Recipe: Milk Cake (tres leches)

I've written about Nuri's keto diet here on the blog, and you'd be interested to know that even though I gave up on it in less than a month, Nuri has continued all the way until now. Although, from time to time, he does take a little break - but I think it's only because he's very sweet and wants to accompany me on my carb diet as well! hehe :) There are a few things in this world Nuri would break his keto diet for. One of those few things is... TRES LECHES! 

I've had tres leches a total of 4 times in my life, and loved it each time! Nuri had his first a few weeks ago (made by a friend), and when I saw how much he loved it, I knew that this had to be the next cake I learn to make. My first attempt was very good! I found a very straightforward and simple recipe, and our cake turned out divine! By the second time I baked it, it was a walk in the park. I hope you find this recipe simple and easy to follow to! Come give it a try! 

1. Begin by whisking together

• 113g softened  butter
• 1/2 cup of sugar
• Until smooth and fluffy

2. Add in 5 eggs 

You can either add them one by one or all at once; does not matter. 

3. Add a teaspoon of vanilla and whisk it all away! 

4. In a separate bowl, mix 1.5 cups of flour and 1 teaspoon of baking powder (sieve together) 

Pour the mixture little by little into the batter. Be patient here! 

5. Once everything is mixed together nicely, pour into a baking pan. I oiled the baking pan and lined with some flour. Ideally a 9x11 inch pan is good for this amount, but I used a 9x9 inch pan because that it all I had. The only difference is mine turned out thicker, which is still fine! 

6. Bake at around 190°C for 30 minutes. 

7. While baking, start to make the tres leches. Tres Leches in Spanish means three milks, because you're going to need three kinds of milk for this! 

• 2 cups of milk 
• 14 ounce can of condensed milk 
• 12 ounce can of evaporated milk 

Mix all that together in a bowl. Yes, it looks like a lot but you're going to need all that! 

8. When the cake it done baking, take it out of the oven and while it's still hot, poke holes all over. Use a fork, and just poke poke poke, and then let the cake cool. Don't worry about how ugly or messy it might look because we're going to cover it up later!

9. Once the cake cools completely, pour the 3-milk mixture into the cake. Watch the milk soak into those holes you've poked. If you want, you can also run a knife around the edges of the cake, as this allows the milk to also sip through the sides and to the bottom of the pan. Watch all that goodness soak into the cake! It's an art!

10. Cover the cake and refrigerate for maybe an hour or two. While that's happening, clean up! and let your kitten enjoy the leftover batter! 

11. After chilling the cake for a few hours, time to cover the top with some whipped cream! Whisk: 

• 1.5 cups of whipping cream 
• Half to 1 cup of sugar (we chose to only do half a cup, but the recipe I followed suggested a whole cup. So this is totally up to your liking)
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla 

12. Optional but highly recommended: sprinkle some cinnamon powder over the cream. 

Refrigerate for a few more hours. It's best served chilled, and it's also good to give the cake more time to soak in all that milk! The cake turned out INCREDIBLE! It was soaked completely, each bite was juicy! I added a messy photo at the end because that was the only way to show you what it truly looked like - with each slice of fork, you'll see milk oozing out of the pores of the cake. The cake was dense, yet moist and soft. The flavour, in my opinion, was all in the condensed milk - who doesn't love condensed milk! The whipped cream on top gave a light touch. Nuri and I took a whole week to finish this cake. On one occasion, we had our slices with some fruits (mango and bananas) and that was an incredible combination, so I highly recommend that as well. You can add strawberries, mangoes, peaches to the top of the whip cream instead of cinnamon powder. 

Recipe: Dynamites!

Several weeks ago I was watching a show where one of the main characters kept talking about jalapeno poppers. I looked it up, and it looked yummy! It reminded me of something my mom once made - dynamite lumpia! It's a popular Filipino street dish, but I've never actually seen it sold anywhere (I've only had it once, when my mom made it at home), so I looked up the dynamite lumpia recipe two weeks ago and tried it, and Nuri and I loved it! So here's to round two: 

1. You'll need as much jalapenos as you want. The ones available to us were really large/long, but that's okay! This meant that I decided to cut them all in half. 

2. Before you do anything with the the jalapenos, wear hand gloves! The last time I did not, and my fingers and nails were burning for hours! You'll need to slice the japalenos on one side and take out the seeds (that's where the spice is!)

3. After taking out all the seeds, you can soak them in water (this is optional - but I learnt that soaking them for 30 minutes helps reduce the spicy-ness)

4. While the peppers are soaking, you can prepare the ingredients. Yes, we'll be stuffing these jalapenos! Last time, I just used fried ground beef and cheddar sticks.  This time, I had some spaghetti sauce left over (ground beef and tomato sauce), so I used some of that, with cheddar sticks and some cream cheese.

