FeR

Can you guess what is it I’m attempting? Look at the ingredients – there’s one thing that stands out and I’ve not used it before in my baking experiments.

Okay lah, this is what I wanted to do. I don’t remember how I got myself to this website and saw this entry – I think it started from searching for bread recipes. Hmmm…but it’s cute, no? [Please refer to her website's one lah, not mine.]

Why bread?

I don’t know. I think I wanted to try making doughnuts, but it requires yeast. I know nuts about bread or yeast. So the ambitious me not only wanted to try making bread, I wanted to make fancy schmancy bread.

Mini loaves. Left over from the bigger “Panda bread”.

Not too bad, kan? I need a bread knife lah…the bread also kemek already when I tried to cut it. Now panda’s got a widddddde face.
A lot of work though because I don’t have a bread machine – I did it all by hand. I didn’t use the same recipe as Florence’s entry…I was looking for the SIMPLEST bread recipe online. Since it’s coloured (and flavoured, actually. Green tea and chocolate), I didn’t want it to be a plain white bread recipe (yea, ambitious gila gila!)
Found a recipe for “sweet bread” and I just assembled the dough according to the PandaBread’s instructions (which originally is in Japanese! I actually spent a bit of time using Babel to translate the original site but…I didn’t understand it any better than when it was in Japanese. *haha*)

The texture of the bigger PandaBread. It was dense at the bottom – probably I didn’t give it enough time to rise before I put it in the oven.
It tasted nice, though! *hehe* I don’t like honey so the smell actually puts me off a bit…a hint of sweetness from the honey and the smell of chocolate/green tea as you bite into those respective areas of the bread.

Baking with yeast is…interesting. While kneading the chocolate and green tea (okay, for the green tea I cheated a bit because I hadn’t got enough green tea – used the macha powder that Mi-Chelle gave me to try DRINKING – so I used a bit of green food colouring), the plain one kembang like crazy and I could see air bubbles forming within the dough. Amazing! Couldn’t take pictures because hands were dirty/oily. Peh.

I’ve not finished what I wanted to do…still in the process.

When Anne called me to see if I wanted to go for young adults, I was preparing for second experiment – time flies, yea. I didn’t know she messaged me. I think I spent too much time trying to get the bread right…quite an exercise to make from scratch, without the help of a bread machine. Phew!

Back to work!

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Edited 12:37am

This is the last bit…

Chocolate cupcake with white chocolate mint ganache (I added green food colouring because white chocolate turned off-white…not nice), topped with Andes mint parfait thin.

Chocolate-coffee cupcake with chocolate ganache, topped with freshly baked mini gingersnap! So cute, if I may say so myself. *hehe*

…actually, the last thing I’m waiting for now is for my gingersnap dough to chill – then I could bake two batches of it.

Been wearing a newly acquired apron (free gift, if not I’d definitely get a cotton one) the whole day and I look like those sample servers. *hehe* Shoulders are achy…need to go to bed soon since I’m serving tomorrow.