HK: Ovenhouse Deluxe

Sorry for the lack of updates but now that i am back in the capital, there will be more blog posts. I've been away for close to 5 weeks in the land of awesome shopping and eating, Hong Kong (especially now that Australian dollar is so strong!)! It's good to be back and enjoy the not-so-hectic pace that Canberra has to offer but not so keen on the freezing weather though =P

Anyways, here is my first Hong Kong blog post for 2011.
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We found Ovenhouse Deluxe purely by accident as we were walking around Tsim Sha Tsui. It mainly does cakes, breads and cookies for take-away because it doesn't have many seats in it (8 seats max., i think). It also has quite a vast collection of wines from what i saw. Ovenhouse has a simple and classy decor which gives it a bit of a high-end feel. The cakes are placed neatly behind the cake counters and the cookies are nicely packed in bags. There is a small section at the end of the counter where you can sample their cookies. On this visit, we tried the two cakes that looked the most appealing to us: Lady Peach and Charcoal.

Lady Peach is a sponge cake filled with white peach mousse and white peach champagne coulis in between. The name definitely suits the cake's pretty appearance and it was the 'looks' that sold it for me. Taste-wise it was a bit weak on the peach flavour and the mousse felt a bit 'hard' (probably had a bit too much gelatine).

Baby Elsie's Dedication Cake

A few weeks ago, J and I decided to make a baby dedication cake for one of our friend who had just had a baby girl recently. We started throwing some ideas around and we finally decided to make a chocolate mud cake covered with pink and white fondant topped with a few baby-related decorations. I was originally planning to make a fondant bear but since this year is the year of rabbit, i ended up making a pink rabbit.

Having had experience making a 21st fondant cake last year, we knew that this one would be a lot easier because we were just going to make a one-tier cake - so no spending countless hours ganaching gazillion of cupcakes and covering them one by one (don't get me wrong, it was fun but just time consuming).

J made the mud cake in the morning so that by the time I finished work we could ganache and decorate it. I made the pink rabbit the night before just to make sure it had enough time to dry and harden. The most fun part was making the decorations and putting them together on the cake. Believe it or not, the pacifier was the trickiest decoration to make despite it being the smallest of them all =P

We were quite satisfied with the final product (although there are plenty of areas to improve in) and glad that the parents liked it too. Enjoy the photos =)

Green Tea Buttermilk Cake

I decided to make a buttermilk cake a few weeks ago (after being in a baking hiatus) as i had almost 3/4 of a carton of buttermilk left in the fridge. This time i decided to wing it just to see what i would get and also because i was too lazy to google for a nice buttermilk cake recipe. I added some green tea powder but unfortunately there wasn't much green tea flavour in the cake - will have to add more next time! The cake is fairly easy to make and to my delight it turned out soft, moist and deliciously rich in buttermilk taste. I can't recall the exact amounts but here are the rough estimates:

Green Tea Buttermilk Cake

-1 1/2 cup of self-raising flour, sifted

- 2 eggs

- 3/4 cup of buttermilk

- 125g of unsalted butter, room temperature

- 1 tsp of cream of tartar

- 1/2 cup of caster sugar

- 1/2 tsp vanilla essence

- pinch of salt

- green tea powder, as desired

1. Sift together self-raising flour, cream of tartar, salt and green tea powder together

2. Beat butter and sugar until you reach a creamy consistency, add in vanilla essence and mix.

3. Add eggs, one at a time, and beat well

4. Divide buttermilk and flour into three batches and beat into the butter mixture alternately. If the batter is rather dry, add a bit of buttermilk OR if the batter is too runny, add a bit of flour.

5. Pour the batter into a 9" loaf pan and bake in a pre-heated oven (~170 C) for 45 - 60 minutes. if the skewer that is inserted in the centre of the cake and comes out clean, the cake is cooked.

Enjoy~

A Floral 21st Birthday Cake

One of the major things that i was doing during the month of October was planning, designing, doing taste-trials for my friend's 21st birthday cake. Gladly, i wasn't doing all of these by myself; i had J to share the load and keep me company (since it was a shared project). The whole process was a fun and worthy experience, even though it took away some of our sleep time and energy. Despite being faced with some uncertainties and failures on the way, those 31 hours of hard work definitely paid off. The cake turned out very pretty (both of us couldn't stop saying '...so pretty, so pretty') and the birthday girl really liked it too.

