Mango Konnyaku Moon Cake - The first edition in Cooked with Love's Mid Autumn Collection.

A refreshing take on the traditional moon cake.

Fresh mango puree in Konnyaku jelly surrounding a mango cube. Chewy one moment, crunchy the next and velvety smooth in the centre. Let the surprising change of textures tantalize your taste buds.

Who says moon cakes are all dry and bland?

Certainly not us :)

For enquiries, email bluepinkice@hotmail.com

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Ooooooreo Cheese Cake....A slice of Goodness!

Have I ever mentioned before just how decadent our Oreo Cheese Cake is? No kidding, it really is a slice of melt-in-your-mouth goodness studded with good old Oreo cookie bits. Although admittedly its not very pretty but the absolutely delicious taste more then makes up for its look, or rather lack of it.

Here is a recent order of Oreo Cheese Cake we did for a birthday party. Once again, Hash thanks for forwarding your pictures to me. We're glad you enjoyed your cake! 

-Rachel-

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Candy Mould

Managed to squeeze in some time yesterday to drop by Phoon Huat in the evening. I though it was time to make an active effort to source for inspiration which, I must add, is a change from my usual passive "I'm thinking..I'm thinking...." (ala Night in the Museum style sourcing). Not that Phoon Huat is very inspiring since as far as I know, they don't introduce new products frequently but its so near to us and... *hangs head in shame*...I'm lazy to go far. 

 Yesterday proved to be our lucky day though, I spotted this incredibly adorable Garden theme candy mould by Wilson. Its absolute cuteness! Little red lady bugs, tulips, sunflowers, frogs and all things garden. I can already imagine how perfectly divine the red lady bug will look perched above a two tiered almond agar. Whooh! Can't wait, can't wait. I just HAVE TO try it out tonight. Bye bye procrastination! 

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I have been blog hopping recently to get some ideas for our agar agar and my head just hangs in embarrassment when I see all the great pictures posted up. Why can't I take great shots as well!?! Not that I do not have the equipment. In fact I do have a pretty decent camera sitting by my side, but the thing is there are so many mini buttons and scrolls for some many different function that an exasperated me will eventually rely on the handy hand phone cam to click away. My detractors will probably nod their sagely head and say "Not bothering to learn how to use is another instance of your pure laziness showing through" Pff, I bet they don't know how utterly incompetent you can feel when you have to resort to asking your younger brother how to educate you on the many fine knobs of the camera!

But that aside, the drool-worthy pictures featured in blogs such as happyhomebaking.blogspot.com and bakeat350.blogspot.com, are so inspiring that I being toss into a "I-Wanna-Improve-Myself" mode. Hand me the cam, show me the brother, I'm ready!

On another note, I found this picture of mini wedding cakes while surfing the web yesterday and it struck me how similar the cream colour of the cakes were to the color of almond jelly. Now, for the past weeks I've only been experimenting on our layer colour agar agar and have completely neglected the almond jelly. There's just so much to rave about it! And I'm not blowing my own horn. They really are great!

Our almond jelly recipe belongs to my darling Grandmother. Like all our agar agar, its very crunchy and brings back waves of nostalgia just sinking your teeth into it. I know what you're thinking! There's nothing really special about almond jelly, you say, we can find it throughout the island! Served at the end of wedding dinners, it is the dish that most guest will probably ignore in a bid to leave early to avoid the human traffic (very inconsiderate, might I add). But the problem with these ubiquitous almond jelly is that they're usually prepared with an instant jelly mix. The difference can be discern immediately. The finished jelly has a powdered consistency and a really strong dose of almond essence. Granny knowing that her grandchildren were adverse to the overwhelming taste of almond, made sure that the almond taste of her jelly hit the right notes; subtle but not verging on blandness.

