The Household COO

Welcome to my blog. These are the memoirs of an undomestic goddess who went from a high flying corporate career to stay-at-home-Mum. Join me as I learn about Chinese culture, how to cook and decorate a home. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

This is a recipe adapted from one of the free recipes by The Sneaky Chef.

Ingredients:

• 2/3 cup whole wheat flour
• 1/3 cup plain flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 large eggs
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup canola oil
• 3/4 cup carrot and sweet potato puree (1 medium sweet potato, 3 medium carrots, 2-3 tablespoons water)
• 3/4 cup smooth peanut butter

Method:

1. Peel carrots and sweet potato and blend with water in a Vitamix.  (If you don’t have a high power blender, steam of boil them in water to soften them first).
2. Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celcius and grease a muffin tin.
3. In a mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt; set aside.
4. In another large bowl, whisk together the eggs and sugar until well combined,
5. Whisk in the oil, sweet potato and carrot puree and peanut butter.
6. Fold the dry ingredients into the wet and mix until flour is just moistened (don’t over-mix or the muffins will be dense).
7. Scoop about two to three tablespoons of batter into the large muffin cups until half full.
8. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until the tops are golden brown.  I think I should add that the Sneaky Chef recipes tend to over cook when following their recommended cooking times and temperatures.  The original cooking time was 25-30 minutes, but mine were done in less than 20.

Personally, I felt this recipe was a little too “healthy” tasting for something that is supposed to be health food in disguise.  If I had to make them again, I would:

• add some walnuts
• add a little more sugar or top them with cream cheese frosting
• replace the whole wheat flour with plain flour.

As it is, I don’t think I’ll be in any hurry to try this one again.

After reading about The Sneaky Chef for hubbies, I decided to try out one of the The Sneaky Chef recipes for children on my son. It was titled “Brainy Brownies” and contained spinach as one of the healthy ingredients.

Since I had excess spinach left over, I decided to try making my first ever “Green Smoothie” using the Vitamix. As it happened, the internet was down at the time so I couldn’t look up any useful “Green Smoothie
recipes so I came up with my own. It was surprisingly very palatable. Despite the very green colouring, I didn’t even notice the spinach flavouring in it.

Looks like I should make myself more Green Smoothies…

As odd as it might sound coming from a former vegetarian, I have been struggling to eat my veggies of late. Ever since I became pregnant, the thought of eating veggies makes me want to gag. Yeah, go figure… Anyway, this is an excellent way to sneak in those greens without wanting to throw up.

So here’s the recipe:

Ingredients:

• 1 Cup of spinach
• 20 Red Globe grapes
• 2 small bananas
• 1 Navel orange
• A handful of ice cubes

Method:

Blend everything in the Vitamix (starting on low speed and moving quickly to high speed) until smooth – use the tamper stick to push down the spinach as necessary.

Serve and drink.  Yum.

Firstly, here is the original recipe.  I would like to add that I would have followed the instructions to the letter except that I didn’t have all the required ingredients at home and I was too preoccupied with a toddler to get them (read: too damn lazy to get in the car and drive out).  So here is the modified recipe which still managed to get the thumbs up from my SIL2 and my son:

Ingredients:

• 1 cup (250 grams) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 1/2 cups (300 grams) granulated white sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
• 2 1/4 cups (295 grams) all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 cups (270 grams) white chocolate chips

Method:

1. Cream butter and sugar together.
2. Add eggs, one at a time.
3. Beat in vanilla.

   

4. Fold in flour, baking soda and salt (sifted together first – I didn’t do this but you should).
5. Fold in most of the chocolate chips and leave some behind for your artistic toddler to decorate the cookies with.
6. Line baking trays with baking paper or foil (it is better you line them rather than just greasing them because the chocolate chips will melt and stick to the tray and you will have a difficult time getting the cookies off).
7. Spoon dollops of cookie batter onto the tray.
8. Let your child top the cookies with a choc chip or two.

   

9. Bake in 170 degree oven for 10 minutes.

   

Comments:

In retrospect, I would have used less sugar because white chocolate is a lot sweeter than dark or even milk choc chips.  Secondly, we converted the brown sugar to white sugar and I don’t think it would have been as sweet with the brown sugar.

The recipe makes a softish, chewy cookie which I quite like.  I suppose if you want something more crisp, you can try lowering the temperature and baking the cookies for longer to dry them out a bit.  What I don’t suggest is overdoing them like I did and end up with this result (seriously, the pictures make them look better than they really did – they were pitch black from the bottom):

How on earth did this happen?  While they were baking, I asked my son what he would like to eat for lunch.

“Pizza!”  He yelled back.

