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Frozen Cheese Cake

sue — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 11:41:49 +0000

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.

The pieces are individually packed as usual for Korean snacks.

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.

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.)

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)

sue — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 03:10:15 +0000

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

Sieve the flour, salt, starch powder.
Add the water and olive oil.
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.)

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.

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

sue — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 02:05:57 +0000

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

Sieve the flour.
Beat the egg yolk.
Mix the sugar and butter together.
Melt no.3.
Mix the flour, egg yolk and no. 4 together well.

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

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

Cakes from Paris Baguette

sue — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 12:18:17 +0000

Yesterday was my sister’s birthday. When she got home, she brought 2 cake boxes with her.
They were presents from her friends. I think it is a weird culture of theirs, that they don’t share cakes and instead just bring it home like other normal presents.

Anyway Yah for me~ I am not that fond of sweet things such as cakes, but I had some with my friend at the coffee shop (I took some of the cake when I met my friend, the coffee shop doesn’t sell cakes and it is a charity coffee shop, so they don’t mind. I hope).

This is a picture of the cakes I had today (before I cut it – It is the smallest size and cheapest you can get in Korea.). My sister had a piece of the chocolate cake yesterday.

One is sponge cake with fresh cream on top (Probably about 10,000 won- US $10.55), the other one is chocolate sponge cake (about 9,000 won -US $9.50)

It was quite nice with coffee. (I don’t drink coffee but coffee is the smartest choice from that shop.)

Paris Baguette is the most popular bakery in Korea. There is one in every town. If you are European or Australian, you wouldn’t like Paris Baguette much, because their bread is usually sweet, even the garlic bread.

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Extrema Cheese Bite Fondue Pizza

sue — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 05:46:44 +0000

3 days from today, Oct 25th, it is my sister’s birthday. She finishes school at 11pm (starts 7:20 am). Being in grade 12 in Korea, it involves just too much work and stress.

Anyway, I figured we are not going to celebrate her birthday on her birthday, because she needs to be at school the whole day. So we celebrated earlier, last night, by letting her choose dinner. She wanted to have pizza and I had a 15% discount coupon from Pizza Hut, but it was for pick up or delivery only. (By the way, there is no extra charge for delivered pizza, in Korea – it’s already really expensive).

We decided to have “Cheese Bite fondue pizza” (It is a kind of pizza, like cheese crust pizza). Pizza Hut launched this pizza a couple of month ago. I haven’t had this kind before but my sister had it once, and she said it was really yummy. I checked it on the internet, it looked really cheesy and fancy. This is the picture of cheese bite fondue pizza from their web site.

So we ordered Extrema cheese bite fondue pizza. This is the picture of what we got.

And this is one piece of this pizza.

Where does all the fancy cheese disappear? I was a bit disappointed.

It is 27,900 won (US $29.40) for family size, with my 15% discount coupon it was 23,710 won (US $24.95). I think it is really expensive for its quality.

The crust has some sweet potato as well which I didn’t realize before I ordered. I hardly tasted the cheese because of this.

This is a picture of the fondue (It didn’t have much taste).
So in general, I didn’t liked the pizza I ordered.

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