Fukuoka ~ Wine & Sweets, Tsumons

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Desserts

My travel companions and I has an incurable disease. Shop-till-we-drop disease. We’ve been travelling together rather frequently, at least one trip a year so we kind of know each other’s weaknesses. No matter how much efforts we put in to planning the itinerary in such a way that shopping should never exceed 50% of the entire trip, we habitually failed to follow through. Time and again, we were being carried away by the alluring stores and lost track of time, especially meal times which was really a horrible thing when we finally hear the protest from our stomachs. On numerous…

Thai Milk Tea Souffle Roll

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Cakes, Cupcakes

On my trip to Bangkok couple of months back, I lugged back some crazy amount of food and necessity products. Specialty teas, dried flowers, black rice, silk-milled flours, spices, cotton pads(!), medicated oils… I can’t believe myself sometimes. And I have the tendency to buy in bulk, which I did for the silk-milled flours and Thai tea leaves. But seriously, who wouldn’t when a kilo of cake flour cost about S$1.50? I was eager to find out the quality of the flour so I used it to make this soufflé roll. The base recipe for the cake was loosely adapted…

Glossy Espresso Stout Chocolate Cupcakes

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Cakes, Cupcakes

I often get carried away whenever I’m doing online shopping. Just the other day when I was trying to order some cleaning detergents and a carton of coconut water from redmart, but ended up with additional unnecessary-deemed-as-necessity-at-the-moment items in my shopping cart. One of the item was this Japanese espresso stout. I don’t drink stout, but was curious about the flavour and wanted to try baking with it. So the moment it arrived at my doorstep, I made some espresso chocolate stout cake. I tasted the stout before adding it to the cake batter. It was horribly bitter. I guess the…

Spiced Prune Cake

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Cakes, Cupcakes

I don’t usually bake Chinese New Year (CNY) cakes in the past. I don’t have to. Since young, during CNY, my grandma and dad were the bakers. Grandma would make her signature 鸡蛋糕 which is a steamed egg cake. She would use 7-up as the secret ingredient that according to her, the fizz from the soda could make the cake rise very high and split open like a flower. She would then adorn it with a red dot in the middle using artificial red colouring. And my dad would bake his signature Hainanese butter cake using Golden Churn salted butter,…

Italy ~ The Charm of Venice

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Travel

It was Spring when I went to Italy last year and Venice was the first city in our itinerary. The weather was still quite cold and dry but there was enough sunshine. Me and Em, my best friend, spent two jet-lagged days in this elegant city of masks and water. I don’t remember the sequence of our visits though, as Venice is a place to get lost in. There’s the Grand Canal which is impossible to miss as you will somehow end up there. And there’s the Rialto bridge, the oldest bridge of the Grand Canal constructed in 1588 and…

Baileys Chocolate Luxe Panna Cotta

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Chocolate

So, I combined three of my favourite things into a dessert I now call my favourite. Baileys Chocolat Luxe + Belgium Chocolate + Panna Cotta = Baileys Chocolat Luxe Panna Cotta. Sounds good? Actually, it’s really good. I am totally hooked on this one. If you are a fan of Baileys, and if you have yet to try Baileys Chocolat Luxe, you should go get a bottle right now. This thing is so luxuriously delicious it almost felt illegal. Imagine molton chocolate cake in liquid form. Nuff said. Anyway, seriously I only wanted to make a simple milk chocolate panna cotta. So…

New Facelift for this Space

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Miscellaneous

HELLO Everyone! Today is an exciting day for Vanillyn as we launch a brand new look. I’ve been working on this for awhile along with a dear friend and our friendly designer from Melki Biz Consulting. It has been a lot of fun and along the way, I gained a lot of invaluable knowledge which I think is the best part of any project. We wanted the website to be more responsive, easy to navigate, and sophisticated enough for your pleasure. I hope you like the new design like we do. Feel free to tour around and revisit old posts and recipes. At the…

S’mores Layer Cake

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Cakes, Cupcakes

Hello everyone! I know, I was away from this space for awhile (again…), but actually I do have a good reason this time. My house is currently undergoing a major makeover and for the time being, we have to stay over at somewhere else, literally living out of the boxes. So no oven, no kitchen aid, no big chopping board, no blender even. We did some light cooking though. Well, we have to eat right?

Beurre & Sell Jammers

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Cookies, Bars, Brownies

When I first got serious into baking, I relied mainly on Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking from my home to yours. I am proud to announce that my copy of this thick, heavy and educative book is torn, tattered and smells like stale butter now. I really learnt a lot from her through the book and so when I read that she had partnered with her son, Joshua Greenspan to set up a little cookie store named Buerre & Sel sometime in late 2012, I became jealous of those who made it to the store. One of their most popular cookies were the…

Hazelnut Chocolate Truffles

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Chocolate

Some mornings, I would drop my mother off near her workplace. During the 35 mins morning drive, we would tune in to her favourite radio station FM97.2 and chat about random things like her job, my job, the neighbours or laugh at the DJ’s jokes. On this particular morning just few days before the actual Mother’s day, DJ #1 of the morning show caught my attention when he talked about a listener who wrote in to share her mother’s day wish. At first, the listener’s wish sounded weird, as her wish was simply: “Not to have chicken rice with her…

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