My first Singaporean cookies

I made my first batch of cookies in Singapore! And yes, I will probably continue to get excited the first time I do every very normal thing, only this time in Singapore. Anyway, the cookies were really just to have a snack for Andrew to take to work; while we were in the hotel, we bought granola bars that he ate for work-day snacks. They were good but I never like how very sweet store-bought granola bars are, so I prefer making my own for snacks.

Except then I made batch of granola on Sunday (first batch of granola in Singapore!) and used most of my newly bought (first big shopping trip for groceries in Singapore!) granola-bar-type ingredients for the actual granola. But I did have an interesting new sugar (black sugar, which seems way more exciting than brown sugar although it is in fact a similar colour to treacle sugar, muscovado sugar, and other dark brown sugars), an interesting new flour (very fine, pale yellow-ish whole-wheat flour; I’m not sure if it actually is whole-wheat), and some baking staples like eggs and baking soda (and here is another set of parentheses, just so I can say I have managed to fit five sets into one two-sentence paragraph).

So I made up some sugar-laden cookies, meaning I could just as well have bought more sugary granola bars for work snacks. But I’m glad I didn’t because, much to my surprise, the cookies made with all the new-to-me ingredients, eyeballed measurements and some unusual elements turned out to be some pretty decent peanut cookies. I’m glad I paid attention when I made them; I will definitely make them again, although this time for a treat instead of a snack.

For now, though, off to go get some more granola bar ingredients. After I sort out a little kitchen disaster I just had (first kitchen disaster in Singapore!)

Whole-wheat olive oil peanut cookies

Makes about 18

I’ve listed alternative options for things like the fine whole-wheat flour and black sugar, which should all work perfectly well. You could also substitute the peanut butter with any other nut butter, and the olive oil with vegetable oil, but then you'd have to give the cookies a new name. Add-ins could work well – chocolate chips, dried fruit, other nuts – although I liked the simplicity.

1 c fine whole-wheat flour (or use cake flour)

¼ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

½ c toasted sweet peanuts (another new-to-me ingredient; alternatively, use raw peanuts or very lightly salted roasted peanuts)

¼ c olive oil

¼ c peanut butter

½ c black sugar (or any other dark, moist sugar such as treacle, muscovado, demerara, etc.)

¼ c caster sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 175 C and grease a cookie sheet with a little olive oil.

In a medium bowl, sift and mix flour, baking soda and salt. Make a well in the centre and set aside.

In a small bowl, whisk olive oil, peanut butter, sugars, egg and vanilla extract until well blended and frothy. Pour into the flour mixture and mix with a wooden spoon until the mixture comes together into a firm dough.

Break off slightly-larger-than-walnut-sized chunks of dough and roll them into balls. Place the balls spaced about three centimetres apart on the cookie sheet and press each ball to flatten into a disk. 

Slide the cookies into the oven and bake for 8 to 12 minutes - less if you want softer cookies, more if you'd prefer them a little crisp. Remove from the oven and cool for 5 minutes before lifting onto a wire rack to cool to room temperature.

These cookies kept well in a sealed container for one and a half days and then they were gone, so I have no further information on how long they might keep.

And now: eating AND cooking in Singapore!

Living in a hotel and being forced to eat out every night is not really a hardship, especially not when you’re doing so in Singapore where there is sure to be yet another hawker centre, food court, cafe or restaurant around every corner, all of them offering a bewildering array of dishes to choose from. But, as evidenced by this site and my former life as a caterer and chef, I like to cook. What with the crazy few days before leaving South Africa and nearly three weeks in a hotel, I hadn’t cooked a thing for about a month. The closest I came was making peanut butter and apricot jam sandwiches on the floor in our hotel room for Andrew to take to work. Peanut butter and jam sandwiches are delicious, but a three-year-old can make them with eyes closed (maybe; perhaps I should get my sister-in-law to do an experiment with my three-year-old niece). Which is to say, my daily sandwich-making hardly provided me with any sense of culinary achievement.

