Category Archives: Baking

I am not a big dessert eater but I love and enjoy turning basic ingredients into all sorts of sweet, cute little things or meaty hot pies.

Good-enough-for-now meat pie

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It is so hard to find really good meat pies in HK. If you love your aussie meat pies and aussie meat, you would know what I mean when I say I miss the ‘raw’ taste of aussie meat. Some people don’t like it, some people crave it and I am one of the latter.

One night over the long weekend, we really wanted a meat pie, one with loads of fillings and a crispy puffy top. So I decided that we can bake one ourselves.

We added our own ingredients, mince beef (of cuz! and from oz too hehe), onions (finely chopped by Mr Lee), mushrooms (i know it’s not a chicken and mushroom pie but that’s how we like it), a bit of mustard, bayleaves, pepper, tomato sauce and cheated with some beef stock.

Shortcrust pastry also sold out at the local supermarket (yuh and it was only frozen pastry.. ) so we only had puff pastry on the top and decided to do without the crust haha..

How it turned out??? Taste was yummy because we were able to add whatever we wanted. The puff pastry and fillings turned out better than we expected. A spoonful of fillings with crispy puff pastry is not a bad idea.

Except, dont watch tv while you are baking. I burnt the pie b/c even after buzzer went off, I kind of ignored it 😛 So all-in-all, it was a good-enough-for-now pie to stop our craving for better pies..for now..

Ugly ducklings almond cookies

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I wanted to try out what looked like a fairly simple recipe for almond cookies over the weekend. I mean how hard is it to whip together sugar and butter, add an egg, then fold in the almonds and cake flour with a pinch of salt?

WRONG!! I was so wrong!! :p

After I mixed all the ingredients, I molded the dough into a rectangular log and kept it in the freezer overnight.

Remember, once they have been cut, they need to be baked soon after

The next morning, I took out the dough and cut it into pieces of 1cm (approx) thickness.

Laid them on a tray and baked it in an oven (preheated) for around 20 mins at 175 degrees. I was really looking forward to the end of the 20 mins when I would see the carefully cutted and lined up dough pieces transform into beautiful elegant cookies on the baking tray….

But oops… it didn’t happen… hehe

It looked nothing like the smooth, cream-coloured cookies they were supposed to be. They were supposed to look so irresistible that anyone seeing them would want a bite…!!

(Top) After freezing the dough, it should be relatively easy to cut and if you had enough almond, each cookies should be filled with a good bite of them.(Bottom) why do they look so unappealing??

I must work out why they are sooo ugly! Please give me a shout if you know the answer (I think I didn’t whip the sugar and butter well enough?). The taste was awesome and sweetness was just right and almond was damned crispy. So I got the inside right, just need to work on the appearance : )