Let’s imagine that you’ve got a packet of blueberries and a tub of Nutella sitting around, why not put them to good use and make these!

Ingredients:

140g softened butter

1/2 cup caster sugar

3 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

1.5 cups of self raising flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tbsp milk

 Method:

Line tray with cupcake liners and preheat over to 150°C

Cream together butter and sugar. (I’ve realised how important this step is as the lighter and fluffier you get this, the lighter and fluffier your cupcakes will turn out). I beat mine for a good 4 mins.

Add in the eggs 1 at a time.

Fold sifted flour in gradually and add vanilla and baking powder. Add milk to give consistency you desire.

Fill each muffin liner with batter until 2/3 full.

For the blueberry cupcakes, I filled the liners till 1/2 full, add some blueberries and top it up with the remaining 1/3 batter. Finish off with a few blueberries on top.

For the nutella cupcakes, fill the liners till 3/4 full and top with 1 tsp of nutella (or however much you like). Using a cocktail stick, swirl the nutella and batter into a nice swirly pattern.

Bake for 15-20mins.

Enjoy!

Eversince we’ve met, I can safely say that I have taken J out of his comfort zone with the kind of food and culture I’ve been accustomed to. And bless him…he’s taken it all in his stride and have enjoyed every different/new challenge I’ve set him.

However, there is just one thing, after all these years he still struggles with… chopsticks!

So it was only appropriate when his uncle bought him a pair of “cheater chopsticks”. I’ve googled and come across various different types of cheater chopsticks and this pair was probably the most discreet of the lot. I so love the cute little faces at the end.

Unfortunately, his uncle can’t remember where he got them from. I would love to get a few more pairs for our friends when I host a Chinese/Dim Sum dinner again.

J doesn’t seem to believe me when I say that he’s really not that bad at cooking when he sets his mind to it. Well, all I have to say is…the pictures speak for themselves.

Starters: A selection of cured meat with buttered olive & poppy seed bread accompanied with a bottle of champagne.

Main Course: Baked Salmon on a bed of spinach & rocket salad, served with grilled asparagus & baby potatoes, accompanied with a creamy herb sauce.

It was divine!

I just wish he was confident enough to cook more often…

I’m a huge fan of cupcakes and my ultimate favourite are vanilla cupcakes.

When we first moved in, I was thinking of baking some cupcakes and distributing it amongst our neighbours…just a simple gesture of introducing ourselves to the neighbourhood (we live in a little cul-de-sac) but J’s immediate response was : “Err..why don’t we get them a box of chocolates instead…” Yup..you guessed it…I’m not a good baker…I’ve tried! …I tried cupcakes/cakes/muffins but somehow… they just don’t turn out too great!

Therefore, when I came across this recipe on Saripartygirl’s blog, I thought I would give it one last shot…before I throw in my baking gloves (if there is such a thing) forever and declare myself a baking idiot…there are some things you can’t do and for me, it might just be that I…just…can’t…bake!

So I locked myself in the kitchen and tried it out.

Oh boy…am I glad I did! They turned out perfect! Soft and moist…with that light taste of vanilla with a rich creamy vanilla cream frosting. YUM! I was so proud of myself I was beaming from ear to ear all day. I’m not such a baking idiot after all!

Eventhough, the recipe was pretty much identical to the original, I tweaked it a little and this is my version:

Cupcake Ingredients:

2 cups milk

3 tsp vanilla extract

1.5 cups cake flour

1 tsp baking powder

0.5 cups of French unsalted butter at room temperature

1 large whole egg

2 large egg whites

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 180deg. Line 12-cupcake cases lightly with melted butter and set in cupcake tray.

2. Sift flour and combine with baking powder.

3. Using an electric mixer, beat butter until fluffy & gradually add sugar and eggs until well combined and fluffy.

4. Add in half flour mixture and fold. Add in milk and vanilla extract and remaining flour and fold. Do not fold too much. I only folded like 6-8 times.

5.Divide batter into cases and bake for 25 mins.

6. Once done, leave to cool for 1.5hours before frosting.

Vanilla Frosting

Ingredients

0.5 cup French unsalted butter

1.5 cups of icing sugar

2 tsp vanilla extract

2 tbsp milk

Directions

1. Beat butter until fluffy and gradually add icing sugar, milk & vanilla extract. Beat until fluffy but firm. Taste. If you want it sweeter, add more sugar.