The walk home from the shops, along a canal

However! Buying random, unfamiliar vegetables, packages, bottles and jarred things and trying to figure out what to do with them in order to end up with an edible dinner – now that does provide me with a sense of achievement, even more so if the dinner is not just edible but actually good. We moved into our flat – called a condo here – over the weekend, and before we’d even unpacked anything, we’d been to our local grocery shop and stocked up on some familiar staples, and a whole lot of other things that seemed like they might be good and weren’t too expensive (in case they weren’t good).

Inaugural dinner, much more average than the word "inaugural" implies

After weeks of eating out we both just wanted vegetables, so I roasted a big tray, tossed it in a spicy peanut sauce (that possibly contained cuttlefish; I think I accidentally bought cuttlefish-laced chilli sauce but didn’t tell Andrew and he didn’t seem to mind) and called it dinner. It was edible, but not great; it appears Chinese green carrots and white radishes are perhaps not best when roasted (although, please do correct me if I'm wrong).

Dinner number two - much better!

But I was not discouraged, and dinner number two fared much, much better. We managed to find proper whole-wheat spaghetti, to my delight, and tossed the hot, cooked spaghetti with sautéed shiitake mushrooms, enoki mushrooms, Chinese spinach, crushed garlic, lime juice, soy sauce and olive oil. I topped the pasta with enormous toasted pumpkin seeds, and voila – dinner. So good. The kind of thing I would’ve made back in Cape Town, but using lots of local ingredients (that is, as local as things can be when not much is grown on this small island).

Biggest pumpkin seeds I've ever seen

Mushroom spaghetti with spinach and lime

Serves 3 or 4

Most of the ingredients here can be easily substituted. For example, you could use normal spaghetti, or a different shape pasta; use sunflower seeds instead of pumpkin; replace the mushrooms with any other variety of mushrooms you can find; use English spinach or rocket instead of Chinese spinach; and while the lime juice is lovely, lemon will also work. Reduce the garlic if you’re not used to too much.

150g shiitake mushrooms

180g enoki mushrooms

2 cloves garlic, crushed

Large bunch of Chinese spinach

Juice of 3 tiny limes, or 1 average lime

75g pumpkin seeds

4 tbsp olive oil

Salt

250g whole-wheat pasta

4 tbsp soy sauce

Pepper

First do your prep: slice the mushrooms, crush the garlic, cut the spinach up into bite-size pieces, squeeze the lemon juice and toast the pumpkin seeds in a hot oven till golden – watch them, they burn quickly.

Once your prep is done, place a large pot filled three-quarters of the way up with water, a tablespoon of olive oil and a teaspoon of salt over high heat to bring to the boil.

Meanwhile, place a large, heavy-bottomed pan over high heat, pour about a tablespoon of olive oil in the pan, and add the shiitake mushrooms. Sauté the mushrooms until dark golden; add the enoki mushrooms and sauté for a few more minutes (skip this step if only using larger mushrooms; the enoki mushrooms should be cooked much less since they’re so small and frail). Remove the pan from the heat and lower the heat to medium.

Your pasta water should be boiling by now – add the spaghetti.

Return the mushroom pan to the heat, adding the spinach and garlic. Sauté for a few minutes until the spinach has wilted. Scoop a few spoonfuls of pasta water into the pan and add the lime juice, soy sauce, another two tablespoons of olive oil and plenty of freshly ground black pepper. Give it a good stir and turn the heat as low as it can go.

When the pasta is cooked, drain thoroughly and add to the mushroom pan. Turn the heat up to high and toss the pasta quickly until most of the liquid has evaporated. Remove from the heat and taste – you might need to add a bit of soy sauce or salt, or some more lime juice or pepper. If you do add more liquid, return it to the heat for another minute or two; otherwise, remove from the heat and scrape into a serving dish.

Top with the toasted pumpkin seeds and serve.

Mangosteens, then and now

Eleven years ago I had my first mangosteen, and then many more over the course of the few months I spent in Malaysia. Despite some misgivings about the texture, I thought that it might be my perfect fruit – sweet, almost rich but with a great juicy, tangy, refreshing quality. I do realize that this is a ridiculous description of a fruit’s taste – sweet, tangy, rich, juicy, refreshing – all words that can be used to describe so many kinds of fruit. I think maybe I mean that it was all these things, but so much more intensely than any other fruit I’d had. Then I left Malaysia and there were no more mangosteens, and as far as I could tell, there wouldn’t be for a very long time, if ever.