5. Now it's time to stuff your jalapenos! Oh, I also cut all the jalapenos in half. They were really long (longer than the small frying pan I was planning to use). But if your jalapenos are of a reasonable size, go ahead and use the whole thing! Google "dynamite lumpia" to see what I'm talking about (they do look better when you keep the head on!) But if, like us, you'd prefer smaller bites, go ahead and cut them in half and begin to stuff them:

6. Cream cheese, meatball sauce, and cheddar cheese all stuffed into the jalapenos:

7. Now it's time to wrap them in spring roll wrappers. I bought these ready made wrappers. Place the sheet in a diamond shape and place one jalapeno at the end near you, then roll once:

Then fold in the left and right wings. To make the wrapper stick, you can make your glue. I mixed some flour and water (small amount, just to make some kind of sticky paste):

Continue to roll. Then on the opposite end of the wrapper, place some glue which will lock everything in together:

There you go!

8. Of course Nuri and I didn't eat all of this in one go! I kept half in the freezer - Yes, you can store the extras in a closed container and fry whenever you want to! You don't need to thaw the spring rolls - they can go directly from the freezer to the frying pan.

Time to fry! Fry under golden brown, and enjoy!

The dynamites were truly THE BOMB! The jalapenos were soft, and the cheese was runny, and the meatball sauce was just tasty! We enjoyed these with some soy sauce and chilli. It's not spicy at all - taking out the seeds and soaking the jalapenos took all that away.

Recipe: Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake!

 For my beloved husband's birthday last weekend, I decided to make him a chocolate chip cookie cake! He loves chocolate cake, but I didn't want to just make a chocolate cake; I wanted to learn something new too! I also know that he loved chocolate chip cookies SO I decided to look for a recipe that combined the two and lo and behold, I found one! This recipe is very simple and easy to put together, and gave us many slices which we've been sharing with a few friends this week.

1. In a large bowl, mix:

• 2/3 cups of white sugar
• 1 cup of brown sugar
• 170g of melted butter

 2. Mix together with a whisk or spatula until it becomes thick, then add:

• 2 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla
• Continue to whisk

3. In a separate bowl, add:

• 2+1/4 cups of flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 spoon corn starch
• 1 teaspoon salt 
• Mix together, then slowly add them to the doughy mixture. Preferably half, mix, then the other half

It will become sticky, so best to use a spatula at this point

 4. Add in 2 cups of dark chocolate chips! Fold in the chocochips into the batter

 I did a little something extra to this recipe, and you're about to find out!

5. First, I only poured half of the batter into the baking tray:

6. Then, I took out a jar of nutella....and you can imagine what happened next!

 Yep, I spread nutella goodness over the batter

 Then I added the rest of the batter on top

 7. Bake for 35 minutes at 175°C

After the cake had cooled down just a tiny bit, I cut them into little squares and we celebrated! They're best enjoyed warm! 

Then I thought about the frozen berries we had in the freezer and I did another little experiment - I put some whipped cream on top, and some raspberries, and the combination was DIVINE! Sweet, with a little bit of sour! Incredible! 

This cookie-cake indeed tasted like both! 

The top and edges were crunchy just like a cookie, 

but the insides were soft and gooey like a fudgy brownie! 

As beautiful as this turned out, one little thing went wrong during the baking.  The recipe said 170g of melted butter. I weighed 170g of hard butter, and melted it and used all of it. My batter looked pretty runny, compared to the original recipe I was following.  In fact, after baking for 35 minutes, when I took it out, the insides of the cake was buttery/oily and so I kept it in the oven a little longer hoping it would dry out. So I basically had to overcook it. It still tasted great, of course, but the only difference was that the top and edges became a lot more crunchy. This taught me that 170g of butter is different from 170g of melted butter :) So please take note ;) But either way, it still worked out... if you end up making this mistake, then bake at 175°C for around an hour.

Netflix in 3 months

I bet this is true for a lot of people - the corona lockdown made you watch more shows in a span of three months than you ever have in all the years of your life combined! Well, for me at least, this was the case! I found it very interesting because generally, I was never a fan of series/shows.  I never had a Netflix account (and still don't - but Nuri does!) I always found myself impatient to sit through many episodes, or to wait for the next season. And then one day, Nuri told me about a show he used to watch called The 100. He had watched until Season 5 a while back, and instead of just picking up with Season 6 on his own, he asked if I wanted to watch from the beginning, and he very patiently went through the whole show with me from the start! It took a long time for us to get through it, but that's how I got into Netflix. And after that show, I watched many others.  I thought I'd share with you some of the shows I watched over the last three months.  I'll try my best not to give any spoilers!