There you have it! The simplest vanilla cupcake recipe I’ve tried which actually works! Now, if you’ll excuse me…I think it’s time for my afternoon tea…

Dinner…cooked – check!

Wine…poured – check!

Candles…lit – check!

Good homecooked food in the comfort of our PJs and just for that evening, it’s just us…in our own little world…talking about things that have been and things that will be.

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I’m happy.

I’m sure every Singaporean will tell you that the one thing they miss about being away from home is the food. Inevitably, when I first arrived, I was extremely homesick and what made things worse was the fact that I was hungry all the time! I couldn’t get used to the sandwiches and crisps everyone else seem to content with at lunch and I missed my favourite Hainanese Chicken Rice desperately.

I would moan to my mum on Skype and bless her…she started looking into quick-fix recipes for me to try in my little student accomodation. None of them worked. Some were either too complicated, some had ingredients which I couldn’t get hold off and some…well, they just didn’t taste quite right.

Until one day, she e-mail me over a recipe for making it all in a rice cooker! And yes…rice cooker I did have. (You wouldn’t be a true Singaporean student if you didn’t drag one of these impressive kitchen devices across the world with you…) Be warned…your Turkish housemate might think it was a radio (believe it or not, that actually happened).

Anyway, I gave it a shot and OH MY GOD…it saved my life (By this time, I was going mental). Over the years, I’ve tweaked it a bit and it always makes me feel so nostalgic when the aroma of garlic and ginger in sesame oil fills the kitchen…utter bliss!

Anyway, I just thought I’ll post my recipe. You might add your bits to it as this is very much a “quick-10mins-after-work-minimum-washup-for-the-tired-and-exhausted-professional” recipe so it might lack some ingredients/steps.

To serve 2

1. Marinate some chicken wings in light soy sauce, dark soy sauce and sesame oil. You can do this the night before. I would only use chicken wings as they are quite small and you can be sure they will cook in time with the rice. Don’t use massive pieces of chicken as they would be undercooked by the time your rice is done. I prefer chicken on the bones as I find the rice has more favour that way. You can use chicken fillets if you like.

2. Finely chop some garlic and ginger. I love my garlic and ginger so I normally use a whole bulb of garlic and a thumbsize piece of ginger.

3. Switch rice cooker on, pour some sesame oil in the pot and gently fry the garlic and ginger till brown.

4. Once brown, throw in rice.

5. Pour equivalent amount of water for rice to cook.

6. Toss some chicken stock granules ( I use Maggi which I stock from Singapore as I find it taste better but you can use any kind you have).

7. Stir and taste. This will probably be what your rice will taste like. Not too salty. Don’t forget…you’ve got the soy sauce from the chicken marinate yet to be poured in.

8. Throw in your marinated chicken.

9. You will need to pour some more water in to compensate for the addition of the chicken. My general rule: fill with water till chicken is almost completely submerged (see pic).

10. Close lid and let it cook.

That’s it! All in all, it took me 10 mins in the kitchen and 20 mins of “Me-Time” in front of the telly till I had to dish it out.

J loves this dish and it’s enough to keep my cravings for the real deal to a minimum so it’s definitely a recipe worth having…

Due to my photography classes once a week, J’s responsible for dinner that evening.

I’m not sure if it’s the same situation with every guy but whenever J’s cooking, he get so intense! The last time I had that same look in my eyes was when I was solving differential equations at A Levels!

No one’s allowed into the kitchen and no one’s allowed to do or say anything which might distract him from his masterpiece.

It cracks me up everytime. So you can imagine how difficult it was to get this shot of him concentrating so hard to place the potatoes perfectly into the oven dish for his signature sausage casserole dish.

Which was delicious by the way…

Coming from a lifetime of living in flats to actually having a garden now, the thought of planting a seed and watching it grow…is completely alien to me. These past few months, I’ve begun to discover terms like compost…grow bags…stakes…seedlings…plant food (and the list goes on)…terms I would never have been exposed to if I was still living in a HDB flat in Singapore.

Anyway, the truth is…I found it extremely boring. You plant these little seeds and you wait for 2 weeks while nothing happens…yet you wake up every morning and look into this little pot to see if somehow…somehow something’s changed from the night before and you hope…no!…you pray that you see some kind of life spurting out from underneath all that soil.

