Happy Cooking in 幸福小窝

This is going to be a long post, documenting the pictures of the food I've cooked in my new house since the day I moved in.  Pardon for the poor iphone camera - taken photos, without any recipes.  In terms of cooking, I'm still not good enough to post any recipes.  Most of them were based on my intuition or some basic cooking experiences / dishes I'd learnt from my mum.  In fact, some dishes were prepared with me calling my mum for help!

I created a photo album in my facebook, naimg it "Happy Cooking in 幸福小窝", loading all these photos of food I cooked but never had any chance to post it here. Friends marvelled at my dishes but there was nothing to marvel about because some could just barely made it to the dining table so long as my hubby is not too fussy about the dishes I cooked. At times, I would also cook too large a portion that ended us too full to speak while there were times the portion were too small that we had to look for tibits after dinner!

Hope that the list in this album will look and taste better and better!

My very first dish made here. Just a simple bee hoon soup with veggies, fishball and frozen packed dumplings.

Pandan agar agar

This is an all-in-one stew of lean prok, potatoes, carrots and french beans. One pot of this dish is enough to go with steam white rice. Simple meal just for my hubby and I. :)

Seafood baked rice.

I baked these sweet potato in the Happycall Pan. :)

One of my usual baked. Banana crumble muffin made during of the Chinese New Year gathering.

Haha, my hubby made this with my supervision. All using Happycall Pan. It's one of my birthday dinner. :)

Stir-fried black pepper pork using a pre-packaged black pepper sauce. I like buying frozen pork that comes packed in diffierent cuttings of the meat, lean pork, pork ribs, pork chop, etc. They are easy to defrost as they were packed and frozen in small portions and very fresh.



Simple stir-fried broccoli

Hearty breakfast that my hubby like. But it's too unhealthy and I'd only made once so far.

Puff pastry wrapped with fish. I learnt from The Little Teochew that it's called Fish En Croute.

Chinese Old Cucumber soup. Trying very hard to cook up the flavour that my mother-in-law cooks. :)

One of those occasional lazy weekday dinner. Korean instant noodle.

Baked mash potato with tuna

Meatball pasta using leftover meatballs from Ikea

Oven-baked fries


WoooH! That's about it all. I didn't include the baked items since I would like to include recipes for most of them. I do cook less on weekdays now because am really tired after work and usually when dinner starts, it's already 830pm, which my hubby and I would be too hungry to even judge how well I have cooked! :P

Double Soft Bread Revisited

After more one year, I finally can bake bread again. :) The bread machine died down last year and without it, I was no longer able to have the luxury of time to knead a bread, and bake a bread.  With my newly acquired Kitchenaid of 6 months old, but only used it for less than 10 times, or perhaps less than 6 times, I must put it to a good use.

I'm so happy to be again smelling the aroma of freshly baked bread in the comfort of my home. With the available ingredients, i.e. some leftover whipping cream, I chosed this recipe which I'd done when I was still new to bread making. This double bread never failed me even though I was new and did not have any proper loaf tin or bread machine at that time. While I had the help of my kitchenaid to do the kneading, the sticky dough made shaping a rather tedious task. I didn't manage to shape it into a nice smooth dough but it still rose beautifully and its wrinkled texture actually didn't affect the outcome at all.

I wanted to make a square loaf but during the final proofing, the bread dough rose over the brim of the loaf tin, that I made do with a traditional loaf! That's what traditional loaf used to look like, ain't it? :)

I love the tall loaf!

The uneveness in the three shaped dough!

This bread is called the double soft bread, first found in a Chinese blog - Warm  & Sweet Home.  To get the recipe, please link it to my previous post. ;) I didn't make any changes to the original recipe though if you read the comments in the previous post, it was said that this recipe yields good result with 50% bread flour and 50% plain flour.

My New Home

It's another 2 months + since my last posting and sometimes, I really thought of giving up this blog since I hardly have time to update it, and probably no one reads it now. But one thing that is for sure is that, I have never forget all the food bloggers out there whom I have been following for the past few years.  I may be silent, but that doesn't mean I lost all my past passion, just the fact that committments have changed so lesser time is devoted to blogging or posting a comment. I believe this is true for all food bloggers or those who have stopped blogging. Once the passion for baking / cooking is found in you, it will never stop.

So I decided that anytime I feel like updating my blog, I would just do it!

This post is all about my new home.. which is a really outdated post as I've already moved in for 3 months++.  I've cooked more than I baked in this new kitchen and loving every moment and every bit of my kitchen. Still a noob in cooking, I'm glad that my hubby is not fussy and eat whatever is my new "experiments".

Another impediment to blogging is that after having used my brother's DSLR camera, I can no longer tolerate the pictures captured by my sony digital point and shoot camera! I know without my sony digital, I won't have mybakingcottage today. :P I'll have to say that the pictures taken by the iphone has a better resolution and produce clearer picture.

I'll just let the pictures bring this short post to an end. I'll try to post more food related postings if I can spare some time like today! :)

 My beloved open-concept kitchen. It's a small kitchen but I love the counter top and so far around my neighbourhood, I've not seen anyone knocking down the kitchen wall and do up this kitchen design. So far not much of a problem with the grease and oil with simple stir-frying. :)

 This is our family's portluck housewarming in Jan. :) I like how the mirror appears as though the food doubled. :)

View from my window. Nothing fantastic, just the playground from my 5th floor unit. :)

I'm Back!!