1. The 100

Only 4 seasons are up on Netflix, so we downloaded the other 3. When Nuri first described what the show was about, I wasn't eager to watch it. I generally do  not like science fiction or all these post-apocalyptic action shows. But he insisted I give it a try, and surprisingly I liked it! The beginning reminded me so much of one of my favourite novels - Lord of the Flies. I was reading too much into the series: every now and then I would pause the show and tell Nuri what I thought! I kept reading into the two main characters Clarke and Bellamy and their leadership style and decisions. Throughout the series you see the characters torn between making ethical decisions or submitting to animalistic desires in order to survive. It's filled with drama; it felt like each episode had not just one but two story climaxes! I was very invested in this show that I had dreams about it.  Sometimes it was scary, but that's just because we would watch several episodes in one go and when you're not used to watching shows... I don't know (it could be just me) but it really got into my system.  Anyways, since I enjoyed this, I was eager to watch more shows after we concluded the 6th season.


2. Lucifer

Of everything that I've watched so far, if I had to rank them, Lucificer is number 1. Again, when Nuri recommended this show, I doubted because I'm also not a big fan of criminal investigation/cop shows. But this one... this one is so good! I realized that I keep saying I'm not a fan of this or that genre, but it's because I was really never into watching series, and there's only one type of movie that I like (you'll learn about it later).  I also found it very interesting how before recommending The 100 and Lucifer, Nuri - after knowing me for almost a year - was confident that I would like both!
Back to Lucifer - every single episode has a deep message. It's philosophical...it makes us think about our beliefs (God, afterlife, wrong/right choices, heaven/hell...) But it's not all serious; it's a comedy-drama. Lucifer is a witty character, he talks a lot and doesn't realize how funny he is. Well, what makes it even more funny is that no one laughs (I always wonder how these actors don't LOL when there's something really funny).  Lucifer is "The Devil", and we see him learning, questioning, re-defining a lot of misconceptions we have about good and evil. There are many moments of "blaming God", and reflection on what is destiny, what is free-will.  For example, there was some meaningful conversation between Lucifer and his brother when he lost his wings and when he got them back (keep a look out for that part!) It was a very refreshing show; easy to watch - I simply enjoyed it!


3. You

How we got here was pretty funny.  One day I saw "You" on the list of shows, and I told Nuri "Let's watch this, because someone said it's bad!" Yes, many months ago I overheard two people talk about a show called "You" which is very gruesome and disturbing because it's about a stalker who dismembers people.  And it's funny how hearing that made me even more curious! I guess it's human nature - we like what we're told to avoid hehe.  So yes, YOU is about someone who becomes obsessed with someone he loves.  It is a psychological thriller and currently two seasons are out and we watched both.  It was a captivating show; we definitely looked forward to the next episode.  One big take-away I had was about being mindful of our online presence; how much about us is out there that we don't know, and how much we put out there and we don't know how people use it. A lot of us know things about each other before we even meet each other. Of course, this obsessive stalker looks a little bit extreme, but I couldn't help but wonder if there are indeed people like this out there. Scary.


4. The Good Place

We stumbled across this show by luck! One evening when we finished all our shows, we scrolled through Netflix and said wherever our finger lands, let's watch it! And it landed on The Good Place and we loved it! The episodes are very short; so this was new.  We were able to watch 5-6 episodes in one sitting because the show is fast-paced.  Compared to the first three shows we watched, this was definitely a lot happier, lighter, fun and funny, and more colourful.  We loved it! It's basically about the afterlife.  I won't go into too much details but it's heavy on philosophy.  There's a nerd on the show who will teach you everything academic to know about ethics/moral philosophy.  We get to learn about different points of view, different theories...but it's not all talk and theory. We see everything played out and experimented. All the main characters are very unique; they each have a very distinct personality, so it's really fun watching them all together. We watched all three seasons of the show.


5. Hollywood

I watched this show by myself.  As you know (or can tell from a few blog posts ago), I am a BIG fan of Golden Age Hollywood (black and white 1950s movies!) so I was keen to watch this show.  It only has one season.  It was just alright.  The cinematography, the acting was very good - but it was just very slow-paced for me. All the other shows I had watched until now were heavy on the drama. So with this one, it felt like very little happened in each episode and I didn't find myself excited to watch the next episode.  I was very interested in who the characters were about though! I did a lot of googl-ing in between the episodes, to know if this or that person is based on a real-life character, and most of them were! So I read about the real people, and that was very educative.  But apart from that, I didn't find the show exciting.


