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Salted Caramels!

I am a savoury person – salt over sweet any day!

I don't like the idea of a sweet element on a savoury dish (although there are some exceptions, i suppose) but i totally don't mind a salty element in a sweet dish!

This lead me to borrow a book entitled 'Salty Sweets' by Christie Matheson from the National Library.
This is the very first recipe in the book and i love it!

When i was still in Sydney and was out with Yuki for lunch one day, we both bought a candy thermometer and this is the first time it has been used and with great success too!

Making candy may seem daunting since one is dealing with super hot caramel and it kinda gets a little fiddly. but it is worth persevering on. This is my first attempt and it is a great success so please do try!

Ingredients
Makes 40-50 pieces

1 cup heavy cream
5 tbsp unsalted butter
½ tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp fine sea salt
1 ½ cups sugar
2 tbsp light corn syrup
¼ cup water
1 tsp coarse sea salt – whatever you have on hand really.. use all kinds of fanciful salts

Directions
Line the bottom and sides of an 8-inch square baking dish with parchment paper, then lightly butter the parchment.
Combine the cream, butter, vanilla and sea salt in a small saucepan and bring to a boil over medium heat. Boil for about 4 minutes, then remove it from the heat and set aside.

In a heavy medium size saucepan, combine the sugar, corn syrup and water and bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring till the sugar completely dissolves. Once they have dissolved, boil without stirring – swirling the pan occasionally until it’s a light amber colour and the candy thermometer registers 340 Fahrenheit, about 7 minutes.

** I had great trouble with this. If possible, choose a heavy bottom pan with high sides but not too wide in diameter. The mixture will foam up later, which is why we need the high sides, but if your bottom diameter is too wide, your sugar syrup mixture is so low that the candy thermometer doesn't come into contact with the liquid. So i had to keep on tilting the hot pan on its side in order to get a reading on the thermometer. It did work though but it made it more troublesome then it really is. This constant tilting/swirling helped though, as i didn't get any burnt bits at the bottom at all.

Turn the heat down to medium-low, carefully stir in the cream mixture (it will foam up) and simmer, stirring often, until the liquid is at 246 Fahrenheit on the candy thermometer, 6-8 minutes. Turn off the heat.


Stir in the *fanciful salt*, then pour the caramel into the prepared baking dish; let cool for at least 3 hours. I really couldn't wait 3 hours, i think i only waited about 2, but it was fine..


Cut in a sawing motion. I tried slicing it like one normally would and it didn't work, it stuck to my knife. So it is very important to slice this in a sawing motion and maybe even oil/butter the knife.


Wrap each in parchment paper. This, i must say is the most tedious step of making candies. It took me a few tries before figuring out how best to wrap it. Since, as you can see, this is quite a wet candy and the liquid seeps out from the ends.

Store in an airtight container and in the fridge to keep them fresh and avoid them getting eaten up by ants!
You can also dip the cooled caramels into melted chocolate and let harden before wrapping.

Since i used coarse sea salt at the end, some pieces of caramel candy had bits of salt in them. I really really liked those, but of course, if you're not as crazy about this as i am, use fine sea salt in place and even reduce the amount of salt to make it more sweet than savoury.

:D

Black Sesame (Goma) Ice Cream

I love black sesame ice cream and it has always been one of the flavours that i really want to try making myself since commercial ones tend to always be too bland, too milky and just really lacking the fragrance of black sesame.

However, one of the major problems i encountered was finding black sesame paste. I have black sesame powder but black sesame paste is an absolute must in getting that beautiful charcoal colour and for the wonderful depth of flavour that only black sesame paste can bring.

So i searched online for other recipes that used black sesame paste and see if they mentioned where they got theirs in Singapore. and i came across a blogger who swears by the black sesame paste (pictured below) and it can be found at Sun Lik located at 33 Seah Street. It is a small baking supplies store and each bottle is 100g and cost SGD$6.80. It isn't cheap but definitely worth it!

It also says to not put in the fridge. It's a very thick and difficult to stir paste so putting it in the fridge will make it even more difficult to work with if it's cold.

Ingredients

50g Black Sesame Paste + 1 tbsp sugar
180ml milk
2 egg yolks
60gsugar (i used raw caster sugar)
120ml cream
1 tbsp Black Sesame Powder (remember to sieve!)

Directions

In a bowl, whisk together the black sesame paste and 1 tbsp sugar.
*Well.. if you noticed in the picture, i actually made a mistake and mixed the 60g of sugar into the black sesame paste instead. No worries, no harm done! :)

Heat the milk in a saucepan while whisking the egg yolks and sugar in another bowl.