Almond jelly just brings backs so many fond memories. I remember, for instance, when we were really little, my siblings and I were always ransacking through Grandma's fridge whenever we were at her home. We called it the "Barney Fridge". You know like the Barney bag? *cue song* When you look into the Barney back, what will you find today...lalala. The fridge was a treasure trove of goodies; bars of chocolates and Yakult and cakes stacked into all corners of the fridge, some hidden deep inside beyond the reach of our little hands On our lucky days, a bowl of almond jelly ready to be tuck into would be hiding in the fridge, waiting to be found. Ah, the good old days.

I can't wait to get started on reinventing the almond jelly. We will be true to the taste of course, but I'm thinking of making them into the shape of those mini wedding cakes in the picture, it'll be perfect for a wedding we'll be catering for in September! Must get to work immediately!

-Rachel-

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We delivered our new and improve Doll Agar Agar to birthday girl Sue yesterday. Well yeah, the improvement is not that obvious, in fact it takes careful scrutiny to realize that we have only just replaced the detested orange layer at the bottom to a sweet pinkish/purplish colour. Now half-Barbie is ready to paint the town red!

Whatever the folks might say, be it "Huh? Got change meh?"or "Where? Where? Change where?" and then "Chey!" when they find out its just the change of a single layer ( talk about positive encouragement),  I think its makes a whole lot of difference. The pink at the bottom just ties together the pretty shade of her top. But then again, I'm bias since I was the one who decided on the changes. Yay me!

With this successful delivery behind us, its time to come up with new ideas and that's exactly what I love so much about Agar Agar. Its versatility! It can assume almost any form, kinda like that shape-shifter dude from Supernatural (ok, bad example). We're coming up with a little something for Halloween this year. I know, its pretty early to plan but I just love Halloween so very much. Not because I get candy from Trick-or-Treating, hell no! Last year's experience had put Trick-or-Treating on my Top 10 "You've aged so get over it!" list. I simply can not bare the evil eye of old women when I reach my hands into their candy pot or sarcastic little boys when I attempted to stuff another Mars Bar into my pocket; "Haven't you already taken your candy?"he said. Did I mention they were LITTLE BOYS? Share, my friends, learn to share. 

So no indeed, I do not love Halloween for its Trick-or treating, I love it for the Supermarkets. Yes, the supermarkets and its shelves of chocolates wrapped in pretty orange, purple and black foil. The plastic Jack-O-Lanterns stacked beside the sweets. The monster sweets! The entire atmosphere! Its gets us here at CWl so excited that we're going to create a special Agar Agar piece for Halloween this very  year. We've already got ideas but of course, we're not going to share cause we all love surprises don't we? So watch this space for more updates :)  

-Rachel-

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Dino Agar Agar

Here are the Dinosaur Agar Agar we did for a little boy's 2nd birthday last month. It's a simple layer of clear coloured agar above a thinner layer of coconut. Its simple, yes, but this is one mean tasting Dino! This might probably be the hundredth time I've said this but I always insist that agar agar from Cooked With Love are vastly different from those agar triangles you can buy at your local hawker's fruit stalls, reason being we like our agar crunchy and our cocont fresh.

Didn't manage to capture great shots of the Dino agar but we made up for that by posting 2 photos of Little Raheel enjoying his agar (kindly forwarded to us by Raheel's mom, many thx once again! ). He looks simply adorable munching on his colourful treat and its the oh-so-cute smile of his, and all the kids that we've catered for, that makes us all here at Cooked With Love enjoy catering for little kids events so very much.

Two weeks from now we're be preparing our signature Oreo Cheese Cake and another agar agar for a girl's 12th birthday. Watch this space for more updates! :)

-Rachel-

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Easter

A little something we did for Easter last week; Agar Agar eggs. Because the Easter spirit is shockingly lacking in our island city, we decided to spruce things up a bit and distribute these delightful eggs to our friends and relatives.

We tried out a new marble effect with the agar agar colors by sloping the layers. The centre egg in the picture below was the exact marble effect we were trying for. The eggs looks really pretty, I must say, it has that playful vibe we love and its almost a pity to sink your teeth into it. But if you do you'll find that the quality of our agar-agar remains as good as ever. Our little chocolate rabbit too looks simply adorable snuggling beside our eggs. The colors are gorgeous excepting the purple top. We would have prefered a lighter more brighter shade of purple but having no ready purple colouring on hand, we had to make do with a little mixing of our own.