J has been persuading me to get some gradening done. However, I see no point in growing flowers etc…they look pretty yes…but am I going to go through all that for something that looks pretty and dies again in a few months? So we came to a compromise…I’ll grow herbs.

I wouldn’t mind going through all that waiting and praying and watering…if I can get some fresh herbs for my dishes at the end of the whole ordeal. So I did. I planted coriander, chives, basil and rosemary. Out in the garden, we have tomatoes and courgettes which will hopefully be arriving in June. Look how gorgeous my coriander’s looking!

I might have green fingers after all….

When we first moved into our first home last year, we knew that the garden was going to be the part of the house which would take up the most amount of our time, hardwork and money to do up – mainly due to the following reasons:

1) It slopes.

2) It’s divided into 2 tiers.

3) Only the top tier has any decent sunlight on it.

4) As a result, the bottom tier is now all muddy due to the lack of sunlight and the drainage issues due to the sloping tiers.

So really, it’s been just short of a year since we moved in and I can safely say, we’ve never really been in the garden…I mean, actually been in it and enjoying it.

However, it was an absolutely lovely day today ( brilliant actually, by British standards). The sun was shining and it felt amazingly warm and J was suddenly overwhelmed with the need to have a BBQ in our half-sunny-half-muddy-sloping garden! Needless to say, we have absolutely zero BBQ equipment or furniture.

We jumped in the car, drove to Tescos and bought some meat, some tongs and an instant BBQ kit. Once back, I quickly whipped up a potato salad while J laid the garden with blankets and got the BBQ started (it wasn’t as instant as I thought it would be).

And we had our very first barbeque in our very first garden!

I have to say…the food was brilliant and we had a really nice afternoon sitting around our little BBQ kit, eating, talking and enjoying each others’ company while feeling the warm hot sun on our backs.

I simply cannot wait to sort the garden out this summer…with a proper BBQ kit and proper garden furniture…and have many more blissful Sunday afternoons like this.

I have had a few e-mails from readers asking about my recent trip to Singapore. I have been meaning to blog about it but just haven’t gotten round to it!

If you’ve ever been to Singapore, you would know that the one thing Singaporean are very passionate about is the local Singaporean food.

Whenever I go back, I kinda have a list of local delicacies which I HAVE to eat or else my trip would be in vain. For the sake of those who haven’t been to Singapore, I thought I’d blog about some of the food we ate recently during this trip.

Ice Kacang

A simple, inexpensive desert comprising of nothing more than favourings, food colouring, some ‘chendol’ and crushed ICE. I love popping down into my local hawker centre at 2 in the morning and having a nice cold bowl of ice kacang.

Hainanese Chicken Rice

This has got to be one of my favourite dishes and is arguably one of Singapore’s most loved meal. You will find them everywhere and it’s oh so hugely satisfying. It’s basically a rice dish accompanied with roasted or steamed chicken pieces. The rice is especially fragrant as it’s cooked in chicken stock and the special chicken rice chilli sauce goes amazingly well with a touch of thick black soya sauce. I’m crazing it already!

Teppanyaki?

Now, I don’t know what this is properly categorized as. Japanese? I’m not sure. The stall is called “Teppanyaki” but the term teppanyaki here in the UK means something quite different…so it’s a little confusing. Anyway, I love the minced pork dish they serve and it comes accompanied with some stir-fried beansprouts, green vegetables and the meat generously stirred in their delicious sauce (not sure what the sauce is but it tastes so good!). Everything is cooked right in front of you and you see exactly what goes into your food. Once prepared, it’s served on aluminium foils placed over burners so your meal stays warm longer. A definite must-try!

Prawn Noodles - Dry

Traditional dish. Yellow noodles tossed with prawns and fish cake slices. You can have it dry or soupy. I prefer it dry as it’s much more spicy. As you can see from the picture, I’ve even asked for extra fresh chopped chillies! Believe it or not- this is a very common breakfast dish for me when I was living back in Singapore.

Roti Prata

One of my all-time favourites. A common breakfast dish but what I love about roti prata is the fact you can have it anytime! It’s light and the curry that goes along it, makes it just perfect. I remember having sober-up meals of roti prata house at 3am in the morning after a night of partying. haha

Well! All that food talk’s made me hungry! Those aren’t all though. I still in the process of sorting through my 600+ pics from the trip. So be warned: there will be more food posts in the near future.