recipe | A Food Fable

Sunday afternoons are sometimes best spent doing some baking before we have to face the new week ahead.

This was from a few weekends ago:

Peanut Butter & Jelly Milkshake

This is our re-creation of the PB&J milkshake they serve at The Paramount Coffee Project. If you haven’t tried it, it’s $8 but very delicious (the jam donut is better actually).

There’s not really instructions/recipes for creating milkshakes – it depends how thick or thin you want it to be.

Get a blender:

First ingredient: peanut butter ice cream. This is the Coles Peanut Butter Ice Cream which my sister got for free as a taster. Coles introduced this new flavour into its line in September 2013. Yum – thanks Coles!

We put 4 scoops in.

We’d already put some milk in. But then decided that it would be better to put in the ‘solids’ first to prevent splashing. This is a big blob of home made peanut butter.

Basically my mum makes her peanut butter from scratch by blitzing peanuts and adding olive oil I think (not sure of the specifics). It tastes pretty much like crunch peanut butter, but less salty.

Why do we put this in on top of the peanut butter ice cream? Well D2D really wants the gloopy peanut butter up the straw effect.

We add another big blob of strawberry jam. Then top it up with some more milk.

Then its blender BLITZ time!

Very foamy on the top!

Unfortunately, unlike the PCP, we don’t have cool looking mason jars hanging around, so instead we use:

Paris Baguette is a common bakery shop in Seoul, South Korea which I got back in 2012. We fill it up and add chocolate sprinkles!

How does it taste? Pretty much just like the PCP milkshake! And just like the PCP milkshake, there’s a strong peanuty flavour but not much jam at all.

Raspberry Coconut Loaf

We followed this simple recipe from Taste website. I had run out earlier (literally) to the shops to buy raspberries. Unfortunately, raspberries are just out of season, so I got a frozen packet. Still tastes good though!

One thing I always like to do is try to use up the ingredients and home and minimise the ingredients I have to buy. If you always buy new ingredients for the recipes you want to try, you end up with a lot of unused and possibly expired (not just ‘best by’, but ‘used by’) food that gets wasted.

Here is 1.75cup dessicated coconut and 1.5 cup coconut milk in a bowl. Give it a mix and stand for 30 mins.

We have dessicated coconut from when mum makes coconut buns, and coconut milk from curries.

I’ll skip the less colourful parts – where we add in 1 beaten egg, 1 cup sugar, a splash of vanilla and 1 and 2/3 cup self raising flour (sifted).

Straight onto the 1 cup of raspberries! Stir/fold gently.

Pour into a loaf pan lined with baking paper and oven at 170 Celsius for 1 hour 10 minutes. Or really, what we do, is check on it frequently and poke it with a skewer a lot – can’t be careful about burn-age!

A big yummy loaf! You can see some raspberries peeking out.

Let’s slice it up.

Verdict? Super easy recipe for a fuss free delicious loaf! It was very moist and had a nice ‘crunch’ from the coconut and raspberries.

Too bad this was made and eaten a few weekends ago… now it’s all gone at the time of this post!

This is the FIRST (and perhaps many) of our cooking posts. On Sun night, we made dinner for the family. We started at 4.30pm and ate at 7pm.

First up, we started with:

4:30pm: Mango Pudding and Strawberry Pudding

Here is my mum’s recipe for mango pudding. It was written in Chinese in a little notebook, then transcribed into English for me. Here, I’ll transcribe it again into blog post form.

1-2 mangoes
Mango jelly powder (Aeroplane Jelly is good)
1 tsp gelatine
4 tbsp whipping cream (can also use milk I suppose)
1 egg (separated)

Mix jelly powder and gelatine. Add say 400 ml of boiling water to dissolve. You can add a bit less if you prefer sturdier pudding…
Mix in the egg yolk -kinda cook it in the hot jelly mix.
Cut mango into chunks and add to jelly mix. Make sure you get all the mango! Don’t include any skin – it tastes like grass.
Beat egg white and cream a bit. Mix into jelly mix.
Pour into bowls/cups etc and fridge it for at least 4 hours.

As mangoes were selling for $8 each, my mum decided to buy some strawberries and we tried strawberry pudding. Basically it’s the same recipe, except you chop up strawberries (and mash a few) and use a strawberry jelly power mix.

Result? It’s a bit more sour than the mango pudding, but still yummy!

5:00pm: Our own Cafe de Wheel pot pies!

Ok, so for dinner, we are making our own Cafe de Wheel pies – five of them.

Pie pastry – make from scratch or buy it?
1 kilo of beef – you can buy mince or a slab

I start with making the basic pie pastry from scratch. You can grab a recipe for this off a cooking website like Taste, but there’s lot of variations – up to your own tastes I guess.

In the meantime, D2D gets busy slicing up the kilo of beef into small cubes etc. Chunky pie!

He also dices up some onion – three of them. Here’s a secret: if you wear contacts, you don’t get affected by the onion smell! No crying for us!

I look in the fridge – but we have no mushrooms. Oh wells!

Around 5:30pm:

We throw the onion and beef on the wok with a bit of oil to lightly cook it. Then I make a pie sauce, using random amounts of salt, pepper, cupboard herbs/spices, water, cornflour, plain flour, evaporated milk, vegetable stock powder. It’s a bit watery so we keep adding cornflour and eventually it’s ok.

Divide it up into ramekin pots:

I take the pie pastry out of the fridge, where it’s been for over half an hour. Oops! It’s a bit dry…hmm. D2D separates it into 5 balls and we roll them out into thin pastry to cover the top of each ramekin.

Brush with egg wash (aka beaten egg) and pop in the oven until it’s a goldeny brown. Put a little air vent in the pastry.