So I went to put an order to Pizza Hut on the phone.  While I was doing that, I vaguely registered the oven bell ringing that it was time to take the cookies out of the oven, but for some reason it failed to penetrate the conscious part of my brain that would initiated the order to my legs to run to take them out (for which I blame the pregnancy).  It wasn’t until I was almost at the end of my order that I smelled the cookies and all but shouted to the Pizza Hut operator, “Will you please hurry the f*** up, my cookies are burning??”

After lamenting to my SIL, the Cordon Bleu chef, about the texture of our butter cookies, she recommended the following recipe which is truly of the “melt-in-the-mouth” variety.

Ingredients:

• 250g butter
• 120g pure icing sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 260g plain flour
• 60g custard powder

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 160 degrees Celsius.
2. Cream butter, vanilla and sugar until light fluffy.
3. Sift flour and custard powder into butter mixture.
4. Mix until dough just comes together.
5. Use a biscuit press to shape the individual biscuits.  Alternatively, a piping bag fitted with a 2cm star nozzle or rolled teaspoonful of dough into balls pressed down lightly with the back of a fork work just as well.  If you’re feeling creative, you can make a variety of shapes like we did.



6. Bake for 14 minutes turning tray around after the first 7 minutes to ensure the biscuits cook evenly remove from baking tray and allow to cool on a rack.

And here are a couple of additional tips that my SIL gave me on butter cookies presentation:

• The ideal colouration of these biscuits is the golden colour that is marginally darker than the uncooked dough.
• To achieve an even colouration of the biscuits, it is best to use a light coloured tray – i.e. the regular silver trays as opposed to the dark, non-stick trays which tend to brown the base and the sides of the cookies.

Considering that the part of the Pineapple Tarts that my son loves best is the pastry, I figured he would go mad over these cookies.  Well, his interest in them lasted about a day or two and then he went back to eating Pineapple Tarts without the pineapple bit.  Looks like I’m better off making the Pineapple pastry without the pineapple – which is probably not entirely a bad thing since there’s a lot less sugar in that.

Okay, I was supposed to record down all the cookie recipes I learned from my MIL during Chinese New Year this year so I wouldn’t forget how to make them in future but I got a little slack.  Darn.  Now I’m not even sure if I can remember the exact recipes…  Ah well, at least I remembered hubby’s favourite – Pineapple Tarts – which I’m sure in his mind is the most important.  Well, it’s also the most important in my son’s mind since that’s the cookie he likes best, too.  Like father, like son…

Anyway, I’ll still try to blog the other recipes over the next few days if I can still remember them.

Butter Cookies Recipe

Today, I’m going to talk about what happened with the Butter Cookies.  This was probably one of the rare occasions when my MIL’s recipe failed her – however, I am more inclined to think that she got a little mixed up with so many things to keep track of.

The ingredients for the original recipe we tried was the same as the Melting Moments recipe but without the Nestum.  Since butter cookies need to be piped, we found the mixture too soft to handle and had to add more flour to the mix.  Even then the cookies looked a little funny because they lacked the body to hold their shape.  We also made the mistake of working in the heat of the kitchen which was rather unforgiving to the butter cookies mixture.

Note: When you live in a tropical country, baking is just that much more tricky because cooking with anything that involves butter is highly sensitive to room temperatures.  I remember making my famous Cheese Cake recipe which had been perfected to an art while I was in Australia only to discover that the recipe didn’t replicate so well in a tropical country.

Anyway, my MIL being the perfectionist that she is, wanted to make the Butter Cookies again.  The following day, we modified the recipe like so:

Ingredients:

• 250g butter
• 250g sugar
• 400g plain flour
• 5 egg yolks
• 1 tsp vanilla

Method:

1. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy (sugar must be completely dissolved).

2. Add egg yolks, beating well after each addition.

3. Add vanilla essence.

4. Add sifted flour gradually.

5. Brush the trays with oil or butter.

6. Pipe the mixture into rosettes and add a small piece of cut glace cherries in the center.  (Just so you know, the addition of the red glace cherry isn’t just to make the cookies look pretty.  The red colour is significant for Chinese New Year).

7. Bake in 160 degrees celcius for about 15 minutes or until cooked through.

It turned out pretty well except that my MIL felt the texture was all wrong for Butter Cookies.  “Butter cookies should melt in the mouth,” she said.  As far as butter cookies go, yes, I do like the ones that melt in the mouth but I thought these were pretty good, too.

After a while, I remembered a melt-in-the-mouth Almond Cookie recipe that my aunt used to make which was pretty much like a Butter Cookie recipe with ground almonds in it.  I also remembered that she used icing sugar instead of castor sugar which would possibly explain why the texture of my MIL’s cookies weren’t “melt-in-the-mouth”.

So we tried the recipe again but this time substituting the castor sugar for icing sugar.  For some reason, it didn’t seem to be any more “melt-in-the-mouth” than the second batch of Butter Cookies we had made.  I did find some alternative recipes which I thought we could try next year:

Melting Moments from the Joy of Baking

Almond Melting Moments