When I tried to explain them to people who had never seen or tasted a mangosteen, I was a little bit at a loss. The outside was easy enough – very dark purple, the colour and also roughly the size of a ripe granadilla, but perfectly round and smooth with a stalk. When it came to describing the inside, though, I couldn’t think how. My best shot was to say that the fruit is segmented, like a citrus fruit, but with only one big seed in the biggest segment; and the segments are white. I suppose that does describe what they look like, but somehow not clearly enough.

Now, eleven years later, we are in Singapore and I have been reunited with mangosteens. We bought a net bag full last week and as soon as we were back in our hotel room, I peeled one and gave Andrew one of the segments before eating one myself; I was so excited for him to try this near-perfect fruit. Delicious, was his verdict, and “when it’s peeled it looks like a head of garlic”, he said.

Yes. Yes, it does, a much more concise description.

They are still very good, but the fruit inside the thick peel is so small, the texture still strange, and I’ve decided I don’t like the segment with the one big seed at all. I feel a little disappointed in myself that I am no longer so easily moved to rapturous declarations about fruit, but I suppose it’s natural to be more given to extremes at seventeen than at twenty-eight.

So in the end, having upheld them as my perfect fruit for eleven years, mangosteens are making me feel old and a little alienated from my former self. I must remember in the future not to have quite such high expectations for fruit.

Eating (but not yet cooking) in Singapore

So! We are in Singapore, and it is hot and wonderful. We are also in a hotel for the time being, meaning we have to eat out for most meals (how we suffer!). I am very much looking forward to moving into our flat at the start of September, and being able to cook again (albeit very basic things, since out shipment with implements only arrives in October). Once I can cook again, I suspect I will bombard this blog in delight with all my creations using new-to-me ingredients.

But until then, here are some of the most delicious things I have eaten after one week in Singapore, listed in no particular order:

1. Lor mee - thick, flat egg noodles in a dark broth with lots of goodies - pork, prawns (I think), hard-boiled egg, and more. The chilli sauce on the side was smoky and slightly sweet. I am getting better with the slippery-noodles-and-chopsticks-and-spoon technique (if anyone knows a less cumbersome term for the technique, do let me know), but still ended up with dark brown sauce splatters all over me after this meal. Worth it, though.



2. Omu yakisoba - this is actually a Japanese dish. I feel guilty eating things that are not actually very Singaporean, and yet it hasn't stopped me from eating Japanese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese food, as you will see. Clearly I am able to push my guilt aside. Anyway, again noodles, this time cooked on a hotplate with bacon and a mysterious sauce, topped with egg, "special white sauce", delicious mysterious brown sauce and dancing fish flakes.

3. I can't remember this salad's actual Thai name. I could google it, but so can you - it's a green mango salad, with tom yum soup on the side. My stomach lining was burning for hours afterwards due to the large chunks of chilli you can see in the salad, and yet I couldn't stop myself from eating them all.

4. Chewy Juniors - custard-filled cream puffs, sometimes with toppings added as above, seem to be a Thing in Singapore, and one of the chain brands is called Chewy Juniors. Eating puffs from a chain brand is probably a very rookie-ish thing to do, but I might never be able to eat another kind, due to these having one of the best brand names ever.

5. Pad thai - again with the non-local food, and extremely well-known-in-the-West non-local food, too. Sorry. It was good.

6. And a blurry picture of a plate from a vegetarian buffet-style stall; brown rice and vegetables, so healthy! (If you choose to ignore all the delicious oil, sodium and coconut milk also contained in this meal.)

And thus concludes my Top 6, so far.

Chocolate orange cake, and a bit of nostalgia

We are in Singapore. I have eaten many notable things, despite only being here for just over 24 hours, and I have many thoughts. But first, some nostalgic pictures from our last week in South Africa, spent both in Cape Town and in Pretoria.



Mountains!