6. The Politician

While reading about the previous show 'Hollywood', I learnt that its two directors had also worked together on an earlier show called the Politician. Ryan Murphy is one of the directors (he also directed Glee, which I used to watch back in the day). I also learnt that one of the main characters in Hollywood also played a role in this show, so I was curious and wanted to watch another of Ryan Murphy's so I gave this show a try.  Similar to Hollywood - the cinematography was amazing; I loved the colors, the style - everything is so pretty, it has this 1970s vibe even though it's set in modern age. However, the storyline did not move me. In fact, the story line did not seem unique. I felt like I had seen too many stories like this - eg. House of Cards!


7. Dynasty

I watched the first season of Dynasty a few years ago, and decided to watch the next two seasons for the sake of continuing, and I watched them by myself.  Dynasty - as the name implies, is about a very wealthy family.  There's a lot of drama - lying to each other, murder or attempted murder, a lot of secrets, revenge... now that I think about it, it's really sad to imagine that a wealthy family would go through all this.  But it's not heavy drama - it's pretty light. I didn't find myself at the edge of my seat like "omg, they're going to get caught!" "omg, that's horrible"... but at some point, the drama was just dragging on and I found myself wondering how am I still watching this? And it's because this show has really good cliff hangers! It always ends at a point that keeps you wanting to know what really happens next, in the juicy kind of way (not the intense way!) There's always a party in each episode, and the main female characters are always dressed very well, which no surprise I love (one of the reasons I love Classical Hollywood films!).  The fashion, the creativity, and thought put into many little details in each episode is just pleasing to the eyes.


8. Friends

At one point, I wanted something a little lighter and shorter so I gave the first season of Friends a try, but I couldn't make it past Episode 5. In the past, I've watched a few episodes of Friends here and there, but I've never followed the story line from the beginning.  I hate to admit this, but I didn't find it exciting.  I didn't laugh like I thought I would! Everyone knows Friends, and I wanted to be part of that conversation.  I told some friends about this, and they said that it gets better...just be patient through the first season, but I couldn't make it! So yes, I left it at the fifth episode, but maybe some day I'll try and pick it up again...


9. Dead to me

As you can tell, I ended up watching a lot of shows by myself because Nuri returned to the office, and we ended up spending our evenings doing other things instead. But eventually we decided to pick another show to watch together, and we randomly came across Dead to Me. It's a good show.  The characters, the acting, the story-line... it's very real. I honestly enjoyed it. I particularly enjoyed the dynamics between the two main characters - one is a very hot-tempered, strict, tough, independent, strong lady, and the other is very very kind, gentle, sweet, forgiving, easily-pushed around, and again, very  forgiving lady.  I like how attention was given to the character development of the first lady's children - how her behaviour affected them.  It's a serious show, but also has a light, easy-going side to it because the main characters are pretty relatable. The characters don't do very unexpected things, but when they do, you see them freak out, over-react, try to undo things, and you hear their thought process and it's just very real and relatable and I liked that.


10. 13 Reasons Why 

This is the most recent show we've been watching.  We are still in the early part of Season 4 (the last). I have so many opinions about this series. First, I can't believe I'm already in Season 4; I wanted to give up after season 1. This show is very popular among teenagers especially because it captures a lot of their typical experiences. The show even has a website to assist people who might be going through any of the things talked about.  The first season is about a high school girl who committed suicide, but before she did, she recorded tapes narrating stories about the different people who hurt her.  Pretty much 13 reasons why she killed herself.  But this season made me angry! I just strongly disagreed with many of the reasons she put out, and I felt really angry with the consequences of the tapes (for one, it made those she blamed feel guilty, feel sad, and because secrets were told, it led to more bullying). Ok, I'll stop with the details.  Anyways, in Season 2, the parents of the dead girl sue the school for allowing bullying happen, and we hear from the kids who were blamed and we learn that there's different sides to every story.  So at this point, I continue to not pity the girl and my anger is still growing angry haha!

But maybe that's what the show intended - to get people talking! To start conversations about these topics! I can't count the number of times I paused the show just to give Nuri a piece of my mind about a scene hehe. The show touches on many issues such as bullying, homosexuality, drugs, fear of the popular/rich kids, mean girls, cyberbullying, stalking, peer pressure, parties when your parents are out of town, rape.  It's quite packed.

The actors were very good. Every highschool student, even their sets of parents, all had very different personalities, so we see different responses. It made for good drama. Speaking of drama, we got to a particular scene towards the end of Season 2 where I just burst crying! I was crying so hard from the bottom of my heart; it was a very painful and visual scene (I couldn't believe it!) I know this show reflects a lot of young people's realities (I, for instance, cannot relate to anything at all in this show - the school I grew up in Nigeria was very simple, peaceful and we all just focused on our studies), but it's still helpful to be aware of these issues (they do happen) in many parts of the world. In case you've watched the show, I would love to have a conversation with you about it!