-Rachel-

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The Agar-Agar Doll

We completed our Agar Agar Doll for the little girl's birthday party tomorrow just this morning. I know I'm suppose to give some sort of account on how I managed to solve half-Barbie's lack of hair problem. In fact, you might have scrutinized the above pictures and remarked to yourself: " If anything, that is a good, healthy head of hair. What was the big fuss about!?!" So I might as well confess and I do so feeling rather embarrass inside: I did not solve the problem of half-Barbie! I went ahead and bought a new one. Now, don't judge me just yet, I believe I deserve a chance to explain.

I did try to hide half-Barbie's lack of hair. In fact, I decided to use a Ken doll's hat I've got to mask her hair loss problem. It was a little fedora, brown and rather rustic looking. No matter that it did not suit the princess theme of the show piece, I thought then, a healthy looking tom boy is infinitely better than a doll undergoing what seemed like the 3rd stage of chemotherapy. Congratulating myself on my problem solving ability and thinking the worst to be over, I fidgeted with the half-Barbie in an attempt to make her more erm...wholesome looking. Only then did I realise that her chest had collapsed upon itself. I do not think I need to elaborate on the hopelessness of the situation and how my only other choice was to get another one.

The one you see above was purchased from our all time favourite, get-all-you-need bake shop- Phoon Huat. Its the best looking in the market and has a rubber body making it easier to wash. Half-Barbie's dress is made with alternating clear and coconut agar agar. Having been a little worried about the colours clashing or looking too dull before, its was a relief to see that the results were vibrant enough to look attractive. We are still a little displeased with the orange colour at the base though, it seem to lack the brightness of the other colours.

I hope to receive pictures of the little birthday girl and her Agar Agar Barbie soon and will definitely post it up once I do.

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Cooked with Love will be catering for a little girl's birthday party this Friday. Its quite an exciting project, we'll be doing for her yet another one of our signature agar agar show piece. This time round its something that we've always been meaning to try but has never got down to it. Its..its...wait for it, now drum rolls please- The Agar Agar Doll.

Now you've probably seen it before or heard of it, so I shall not trick you by exaggerating its difficulty and the tons of effort that has to go into it. In fact, its a pretty simple project and if all goes well we'll be done in an hour, perhaps, with an impressive showpiece that will hopefully make the little girls go Ga-Ga!

Since I have not got any pictures to share yet, I will try to briefly describe how our showpiece will eventually look like. A feat which, judging from my track record of being frustratingly long-winded and a prodigious bush beater, will be rather hard to accomplish but, I shall try.

The main body of "The Agar Agar Doll" consist of a cone shaped mould with alternating layers of coconut and clear coloured agar agar. The top of the cone is flat and there we shall attach our doll figure. The doll figure is of particular interest and in blatant disregard for my previous promise to be brief, I shall elaborate on it. Imagine your typical Barbie doll, only not so pretty and with 3/4 less hair and a face that might collapse on itself. Then imagine it with only the top half of her body up to her waist. That's how our doll figure looks like. The lack of hair is particularly troubling cause you know, all pretty dolls are known for their lush wavy hair. I'm currently tasked with the all important job of solving this lack-of-hair problem.

What I've came up so far is that we either get her a hat so that the lack of hair won't be visible or we attempt some sort of transplant. Transfer the hair from one of our Barbie's to half-Barbie (let's call her that for now). Its work in progress and I'll definitely update once I've decided on my approach. And if some of you are thinking: "Why, she's so dumb, just tie up half-Barbie's hair and problem solve!". No, no, no, I have already tried that and it failed. This just goes to show how shockingly obvious half-Barbie's lack of hair is.

Come back for more updates!