One of the views on one of our favourite
running routes in Cape Town



We ate lots of delicious food in the last week, including this
springbok ravioli dish at Bizerca Bistro



And we drank lots of wine,
like this pinot noir flight at French Toast



Cake and wine at the end of a family braai



That last photo is of a chocolate-orange cake I made for dessert at a family braai; chocolate with orange is one of my mom's favourite flavour combinations. I winged it, being at my mom’s house without recipes and my usual implements, but it turned out well enough that I think it should be made again.

Chocolate orange cake

Makes one large, high cake, or two layers for a layer cake

I had only one cake pan, so I baked the cake as a single layer, sliced it in half and filled it with marmalade. Two thinner layers would probably be easier, although you’d have to reduce the baking time.

When the cake was baked, I decided against covering it with frosting or icing of any kind. But I was afraid it would be dry without a topping, so I both soaked it in a flavoured sugar syrup and filled it with marmalade. It was delicious and I wouldn’t make it without the syrup, although you could add a chocolate frosting or ganache topping to make it richer and fancier if you like.

Batter:

½ c butter

1 c golden sugar

Zest and juice of 1 large orange

3 eggs

1 ¼ c flour

½ c cocoa powder

1 tsp salt

1 ½ tsp baking soda

1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

¼ c milk, plus more if needed

Syrup:

Juice of 1 large orange, plus a few strips of orange peel

¾ c water

½ c sugar

Preheat the oven to 165 C. Butter a large cake pan and line with baking paper, then butter again and dust with cocoa powder. Set aside.

In a large bowl, cream the butter, sugar and orange zest until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one by one, beating well after each addition; the mixture might start to split just a little, which is fine.

Sift the flour, cocoa powder, salt and baking soda into the butter mixture and add the orange juice, balsamic vinegar and milk. Stir until just combined. If the batter drops off the mixing spoon easily at this point, you’re done; if it seems thicker, add a bit more milk and mix again.

Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake for  approximately 45 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean.

While the cake bakes, place all of the syrup ingredients in a small pot and bring to the boil. Boil for about five minutes and then remove from the heat. Remove the orange peel.

When the cake is baked and has cooled for five minutes, poke it all over with a sharp knife or a fork. Make sure you get to most of the cake’s surface. Pour the syrup over the cake, distributing it as evenly as you can.

Cool the cake further to room temperature, then invert onto a plate and fill and decorate as desired. Like I said, I just cut it in half, spread a lot of marmalade in between the two layers, and topped the cake with sliced kumquats and strawberries.

Interruption for pecan-cinnamon coffee cake

Coffee cake seems to be an American thing, for me another relic from my childhood spent amongst Americans. Because by coffee cake I don’t mean coffee-flavoured cake, I mean a general group of cakes originally meant to be eaten along with a cup of coffee. Of course, any cake can be eaten along with a cup of coffee, so I’m not sure why there is a specific kind of cake that’s given this definition. Regardless, as far as my experience goes, coffee cakes are sometimes but not always yeasted, often contain nuts and are often topped with a buttery, crumbly streusel topping – no frosting or icing. They tend to be sturdy, moist cakes, flavoured with vanilla and maybe some spices, but nothing too overpowering. They are, in fact, very good to have with a cup of coffee, and so I decided to bake one for afternoon coffee with a friend (fine, we had tea. Hopefully there are no coffee cake police).

I had a bag of good fresh pecan nuts that I had to use before we left, so I did some searching for pecan nut coffee cakes on the interwebs. There were many, but here’s something that bothered me: this kind of cake is not supposed to be very sweet, yet most of the recipes had many, many cups of sugar, and some even had glazes topping the streusel. Just reading the recipes made my teeth ache. So I used a few different recipes as pointers and cut and pasted and edited until I ended up with my own coffee cake. Sweet and buttery, but not so much so that you wouldn’t be able to have a piece for breakfast. Of course along with the obligatory coffee.

Pecan-cinnamon coffee cake

Makes one large sheet-pan cake

You can easily play with this recipe, using different nuts or spices, adding raisins, or citrus juice and zest.

