at least some of them) in this country and after three years, I've decided that apples are in fact, my thing especially those lovely, sweet gala apples. So it doesn't come as a surprise when I decided one afternoon that the only cure to the brain-muddling that came with trying to decipher equation after equation was apple pie.

Adapted from LEHOUX's Apple Crumble Pie Recipe and B1BMOM's Easy Pie Crust Recipe

Ingredients:

Pie crust:
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons white sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 tablespoons milk

Filling:
5 apples, thinly sliced (I used gala, of course)
1/2 cup white sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Crumble:
6 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup white sugar
3/4 cup all-purpose flour

Preheat oven to 200 degrees celcius.
Place all pie crust ingredients in a bowl and mix well.
Pat mixture into bottom and up sides of a 9 inch pie pan. Using a fork, pierce the bottom and sides of the crust lightly.
Bake for 15 minutes in the preheated oven, or until light brown.

Once the baked pie crust is sufficiently cool, arrange the apple slices in the shell.
Mix 1/2 cup sugar and cinnamon; sprinkle over apples.

Mix 1/2 cup sugar with flour and mix in butter until crumbly (your fingertips are the best tools for this).
Spoon the crumble mixture over the apples and bake for 35 to 40 minutes, or until apples are soft and crumble is a golden brown.

Alright, so it's not really your traditional apple pie but I love how the crumble adds that extra texture to it (and really, who doesn't love toasty, slightly crunchy, crumble?). I have to admit that (yes, another admission) before I came to the UK, I never truly appreciated the the magical powers of custard. I reckon that this could be due to the Malaysian rendition of custard always being a tad too sweet and tasting too much like condensed milk. I discovered in my time here that smooth, creamy custard can be extremely addictive and is often the perfect complement to dessert. So, while warm apple pie with a generous side of vanilla ice cream will always be the winning combination for me, I highly recommend giving the pie-custard pairing a go.

And yes, apple crumble pie does wonders for the muddled brain.

Orange-Lemon Shortbread Cookies

Some time during the peak of the chocoholic's chocolate chunk cookie baking madness, I decided that we needed something, anything, to break the all-consuming chocolate cycle. I was craving something a bit lighter, something with a bit of acidity and zing to it.

I scouted around for something simple and quick to whip up and thought that lemon shortbread cookies sounded absolutely perfect.

Adapted from Debster's Lemon Shortbread Cookies Recipe

Ingredients:
1 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup light brown sugar, packed
2 cups sifted flour
zest of one lemon
zest of one orange
juice of one lemon
castor sugar for sprinkling

Preheat oven to 325 degrees celcius.
Cream butter and sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer.
Add lemon juice, zest and flour. Mix well on low speed.
Drop cookie dough balls on an ungreased baking sheet.
Bake for 15-20 minutes or until cookies are light brown
Sprinkle some castor sugar onto the tops of the cookies as soon as they are removed from the oven, while they are still soft.

Some of the comments about the original recipe involved the cookie being not lemony enough and because I really wanted something with a punch, I increased the amount of lemon zest and juice. After deciding that I would use the zest of two lemons, I discovered that we only had one lying around in the kitchen so I thought some orange rind would be a good substitute and it was - the orange zest gave the cookies a more well-rounded flavour. Sprinkling some sugar on top of the cookies while they were still soft let the sugar set a little - the sweetness of the slightly crunchy sugar was a lovely complement to the sharp, bold cookie.

Light, buttery, uplifting - perfect with a cup of tea.

So there we go, the antidote to too much chocolate - orange-lemon shortbread cookies.