No-Frills Recipes ... cooking, baking & excerpts on travel

I was doing a stock-take of my fridge and chanced upon a packet of mixed cereals tucked in an inconspicuous corner.   It must be some leftover.  A hurried check on the expiry date revealed that it's still edible.  So, I flicked through my recipe collection, subtract, add, tweak a bit and came up with these healthy cookies which I'll simply name, 'Oaty Crisps'.

I was staring at the bunch of over ripe bananas contemplating whether I should bake a cake with them, then my lazy bones got over me ....... yes, muffins!  Simple, less work and naturally less washing up!

I made this for dinner recently and must admit that indeed, the ribs were finger-licking good!  Most important is that this was super easy to prepare!

Belacan is an extremely popular condiment used in a great variety of Malaysian cooking.  It comes in the form of a pressed brick or cake and the unique thing about it is that the ingredients of belacan are all raw.  Traditionally, they are made with a kind of very tiny shrimps, drained and salted before being left to ferment and dry in the sun.  Then, they are mashed together to form a paste and fermented again and this process is repeated.  The smell of roasted belacan can be digusting to some but heavenly to others.  As an ingredient, it mellows out and harmonises in the cooking and acts as a sort of natural  flavour enhancer.

I was browsing through my collection of recipes and chanced upon this recipe, using the rub-in method.  That reminds me that I haven't been baking a cake using this method for ages.  So, time to refresh.  It was not a disappointment  as it turned out great, so yummy that I just want to share it with you!

I googled and stumbled upon this Mochi recipe that requires wheat starch and the method is slightly different from the norm.  As it looked pretty simple and easy enough, I set out to try as I've some wheat starch sitting in the pantry.  I could envisage a disaster looming when the dough was so wet and gluey and as there was excess glutinous rice flour, fortunately, I loaded in an extra 3 ounces before the dough became pliable enough to work with.  Phew ..... that was close!  Oh, you must be wondering what are those  'Bunga Telang' doing in the picture above.  For decor?  Yes, it was one of the ingredients that I used to make these Mochi, but alas, their bluish colour was not overpowering enough, hence the end result was Mochi with a very faint shade of grey! Just a short introduction about these 'Bunga Telang' .... they do resemble the Morning Glory and while Bunga Telang is in Malay, it's Butterfly Pea ~ Clitoria Ternatea in English....

There are two types of Bihun~Rice Vermicelli, one is thin and fine which is suitable to serve with soup as they soften easily when soaked.  The other is thicker and tougher which is best for stir-frying.  These take a longer time to soften and as such they don't break easily during the stir-frying process.

I made this again for a friend's birthday.  I doubled the recipe and made it into a 9 inch square cake.  As it's thicker and bigger the cake took an extra 10 mins. baking time and do remember to cover it with foil for the remaining 15 mins.  As it is now, compared to my previous post, this cake is more brown.