Streusel:

1 ¾ c flour

½ c treacle sugar

½ tsp cinnamon

1 tsp salt

½ c butter, cold and cubed

½ toasted, chopped pecan nuts

Middle layer:

¼ c treacle sugar

¼ tsp cinnamon

1 c toasted, chopped pecan nuts

Batter:

½ c butter

2 c flour

1 ¼ tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

¾ c sugar

2 eggs

1 ½ tsp vanilla

¾ c sour cream or full fat yoghurt

½ c milk

Preheat the oven to 170 C. Butter a large casserole dish or sheet pan and dust with flour, shaking out excess flour. Set aside.

For the streusel, combine all the streusel ingredients in a bowls and rub together with your fingertips until the mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs. Set aside.

For the middle layer, combine all middle layer ingredients in a small bowl and toss together. Set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, cream the remaining butter and sugar until light. Add the eggs one by one, beating well after each addition. Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt into the bowl, add the sour cream (or yoghurt), milk and vanilla extract, and beat until well combined with no lumps.

Spoon half of the batter into the prepared pan and smooth with the back of a spoon. Sprinkle the middle layer mixture over the batter evenly, then top with the remaining batter and smooth over to cover completely. Finally top evenly with the streusel mixture.

Slide into the hot oven and bake for 40 – 50 minutes, until the topping is golden and a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean.

Cool at least ten minutes before cutting into squares.

Dinner party number ten

This dinner party, in fact another Sunday lunch, was the very last meal with friends in our flat before we moved out to stay in a friend’s house for our last few days in Cape Town. I had thought ahead and frozen the leftover roast chicken from the previous weekend’s dinner party, as well as the leftover pastry from the pumpkin pie. (I have a complex about not having enough food to feed people, whether they’re guests or just my husband and I. The result is that I inevitably make far too much food. I take out four potatoes knowing that they’ll be enough, but then the doubt starts and I take out another one. And halfway through peeling, I’ll whip out a final sixth potato, just to be sure. Result: leftovers!)

But I digress. Leftover roast chicken and leftover pastry, combined with a quick creamy white wine sauce and some roasted root vegetables, leaves you with a creamy roast chicken and root vegetable pie. Add a salad and it’s a comforting, filling lunch.

So, the menu:

Creamy roast chicken and root vegetable pie

Spinach salad with avocado

Cappuccino bars

I was going to make another batch of brownies for dessert – they’re quick and easy and I know they’re good. But then I happened upon a recipe and accompanying pretty picture for glazed, chocolate-y cappuccino bars. I am a slave to pretty pictures of baked goods, so I decided: lack of baking implements be damned, I’m going to make these things. I had to become a little creative in the process given my single giant catering-size mixing bowl, one wonky wooden spoon and bent, charred baking slide, but the bars turned out anyway. They’re good, but they are incredibly rich; do cut them into small squares.

Cappuccino bars

Makes about 30 small squares

Dough:

1 c softened butter

1 c packed treacle sugar

1 tbsp instant espresso powder

¼ tsp finely ground espresso powder

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 ¼ c flour

½ tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

2 c dark chocolate, chopped (I used Cadbury’s Bourneville)

Glaze:

2 tbsp milk

1 tbsp butter

¾ c icing sugar

¼ tsp cinnamon

Preheat the oven to 190 C. Line a rimmed cookie sheet/baking slide with baking parchment.

Cream the butter, sugar, coffee powder and grounds, and vanilla. Add the flour, baking powder and salt, and mix – the dough will be crumbly, which is all as it should be. Add the chopped chocolate and mix.

Dump the dough onto the lined baking slide and press it down into a smooth, solid sheet, using a rolling pin to smooth the top. If your baking slide is too big for the dough (you want it to be at least 1cm thick), the dough doesn’t have to go all the way to the edges; just be sure then to square off and trim the edges.

Bake for 10 to 15 minutes; watch them carefully as they burn easily. You don’t want them to get too dark.

Remove from the oven and let cool for 10 minutes. While they cool, melt all the ingredients for the glaze together in a small pot, and spread over the bars.

Cool to room temperature, until the glaze has set, and cut into small bars or squares.