Hi people, I'm back, finally! This blog has become dusty, being neglected for months. I wonder if anyone still reads my blog. :P Not only that, I find myself blog-hopping lesser and lesser. I couldn't help it, as I had to prepare for my wedding and setting up of my new home then. Every weekend was filled with activities... Meeting up with bridal coordinators, choosing and collecting invitation cards, making of video for our wedding montage... etc. Well, nothing beats the importance of my wedding, followed by work. So, baking and blogging has to be put on hold then. :P

It was a really busy year for me last year, but fun and fulfilling. I have to admit that in the midst of "happy future planning", there were times when I felt a little stress or overwhelmed by all the conflicting views by both side of our parents when it comes to our wedding. Although times have changed, but we still have to respect our parents who are more traditional in their thinking and hence have to abide by their customs. It was also through our wedding that I felt very touched by how our parents and family loved us, the things they did for us, and being accomodating and helping us wherever they could.

I am slowly getting back to my baking routine and have baked twice using my new Bosch oven! I have also cooked a few dishes and loving it, except for the washing and cleaning. As for blogging, I believe I won't be blogging that much but I'll try to keep it going as best as I could.

Here's sharing some of my bridal photoshoot taken in Singapore. I am so proud of myself that I could resist the "temptation", and only bought extra two photos (but costing $75 per photo which is daylight robbery! lol). I wouldn't want to spend thousands over just because the photographer took too many photos of us and allow us to choose!

:D

Birthday Cake for Mummy

I came to realise how time passes so fast when one gets busy. It's not just fast, it's extraordinarily fast! Before I could fulfil the tasks that I set for myself, one week, two weeks and so on just passed without having it accomplished. argg... my wedding is coming in 2 months time and just yesterday, I wrote down the list of things I have to prepare. Gosh it seems little yet so much... at least it provides some direction of what to do next.

For the whole of last month, I didn't post a single blog entry as I was just so busy. I think that's the first time I miss posting in a single month. The good thing was, I wasn't busy the entire month working and slogging... I took a break. :D It was my first trip (not to mention genting highlands in Malaysia) for this year and was really looking forward to it! I was away for a 7 days trip to Taiwan, with my mum, my best friend and her mum, and my in-laws. It was meant to be me and my best friend bringing our mothers for a trip, and ended up my in-laws joined in as they had not gone for a trip this year and their children (including my hubby) probably was unable to fit in a schedule to bring them for a tour. So well... I felt I did a great thing for my hubby! :D

No bakes for the past month, as far as I can remember, except for an awesome steam chocolate cake which I had no choice to take a picture of. This cake (below) was a birthday cake made for my mum in Aug. I adapted from the Japanese strawberry shortcake that I made for Xian, and made it into a cherry version, my using canned cherries for the layers and topped with fresh cherries and white chocolate shavings.

I wasn't pleased with the presentation, though the cake tasted quite yummy!

Two months 5 days to my wedding! My house renovation has completed and we are doing the cleaning up and awaiting the arrival of the furnitures, etc. My kitchen Aid and oven has arrived and sitting in my new kitchen! I'll update when the house is clean. ;)

Pre-wedding Photoshoot Prelude

It has been a long time since I last update the progress of my wedding preparation. Well, in fact it has almost come to a halt since my ROM last year. Since the beginning of this year, way before we collected the keys to our nest, we kept ourselves busy with sourcing for renovation contractors / interior design firms, furniture / appliances shopping, etc. Most of our friends are really amazed to see that just shopping for a simple dining light could take us months to decide. The shop assistants in Balestier could even recognise us at the bus stop because my hubby went to Balestier too many times! *lol* Anyhow, we enjoy this process because those weekly hunting has become our dating affairs :) Both of us are rather picky (especially me) so we'll rather spend more time than to regret for not having browse enough. Since our schedule to our wedding has been planned well ahead, why not? :)

Our house is almost 50-60% completed, sans the carpentry which would be installed very soon. It was rather draggy though due to some hiccups in our flooring and our design concept. ;) I am looking forward to see some carpentry work done up this week and hopefully by Nov, we can start to do the final touches. Then, we'll be able to focus on our wedding held in Jan 2012. Oh gosh, just realised it's less than 4 months to our wedding. :D

Opps I digress again. I should be taking about my pre-wedding PS... :P Our PS was on 15 Sep 2011. It was a hazey week, with the island experiencing a higher than usual PSI on 12 Sep, few days before our PS due to the Sumatra fire; and heavy rain hit parts of the island the day before. NEA weather forecast showed that on the day of our PS, rain was expected in the late morning / early afternoon. It did, followed by fine, clear weather. We were so lucky! We even managed to capture blue sky in botanic garden. :D

Here are some of the shots taken not by the photographer, but my best friend aka da jie using her iphone 4. The first photo was taken in the studio. I love the white background.

This is retro doesn't it. My boss exclaimed: Oh my botanic garden time! *lol*

This was in botanic garden as well, the man-made waterfall.

Another shot in botanic garden.

Botanic garden was our first outdoor location, after which we proceeded to the shophouses along Tanjong Pagar area, and landed at our last stop at Sentosa for sun set shoot. As much as I wanted to be creative and wish to avoid the more common PS locations, we still settled for these safe, yet beautiful locations, as Singapore is really that small.

Although it was really tiring, we really enjoyed the PS (especially me!). :P In fact i had a crazy idea - to do another "post-wedding" PS during our honeymoon. *wink wink*. Well... we shall see how... We'll be able to choose the photos in a few weeks time. I'm determined not to allow myself to top up extra photos over the package of 44 that I am given. $85 for each extra photo? I would rather sign another package. :)