just for the heck of it, decided to post a picture of one of my favourite comfort foods i don't get often anymore. SCGS MEEPOK. meepok, gan de, bu yao la jiao, jia rou. with that blob of wonderful chili the uncle made personally. i have to go back some time.

Gothic Muffins

I actually created these for my school drama society since drama tends to have a preoccupation with the colour black. It turns out that the icing leaves a bluish-black stain on teeth and lips and tongue [temporarily, not to worry!] because I added in quite a lot of food colouring. Only after I got a few comments about them being 'gothic muffins' did I realize this would be a good treat for halloween [which is coming up in about three months time!]. Kids enjoy this - watching their mouths turn black - whether parents will is a totally different matter.

The muffins are my very own recipe, based on rough experimentation one night - and i hit it right it seems, after testing it out on classmates at school. The icing, however, is Nigella Lawson's Buttercream Icing and the recipe can be found in How To Be A Domestic Goddess.

DOUBLE CHOCOLATE CHIP MUFFIN RECIPE

23/4 cups all purpose flour
3/4 cup white sugar
3/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs, beaten
12 tbsp unsalted butter, melted
3/4 cup buttermilk
1 tbsp pure vanilla extract
1 cup Hershey's Cocoa powder [you can vary the amount]
2 cups Hershey's chocolate chips [again, you can vary it to your preferrence]

Simply whisk the flour, sugars, baking powder and soda, salt together in a bowl. In a separate bowl, blend all the wet ingredients till they've incorporated well. Then, slowly add the dry ingredients to the bowl of wet ingredients. Bit by bit, folding it in gently. You can use the electric beater but I prefer to do it by hand because overbeating the muffins can make them 'tough'. Add the chocolate chips, all the while folding in the dry ingredients. Once it's well combined, it should look like this.

The actual colour is a much darker and richer chocolate but my camera was malfunctioning that night and that's why it looks orangey. Anyway, the more cocoa powder you add, the darker it gets.







Scoop the batter into 12-cup muffin tins, each cup lined with a cupcake holder [in my case, mine were black]. Don't worry if the batter is extremely gloopy - the runnier it is, the less tough it will be. Which is a good thing. It's up to you how much you want to scoop, because these muffins rise up a lot it's up to you how big you like them. I like them huge, but seeing as I had to add icing, I was less generous. Bake for about 20-25 minutes at 180C





Then I made the icing with nigella's recipe. It's very simple, and if you're not particular about how your icing is going to taste, you can probably just experiment on your own - icing sugar is a must of course. personally I've never cared much for icing. I don't like my food all prettied up and far too sweet. The food colouring i used was COAL BLACK colouring. It wasn't completely black and that's why I just kept adding more and more. Be wary though, these things contain lots of food additives and if you're giving these away make sure that person doesn't have food allergies - but the whole drama society survived so my guess is that it's quite safe.





WARNING! it's an awfully messy business working with black food dye and i was left with black nails and fingertips for a week.



Okay, back to the muffins. So after they were baked, this was how they were. I then had to get down to the tedious and messy task of icing them. I intended to pipe words at first, but it was troublesome so I decided to just cover the lot. It's much easier to ice flat-topped cupcakes but I have a personal weakness for muffins and that's why I chose to do this with muffins. Particularly good muffin recipes can be found from Mrs. Fields cookbooks.







This recipe makes about 18, but then again it all depends on how you size your muffins, and you can always play around with the ratio of the measurements. So there you have it, Gothic Muffins.

girl's night in

on the last day of our commontest2, two of my girlfriends and i decided to cook ourselves a dinner using nigella lawson and jamie oliver recipes. bea did the molten babycakes by nigella lawson and i did the meatballs by jamie oliver.

JAMIE O'S MEATBALLS WITH TOMATO SAUCE [DONE BY ME]

first, the dubious task of thawing the meat - it was kept in the freezer for about a week so beat chopped it up into hunks to speed up the thawing process. this is organic minced beef, but any other kind of minced meat would be fine depending on your preferrence.




finally when it was thawed, i put it into a big bowl to work with and season. unfortunately didn't take photos of the seasoning but i had to add bread crumbs, rosemary, basil - plenty of herbs. check out jamie olivers The Naked Chef cookbook for more details. i know these pictures look just gruesome. partly because my photography skills aren't that great and also, it's hard to make raw food look appetizing with a 2.0 meg digital.you can leave this to sit in the fridge for a few hours or you can work with it straight.

i let it sit so i could make the tomato sauce. i used jamie's recipe and it's pretty simple but there's chockloads of garlic in it - perhaps a little too much for me. i used ready canned tomatoes but if you're extra diligent you could squash your own.




okay here's the fun part. making the meatballs! if you like them perfectly round, keep your hands wet as you roll. if you don't mind them being a little bumpy [like me] then just work with what you have.





then fry them in a pan of olive oil [as much or little as you like] and quickly transfer them to your casserole dish. you don't want them to be cooked all the way through because you're baking them again after. you just want a nice brown. i admit mine are slightly overcooked.


pour the tomato sauce over the meatballs and sprinkle grated parmesan cheese among the meatballs. finally, put large slabs of mozarella on top and basil. the fresh leaves are best but i had to make do with the dried kind. you should be able to get these at any supermarket. all ready to bake!






i baked it for about 20 minutes at 180C - i think. when it's done, poke around a bit to check if the meatballs are cooked. it gives you an excuse to eat it first. SO, this is how it turned out. we ate it with some boiled packet pasta upon bea's adamant requests and i also bought two long baguettes to make meatball sandwiches with. and i suppose if you're like my brothers and can't live without your rice, you can have it with rice.

NIGELLA'S MOLTEN BABYCAKES [DONE BY BEA]

i actually tried this recipe out three years back and failed because i left the cakes in the oven for too long but bea did it this time and it turned out just perfectly. the recipe is taken from How To Be a Domestic Goddess.

bea used my rubber heartshaped moulds so the cakes could be squeezed out quickly. i can't tell you much about the process because we were working simultaneously [she did the batter while i cooked, and we baked it after we had the meatballs] but this is how the batter was




and this is how it was after it was baked for less than 10 minutes and served up with ben and jerry's vanilla ice cream.



SIMPLY GORGEOUS!

mel's makan sutra.

after staring longingly at countless foodblogs, i've decided to start my own. i'll have to learn how to spruce it up, being a rather tech dummy and all, but i think for now this will do. as i'm having exams soon for a good three months to come, i won't have much time to maintain it. but once december rolls around, be sure that this place will be hopping mad!

enjoy.