Slowly, add the warmed milk to the egg yolk mixture and whisk/stir continuously to prevent scrambling the eggs.

Place the mixture back into the saucepan and heat over a low low heat, stirring constantly. When the mixture thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon, take it off the heat and add it slowly into the black sesame paste sugar mixture while whisking continuously.

Let the mixture cool while stirring occasionally
*This is the lazy method. The proper one should be to sieve it then place it over a bowl of iced water to reduce the temperature.

Now we sieve the mixture, cover the bowl with cling wrap and place in the fridge for as long as you possibly can, but definitely at least until the mixture is completely cold.

In a separate bowl, combine the cream with the sieved ground black sesame seeds.
*I didn't think of sieving it and it had many many clumps so i went through the mixture slowly and mashed the lumps!

Add in the cream mixture to the cold custard from before and pour into the ice cream machine to churn for 20 minutes.

Voila!

Dinner at the Soup Restaurant 三盅两件

Recently, me and fish had dinner at the Soup Restaurant and we have not eaten there in a long time, so one day, we decided to try it.

We had a 2 person set meal which consisted of soup, samui chicken, vegetable (we requested the dang gui kai lan), hometown tofu, olive rice and dessert.

It was all great.

First, the chicken came.

It was succulent and delicious with the ginger oil mixture. Yummy! I preferred the chicken breast to the thigh though. The breast was still soft and moist. The thigh however, i felt were a little bloody and tasted too much of raw chicken – though i'm sure it was cooked though. So 10/10 for the breast meat!

Then we had the Hometown Tofu. It was delicious, although i felt the sauce was slightly too salty and the 'skin' of the tofu a little too thick. but nonetheless, i liked it.

The menu actually came with sweet potato leaves instead but upon fish's insistence, we changed it to this Dang Gui Kai Lan instead, and it was a good choice. I really liked the herbal flavour of the dish and the best thing was that it was mostly leaves and they didn't give a whole load of stems, which i wouldn't have liked. This was really nice.

We then had olive rice to go with the dishes. As much as i love olive rice, i think maybe the combination of the samui chicken's ginger oil and the oilness of the olive rice made it a little too oily. It was still delicious, don't get me wrong, but maybe plain rice might be better? Though i know i will always be tempted to order olive rice since i love eating olive rice.

This was a filling dinner. but oh so delicious and satisfying. Can't wait to go back and eat again!

Chocolate Ice Cream!

I apologize. I can't seem to find my ice cream scoop and i can't get a decent picture of the ice cream. So trust me when i say this is awesome. Alright?

When making ice cream, we generally have a base custard mixture to which flavours are added in. and this is a really basic recipe for a rich chocolate ice cream.

Ingredients

180ml milk
2 egg yolks
50g caster sugar
70g bittersweet chocolate
1 1/2 tbsp cocoa powder
1 tsp instant coffee powder
140ml pure cream
1 tsp vanilla extract

Directions

Heat the milk and vanilla essence.

In a bowl, whisk the egg yolks and sugar together. Whisk till pale.

Slowly, add in the heated milk while whisking continuously to prevent cooking of the eggs.

Pour the mixture back into the pot and thicken, while stirring constantly over low heat to prevent cooking the eggs as well.

* Should you accidentally scramble the eggs, either sieve the mixture before continuing or use a hand blender to blend it all together. If this happens, and you were intending on making vanillia ice cream, i would suggest that you change the flavour, as it will have a slight flavour of cooked eggs, but if you changed the flavour to something else, the eggy-ness would not be so prominent.

After the mixture thickens, take it off the heat and let it cool slightly. Then add in the chocolate pieces. Stir to ensure that all the chocolate pieces have melted and are well combined.

In a small bowl, combine the cocoa and coffee powder, if using. Add into the chocolate custard mixture and stir to combine.

Sieve the mixture to ensure that you get a smooth creamy ice cream.

The mixture should be relatively cool now. If not, place it over a bowl of ice water to reduce the temperature.

Add in the cream. *Should you feel that the mixture is too thick, add a little more cream. I have made adjustments to this in my recipe but feel free to change it to suit your tastes.

Cover the bowl well and chill in the fridge for as long as you can.

Pour the chilled mixture into the ice cream machine and let it churn for 20 mins.

Ta-Da!

Enjoy!!

**A note about homemade ice cream – From my experience, since this is homemade and it has no weird chemicals and ingredients, this ice cream melts quite fast. So be sure to eat it quick and keep it frozen at all time. Although.. it would make a awesome thick chocolate shake should it melt. hehe.