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.