-Rachel-

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Valentine Cupcakes

Finally after 2 hours of hard work into the night we have completed decorating 60 cupcakes. We opted for a simple yellow cupcake and the pics you see above are the cupcakes frosted with royal icing. Now, the great thing about royal icing is how easy it is for absolutely anyone to handle it. Its a amazing tool to use for cake decoration and besides cupcakes we also use it to ice our gingerbread men during Christmas. However, it usually doesn't taste very good which is a pity seeing how lovely it looks. The icing hardens after some time and what you will get is a candy like crust which is extremely sweet seeing just how much icing sugar goes into the recipe. The cupcakes were decorated with little sugar hearts and dragees and I would say the results was pretty satisfying.




Now as you could have guess I am not a fan of royal icing. I'll opt for something more tasty and with more...ooomph! So we tried a chocolate ganache frosting recipe we've got. It called for a combination of bitter-sweet and un-sweeten chocolate, perfect for the chocolate lovers that are us. But we were met with a very puzzling situation after the frosting was all ready to be piped on, something we came to term: Mystery of the Chocolate Ganache Frosting!

Perhaps I'm dramatizing it a little but it is indeed very peculiar when there appears to be a minty taste in your frosting even though there wasn't any mint added to the recipe. We fretted over this quite some time. Could it be that the chocolate we used were previously stored in a container with mint in it? But that's impossible! The only source of mint in our kitchen comes in the form of peppermint essence. What about toothpaste then? Toothpaste has a minty taste. Now that's even more absurd, we don't keep toothpaste in the kitchen!

So after we all had our chance to play "Kitchen Detective", the Mystery of the Chocolate Ganache still eludes us. So if any of you have any idea how our chocolate frosting can decide to go mint, please do do tell us.

All in all, despite the little mysteries that concluded our cupcake baking experience, we had a lovely time creating these little beauties and I'm glad to say that I'm pretty motivated to continue experimenting with cupcakes. So yes, we had our qualms about these cakes but here at Cooked with Love, we are also suckers for all things pretty and cupcakes.....what can I say, they're gorgeous

-Rachel-

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Koi Agar Agar

My heart just swells every time I look at these pictures. As you could have already guess, this was the special CNY dessert we did for a party last Saturday. Although our search for the ideal Koi mould was a disappointing failure, we improvised and the final product turned out pretty good indeed.

Now we did do quite a bit of research for this dessert. A search through google turned out images of koi agar agar that were rather dull in appearances, we were determined we do better. First up we needed the kois to look as life like as possible so a visit to the koi pond soon ensued. Oh ok, so that's just a phony excuse for a break but who cares, after that exhausting and, might i add, depressing koi mould scout, we needed one. So a good 15 mins was spent observing these lovely kois, the patterns of their scales, the colours and then it was back to the kitchen for us.

It was an intensive hour then as we laboriously added in the details of the individual kois. Of course there was competition. One of us even resorted to measures such as this:

" All my kois have a secret birthmark"

Her "secret birthmark" turned out to be little spots of black at the tip of her koi's tail, a move which she later discovered wasn't very secret after all. Competition or no competition, the kois turned out to be lovely and to our credit, very realistic looking. They look pretty standing alone but even more attractive arranged together. Needless to say, our dessert piece elicited a lot of "oohs" and "ahhhs", something which always makes our hearts swell. These were also some mean tasting kois. We always make sure that the coconut use for the our agar agar are the freshest in the market cause the difference in colour and taste is really quite obvious if one takes the time to notice.

Next up, we're preparing a little something for Valentine's day this Saturday: Cupcakes for our friends and family. I remember having gone cupcake crazy 2 years ago. I was quite taken by that charming little confectionery and the endless possibilities of how one can decorate it. We were whipping batches after batches of cupcakes, hoping to find a great tasting one.

But the problem with cupcakes is that seldom do you find one which taste as good as it looks. Believe me, there are bases for my assertion. Finally suspecting that perhaps its the cupcakes that we make that fails the standard, we proceed to once again do some market research. We ordered some from an online cupcake store and tasted some at a cafe known for their cupcakes. None of these impressed us much.

I still do hope to find a mean tasting one cause surely all these hype and countless websites dedicated to this pretty cake can only be proof of how delicious a cupcake can really be. So wish us luck tomorrow as we attempt to bake cupcakes again for the first time in 2 years!

