Homemade No Dairy Citrus Mango Tart

A no dairy diet doesn't quite go with most traditional dessert, in fact you will be hard pushed to pick any item from the dessert menu of most western restaurants. Mum tried baking a citrus tart from a Japanese recipe yesterday and came up trumps. Even though there wasn't even a drop of cream in the recipe, the citrus cream in the tart came out tasting like the real thing.

List of ingredients:

Orange Cream	Tart	Topping Fruits
Orange Juice - 250ml	Plain Flour - 200g	Orange Slices
Vanilla Pod	Brown Sugar - 25g	Ripe Mango
Egg Yolk - 3	Icing Sugar - 25g
Sugar - 60g	Salt - 1/4tsp
Plain Flour - 15g	Olive Oil - 60ml
Cornstarch - 10g	Whole Egg - 1
Olive Oil - 50ml

New York Style Pizza - Homemade in HK!

Pizza toppings - tomato, Iberico sausage and mozzarella

Adapted from Mario Batali Pizza Dough recipe

• 3¼ cups all-purpose flour, plus extra for dusting
• 2 teaspoons instant or rapid-rise yeast
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 cup warm water
• ¼ cup dry white wine, at room temperature  (consume the balance with the pizza)
• 2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon extra virgin olive oil

Combine flour, yeast, salt & sugar in mixing bowl. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and add the warm water, wine, and olive oil. Using a Kitchenaid mixer (I skipped the handmixing process), mix until the dough comes together and pulls away from the sides of the bowl.  The dough is ready once it is  smooth, elastic, and only slightly sticky.  Oil a large clean bowl, add the dough, and turn to coat. Cover the bowl with a kitchen towel, and let the dough rise until doubled in size, about 1 hour.

Preheating the oven with a  pizza stone takes a long time - best to preheat earlier.

Divide into 3 portions and roll on a lightly floured work surface into an 28cm round.
Spread each with 1/3 cup tomato sauce and add your favorite toppings.  
Bake on the pizza stone at 200°C for 15 minutes or until the sides brown (in fact patiently wait until you see tiny bits of black burn marks to ensure maximum crunchiness).   

The right out of the oven pizza was truly yummy with crispy crust and juicy toppings.

To do - get an even thicker and larger pizza stone, will go to our local stone mason and get a piece tailor made, get one of those big wooden spatulas to put the pizza in and out of the oven and get a pizza cutter perhaps.

Bread Making at Home Part 3 - Pain de Dieppe and more

Pain de Dieppe

This bread came from here ->


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Madeleines - Part 2

Another attempt at baking Madeleines, this time with slight variation in ingredients and tried to bake mini ones using traditional non-stick Madeleine pan. The problem was still in taking the cake out. Small pieces sticking to the pan became noticeable bruises on mini ones. But alas, the flexible silicone mold doesn't seem to come in mini sizes.

Madeleines

Mum tried making it a few times with different recipes and different Madeleine pans. It was often too dry or the cakes were impossible to dislodge from the mould. Today, she found the perfect combo using the soft silicone mould and a recipe from an old cookbook - Paris Boulangerie Patisserie edited by Linda Dannenberg - this particular recipe was from Patisserie Lerch.

Mum's latest hobby - Bread Making at Home Part 2

Homemade Ciabatta - right out of the oven

Baguette Viennoise

So far she has tried making......
Brioche
Milk Bun (pain au lait)
Baguette Viennoise
and now Ciabatta (one of them has sun dried tomatoes added)

Bread Making at Home Part 1

Pain au Lait and Brioche

Doggy Biscuits

When we stay home idly listening to the TV blasting behind us, we hear "global warming" all the time. But the last few days certainly do not feel like "warm" at all to us. While those in Beijing can blame the snow storm on rain experiment, but we never hear the HK government fire anything up the sky other than fireworks. So the welcome wintry gust is probably the work of mother nature after all.

As this cold spell continues, there's nothing better than the smell of freshly baked cookies and cakes. Mum and dad are baking more nowadays, after all you don't want to switch the oven to 180C when the kitchen is already 35C. It's a different matter when the kitchen is 15C.

You probably wonder what goes into the doggy biscuits which drive us all crazy. You might be surprised that our treats are very similar to the ones for human consumption, the major differences are

• No Chocolate, use Carob in situ - one of the most popular human desserts is dogs' worst enemy, the theobromine in cocoa is a killer. You can read more here. Carob is a safe alternative but apparently tough to find in Hong Kong. If you find it in Hong Kong, let us know. Ours are from friends in far away places.
  
• No Raisin - Nobody knows why, but never feed grapes or raisins to us. So choc n' raisin cookies are out for us. You can find some dog biscuit recipes with raisins in the web but as in human recipes you never know if they have gone through the trial process.
• Less sugar or no sugar - most of the recipes use honey instead. Honey is a lower calorie and more nutritious alternative. Sugar will make us fat and rot our teeth.

Ingredients commonly found in dog desserts are - carrot, banana, pear, banana, apple sauce (no added sugar), pumpkin, honey, carob, peanut butter, oats, walnuts, cream cheese, sour cream, tofu, soy milk, cornmeal and egg.
Spices and herbs - cinnamon, nutmeg and vanilla extract.

Quality dog biscuits should be fit for human consumption, just a harder and healthier alternative. Get your mum and dad to start baking. It's fun and delicious.

Doggy Desserts and Carob

Buddy had his birthday muffin made for him last year and then mum went to learn baking doggy biscuits in Three Dog Bakery. And then it all stopped. No more home baked stuff after Cadet went to heaven. Sob :(

Last week dad pulled out this book about baking for dogs called Doggy Desserts by Cheryl Gianfrancesco and started flipping through the pages. Next he saw 3 packs of Carob chips that mum got from her colleague from the US still in their original wrappings. Our luck changed.

A day later, they bought some organic wholemeal flour from "Great". Soon after dad messing around with the spatula in the kitchen putting all the below ingredients together, the muffin mix was ready. 25 minutes in the oven and this Banana Carob Chip Muffins came out as if by magic. Mum and dad had a taste of it. Yummy!!

1.75 cups wholemeal flour
0.25 cup honey
0.50 cup carob chips
1.00 egg
0.25 cup veggie oil
0.25 cup milk
1.00 mashed up banana (pick a ripe one)
1.00 tsp baking powder
1.00 tsp baking soda

Our only comment is the muffin taste more like human food than dog food. All good for us. Check out the book for more exciting experiments and lets hope we get more from the home bakery.



NB - Carob is an excellent source of pectin which makes it a good colon cleanser. More on carob in wikipedia.
Also if any of you know where one can buy carob chips in Hong Kong, please let us know.
We will talk about another good colon cleanser, epsom salt in another article.