A touch of Claire- baking, cooking& life

After baking two birthday cakes in a row last week, I finally had enough "pretty and fancy" for the moment. I mean, it is always more important for the good-looking of a cake, especially if that is a gift. I did throw my failure of eclairs to trash bags just because they were not pretty. I felt bad about that as those eclairs should taste just as good, but in my mind, what's the point of baking cakes and cookies if they are not pretty?!  But when it comes to breads, I have different criteria especially for artisan breads. I do think my bread is pretty, though it is so "black", hard and simple. I love the smell of its wheatness and nuttyness, love the hard as stone shell but soft and moist inner texture, love the bread "singing for a while" after just taken out of the oven (it will crack a little bit from hot oven to room temperature)... I want to write a poem for you, my bread hahaha~~~ OK, I have to say I'm just conducting "self fulfilli

I can't wait to post this cake I made this week; I wanna tell people how 'intelligent' I am!  (=￣ω￣=)　 By saying that I mean this 'seemingly fancy' cake is a pure recreation of what I have in hand.  So my situation this week was- 1. I need to bake a nice cake for a really good friend of mine before Friday, and it needed to be good! 2. I had a full-scheduled week of experiments and my qualify exam proposal (still not much progress for that lol) before Friday. 3. The checkers cake I made last weekends made me completely exhausted, the good thing about which was I saved two layers of chocolate sponge cake and that saved me! As it's finally spring, (Wait, there will be a snow next Tuesday??? New York is just crazy!!! %^&*() I want to make a strawberry charlotte, with the chocolate sponge cake as the base, strawberry bavarois mousse as filling, and all fresh berries on top. But I also needed ladyfingers to line the side of a classical charlotte cake, which I

I made this cake for a friend of mine in lab; it was his birthday last Sunday. He's a really nice guy; thus I think he deserves a good husband! He was searching for Lady M the bakery's menu the other day to pick a cake for his friend's birthday, and he loved the checks! So not creative enough, but why not trying baking my friend himself a checks cake this time- I knew he was gonna love it! To be honest, I'm not super crazy about the checkers cake- it consists only plain sponge cake and chocolate sponge cake, and the point they are selling is the assemble. OK, nice presentation is important, I guess. But a nicely-presented sponge cake sells 80 bucks!!! I'm so going to save this money XP When I got to make it, I changed the plain sponge cake to white chocolate cream cheese mousse, so it has another layer of flavor and texture. It was not my creation, I was referring to this recipe. http://www.xiachufang.com/recipe/261895/ . The whole process was not super difficu

I went to a party last weekend, which means I got to bake something AGAIN! Yay! I mean, right now bringing the desserts seems to have been my routine. I'm actually pretty happy about this- my baking has been finally approved, to some extent, and I need someone to share those calories when I just want to play with cream and butter so much  <(￣︶￣)> But as I didn't want to spend a whole day on a fancy protocol, I mean, recipe lol, I went for the NO-BAKE cheese cake. It was sort of like a pudding; the texture was built up by cream cheese, egg yolk and gelatin. It was SO simple- mix all the ingredient, pour on a shortbread crust, and let it cool down in the fridge for 4 hours till it doesn't flow. To make it more presentable, I spread some whipped cream topped with fresh blueberries. The recipe is as follow, still in Chinese, though... http://www.xiachufang.com/recipe/1074414/ Btw, all my friends loved my cheese cake. (I heard "btw" in English actually mean