-Rachel

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Koi Mould Scouting

Went scouting for the perfect Koi Mould today. The one shown above is what we currently have among our arsenal of agar moulds. Unfortunately is a tad too big for our purpose- The Special Chinese New Year dessert we're preparing.

First stop was of course the ubiquitous Phoon Huat, we visited the branch at Ang Mo Kio. Was sorely disappointed by the selection, I always though that one would full fill all one's baking needs at this one-stop baking shop. Apparently this does not extend to small Koi moulds. No fear, still optimistic we visited Sun Lik located on the street next to Raffles Hotel.

This little shop had quite an interesting collection of cake decoration - Coloured rice, sugared cut-outs, silver dragees. And cause its just after the Christmas season everything came in green and red. Interesting yes, but it made me wish that Christmas wasn't already over! :(

I remember being quite excited over finding this little store last year. We were in our cupcake fanatic mode and the little decorative pieces had us all fantasizing about all the pretty cupcakes we could create. Unfortunately Sun Lik did not meet up to our expectations, our hunt for the perfect Koi mould failed. We did discover an adorable looking cow mould though. Very tempting but we reminded ourselves to be prudent. Economical crisis period!

Dejected but still hopeful we made our way to the last stop on our list- Siah House at Buffalo Street. The facade of the shop was very promising, it was huge for starters spanning over 3 shops and boasting a second floor. I'm guessing they're catering mainly for big restaurant players. They had on sale rather impressive equipments. Giant frying pants like the wants you see the curry simmering in in Indian restaurants or prata places. Giant fridges, giant steamers, giant mixers, giant....you get the point. But not what we were looking for. The agar mould collection was disappointing, they stocked more chocolate moulds than agar ones. Although they did have a koi mould it of the exact same size as the one we have on hand. Another futile trip.

Not to matter though, we dug up an old Lifestyle article listing down all the bake shops in Singapore selling moulds (see, we do do our homework!). A few is not yet on our list and we shall set off with a hopeful spirit in our quest for the perfect Koi mould yet again, tomorrow.

Wish us luck!

- Rachel -

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First Order Of The Year

Here's wishing all a Happy Chinese New Year!

We just delivered our first order of the year yesterday, it was an order of carrot cake and agar agar for a small New Year's get together. We're glad to say that everything went smoothly, no hick ups here or there, was afraid that we might have gotten a little rusty since last year. Thankfully the our trusty Kenwood mixer still work like a charm.



















CWL took a one month haitus during January, decided to do a little new year cookies baking or rather its an excuse for a little ME time ( Hey hey don't judge us we're humans! We need rest!)
Whipped up a few batches of our all time favourite Cashew Nut Cookies. We really did enjoy the whole process , good to be back on our feets again although it was really exhausting cutting out the cookies indiviually and placing a halved cashew on each cookie. It was tough, yes, but we did it lovingly! :)

This year we were a bit more aspirational so we decided to distribute these home-baked cookies instead of those sterotypical (Read: Boring) Bangawan Solo ones during our New Year visits. Besides we do indeed feel a soft glow of accomplishment surround us when we pass these cookies out to our always obliging relatives. Talk about an ego boost!

Next up, we're catering for a large CNY party next Saturday. We were thinking of during something a little special this time round, something more suiting the festive. The festive mood has been so lacking this year, it feels as though the New Year just steathily crept up from behind us and then disappear again just as abruptly. Just shows how badly an economical gloom can hit the population. Its gets me all depress just thinking about it, I did'nt even get to do my usual tour around China Town this year round. No wait, there's worse, I did'nt even get to sample durian this year. Sobs, talk about a lack of festive cheer.

This little "special" dessert will require some preparation so the team will be scouting around all the baking shops on the island looking for that special mould. I must say, Im pretty excited about how it'll turn out it has been a long time since we took on something so intricate. Haha I shall not give away anything more, it is afterall a surprise piece!

-Rachel-

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