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Archive for the 'Bread and Bakery' Category

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Frozen Cheese Cake

Published December 5th, 2006 in Bread and Bakery and Desserts. 8 Comments

We have a regular gathering with some other foreigners living in this area every second Wednesday. We have dinner in one person’s house and we take turns. The host prepares a main meal and everyone else brings their duty dish. Anyhow, Mel (most of the time dessert duty person) brought this cheese cake at the last gathering, and since then I fell in love with it. She usually brings home made dessert, but she brought frozen cheese cake that day. (She mustn’t have had much time to cook.)

Not realizing that it was from Homeplus, I kept saying how delicious it was and I wanted to have some more, etc. Michael was surprised because it is a very unusual comment for me to say something like that for a dessert. Because most of the time desserts are just too sweet for me. I guess most Canadians and Americans can cope with it, because I know they keep helping themselves until it is all gone. Yet I’ve never finished one piece of dessert ever so far, I usually pass mine on to Michael (When I think I am done.)
So I guess, me saying that I want more could have hurt her feelings.

After knowing where she got it from, we eagerly looked for the cheese cake when we went grocery shopping at Homeplus the other day. When we found it, I nearly fainted because its price was so high.

It was 15,950 won (US $17) for that smallish medium size cake. Come on! It is not even a bakery made cheese cake, it is just a frozen cheese cake from the factory. Michael encouraged me “Not” to buy it because of the ridicules price. So I gave up.

When I came home from shopping, I was thinking about the cake more and more. I become a slave of it. So what!
Yes, I finally bought cheese cake yesterday. Michael found out about the fact near the cash register, though he couldn’t convince me not to buy it anymore.
This is a picture of cheese cake I was craving for days and days.

cheese cake box

The pieces are individually packed as usual for Korean snacks. :)

individually packed cheese cakes

How to defrost :

  • You just defrost it one piece at a time (or more, if you going to have more)
    You can defrost it in the fridge for 1 hour or at room temperature for 30-40 minutes (It was written on the box).

I took out 4 pieces to have (2 each), and Michael said that he finds frozen cheese cake tastes better, so we decided to defrost 2 pieces, and eat 2 pieces of frozen cakes. It was OK to have frozen cheese cake though it was a bit too hard to break it with a fork and hard to taste the cheese. He added the comment later that he likes frozen ones better because he doesn’t like the creamy taste. Dude! If you had mentioned that part I would have waited 30 minutes for both. The picture just below is a piece of frozen cheese cake.

Frozen cheese cake

After waiting 30 minutes to taste a defrosted piece at room temperature, I added some strawberry jam on top and tasted it. It was fabulous. It was very creamy and soft, a little bit sweet from the strawberry jam, it was the best cake ever. (We don’t have many good cakes in Korea. 90% of cakes are sponge cake and are all sweet as far as I know.)

Cheese cake with strawberry jam

I’ve never had cheese cake from a cake shop or bakery, so it is not possible for me to compare them, though it was really good as a cheese cake from a supermarket.

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Dumpling Pastry Pizza (Mandupy Pizza in Korean)

Published December 1st, 2006 in Bread and Bakery. 7 Comments
dumpling pastry pizza on the magazine

I found that some Koreans make simple pizzas with dumpling pastry at home. It is very quick to make as long as you can get the dumpling pastry easily. You can buy some at a supermarket in Korea for about 1,300 won (US $1.40) for 260g of pre-made dumpling pastry.

This is a picture of dumpling pastry package. (I bought the package that contains green tea powder which is a little bit more expensive than white flour pastry. Though you can use either pastry. They are next to each other, so are easy to find.) - It is stored next to the instant dumplings or pork cutlets section, which implies in the fridge.

dumping pastry

Ingredients for 2 people (12 small pizzas) - You can alter with any topping you want.

dumping pastry pizza ingredients
  • 7 black pitted olives
  • 2 sausages
  • 1/2 an onion
  • 1/2 a capsicum
  • 3 mushrooms (I was going to use button mushrooms, but I only had shiitake mushrooms)
  • Shredded cheese 2 fistful
  • Dumpling pastry 12 sheets
  • Tomato sauce (Ketchup) - 3 to 4 tbsp (depends on whether you like a bit stronger taste or not. Pizza that had more tomato sauce tastes better for me.)

Preparation

  1. Finely chop the onion and capsicum.
  2. Thin slice the olive, sausage, and mushrooms.
  3. Paste the tomato sauce on the pastries.
dumpling pastry pizza prep

Cooking (with small oven)

1. Place them on the oven tray. (this way, you don’t spill the toppings.)

2. Add the toppings on the top of the pastries as you like.

3. Bake them on 210˚C for 10 minutes.

Baking pizza

4. Serve them on the plate.

dumping pastry pizza

If you don’t have an oven, you can bake them on the frying pan with some oil. (bake them until the cheese melts, usually it takes about 5-6 minutes) I tried this way too, though it wasn’t as convenient as oven baking, and it tastes different. Pan baked pizza tastes like pan pizza, and oven baked pizza (without oil) tastes like thin pizza.

By the way, if you can’t get the dumpling pastries, you can use my tortilla recipe to substitute for the pastry and make some small tortillas out of it instead of big ones. I think it will work out well too.

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How to Make Flour Tortillas (with Limited Resources)

Published November 28th, 2006 in Tips for Living in Korea and Bread and Bakery. 13 Comments
Hand made tortilla

Since I speak Korean, I can easily order tortillas from the internet. Though it seemed expensive to me to pay about 4 dollars (US) to get 12 sheets of tortillas, plus pay the delivery cost which is another 4 dollars if I spend less than 40 dollars from that shop.

So I researched a little bit on the weekend to get a very simple tortilla recipe.
Here is the one I found, I altered it a bit in my own way. They were quite good but they weren’t as thin as prepackaged ones. I guess I need a better technique to do so.

Ingredients for 4 wraps

  • White flour 2 cups - I used all purpose flour
  • Starch powder - 2 tbsp
  • Salt - 1 tsp
  • Water 3/4 cup
  • Olive oil - 2 tsp
  • White flour - 2 tbsp (Anti sticky purpose)

Make sure you pour 3/4 cup of water, not 1 and 3/4 cups. There was a incident while my sister was helping me cooking. She doesn’t have much experience with measuring cups like most Koreans, and she poured 1 cup extra on the flour. Thanks to her, I started all the steps over again, and had to cook lots of Buchimgae pancakes to use up the other failed dough whole weekend. I still have 2/3 more to go. :(

Steps

  1. Sieve the flour, salt, starch powder.
  2. Add the water and olive oil.
  3. Kneed the dough. (The recipe I found recommend to leave it like that for about 1 hour in the fridge, but I didn’t have much time to spare, because of the incident I had. So I just kept going to next step without having any break.)
Making tortillas1

4. Divide the dough into 4 pieces.

5. Spread the white flour (2tbsp) on the board.

6. Roll the 4 pieces of the dough lightly on the board into balls. (Separately)

7. Roll one piece of dough with a rolling pin to make a thin round shape. (Repeat this for the rest of them)

8. Preheat the pan for 10 seconds.

9. Add one tortilla sheet and cook it for 20-30 seconds.

10. Turn it over and cook it for 20-30 seconds.

Making tortillas2

If you have a tortilla press, here is a good recipe from Simply Recipes - How to make corn tortillas

Also, if you have better ideas or suggestions to make tortillas with limited resources, I would like to hear about it from you too.:)

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