I also decided to submit this blog post as part of The Nuffnang October Blogger Challenge because i thought that the cake & cupcakes were so pretty that i would totally take them to the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. The cupcakes have beautiful pastel colours and delicate flower decorations that especially suits a spring season tea party.

The journey started when we accepted the birthday girl's request to make her 21st birthday cake. At first, it sounded cool and fun but when we actually stopped to think about it we were like "Wait...it's her 21st birthday cake, not any other cake that we usually make". The birthday girl was going to hold a sit-down dinner for 50 or so guests, so we couldn't just make any Michel-Patisserie-like cake. It had to be displayed during the dinner, pretty, tasty and something that would feed 50+ guests. I immediately knew what we were dealing with...Fondant Cakes! Neither J or myself had ever made a fondant cake before, so we started to do heaps of research and watch Youtube videos about fondant cakes.

The birthday girl wanted green tea-flavoured cakes so we ended up making a White Chocolate Green Tea Mud Cake (main cake) and Green Tea cupcakes. We adapted the recipes from the book Planet Cake - A beginner's guide to decorating incredible cakes by Paris Cutler. We basically just added green tea powder to the recipes and reduced the amount of sugar needed in them. It's definitely a great book for beginners (like us) who are interested in cake decorating!

With everything ready and set to go, it took us 3 days to finish our little work of art! Let the journey begin...

Day One

We made the mud cake (as it can be stored longer) and coloured 6kgs of fondant to the colours needed: pale green and four shades of pink. That was a lot of muscle work involved! We were both pretty exhausted by the end of day...

Mud Cake Batter

The different coloured fondants

Day Two

That's when we made 6 batches of cupcakes (86 cupcakes in total), brushed them with syrup and covered all of them with white chocolate ganache.

Testing the batch of green tea cupcakes

Brushing the green tea cupcakes with syrup before ganaching them

Day Three

This day was entirely dedicated for decorating the mud cake and the cupcakes. We rolled out some pale green fondant and cut them into circles to cover the cupcakes. We also rolled out a massive 'sheet' of pale green fondant to cover the main cake and then, we put edible pale gold ribbon around the bottom rim of the mud cake. 

Cupcakes covered by pale green fondant

Covering the White Chocolate Green Tea Mudcake with Fondant. It wasn't as daunting as we thought afterall...

Covered mud cake with edible pale gold ribbon

We cut out a few hundreds of flower-shaped decorations to be used on cupcakes and the mud cake. All flowers were brushed with white shimmering glitter for a prettier finish and some flowers were decorated with metallic cachous.

Cutting flower-shaped decorations

More pretty flower decorations

In process of decorating the main cake

Finished cupcakes! I think it was past midnight when we finished all  them...

Day Three was probably the most fun and rewarding day for both of us as we got to see the final product! Yey!
It was such an accomplishment for us, i have to say. *tears...J also tears...

More photos of the finishing product...

Sorry for the long post, just felt like a proud mum!

The Flute Bakery Revisited

Haven't been to The Flute Bakery for a while (almost 6 months!). I guess that's because it isn't very accessible and also their opening hours aren't the most friendly (Mon-Fri from 8am until 3pm). On this instance, i went there during lunch hours and the petite bakery was packed. I had to walk past a few people before i managed to look at the cake display. I was delighted to spot quite a few cakes that i hadn't tried before. Knowing that i would not be able to finish them all in time, i decided to get only four! I really liked the chocolate one because it wasn't as rich as it appeared to be and i really like how they used the short bread and the crunchy chocolate feuilletine together! I don't know its name because i was only told a description of the cake and they hadn't prepared a name tag for it.

Cream & Chocolate mousse decorated with a chocolate ball (filled with cream) on a short bread and crunchy chocolate feuilletine and wrapped with a chocolate sheet.

The Cappuccino had the same shape as the Hazelnut Mousse Cake (tried in my previous visit) and guess what made me get it? THE MACARON that they used as a decoration. It sounds pretty silly but if you are a macaron lover or a person who understands the intricacy of these little gems, will see the reasoning behind this.

The cake itself did not have a very strong cappuccino flavour but it was still lovely with the hazelnut meringue base.

Cappuccino

The Castel, which is Hazelnut Meringue topped with some strawberries & raspberries, was light a cake and perfect for a sweet treat after dinner.

The Castel

The last one was actually a cheesecake - the well-known New York Cheesecake - and if you fancy a dense and reasonably cheesy one, this will be a just for you! The cheesecake doesn't look fancy, but somehow it has that simple attractiveness to it (that's probably why i ended up getting it) that makes you go for it!