Tag Archive for 'bread-and-bakery'

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Frozen Cheese Cake

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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How to Make Flour Tortillas (with Limited Resources)

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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Butter Cookies

When you have egg yolk left from some kind of cooking, these butter cookies can be a good simple solution to use it up.

About three week ago, I made sweet and sour chicken. Do you remember that? After making that meal, I had two egg yolk left over. So I decided to bake some cookies. But it only gave me 10 cookies. Today I increase all the ingredients 2 times more to get 2 times more cookies.

It turned out that I only got 15 cookies, and they tasted a bit different to the original ones (in a good way according to my husband. He prefers crispy ones.) I expected them to be the same, but obviously they were NOT.

Ingredients (for 15 cookies)

  • Flour 180 ml
  • Brown sugar 80 ml
  • Butter 60 ml (I defrosted it for a couple of hours before I used it.)
  • 4 egg yolks

Steps

Preparation for butter cookies
  1. Sieve the flour.
  2. Beat the egg yolk.
  3. Mix the sugar and butter together.
  4. Melt no.3.
  5. Mix the flour, egg yolk and no. 4 together well.
Mixing flour and melted butter sugar

6. Place spoonfuls of the mix onto the oven tray.

Baking Butter Cookies

7. Set the time for 10 minutes in 160 ˚ C.
8. When it is baked, cool it down, then serve it on the plate.

Butter Cookies

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