Vietnamese Style Banana Cake

When asked to give a simple easy recipe, I decided to do submit a dessert that is so easy; you wouldn’t even need to make frosting! Another plus is that these ingredients are readily available all year round! Step forward Luke Nguyen's Vietnamese Banana Cake from his book ‘The Songs of Sapa ‘. Unlike the usual banana cake which has the texture of muffins, cupcakes or breads, here’s one banana cake that is richly dense and satisfying, people will be asking for seconds or thirds.

Ingredients

12 ripe finger bananas or pisang emas (Choose the ones that are ripe but not turning black)
60 g (1/4 cup) caster sugar
7 eggs
380 g (one small tin) of sweetened condensed milk (susu manis)
250 g unsalted butter, melted
200 g (around 1 and 1/3 cup) plain flour

Method

1. Slice the bananas thinly on the diagonal and coat with sugar. Cover and set aside at room temperature for 30 minutes.
2. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees celcius. Grease your cake pan or bakeware with butter.
3. Beat the eggs and combine with the condensed milk and melted butter (make sure the melted butter is not too hot or it will cook the eggs).
4. Now add the flour and mix well, then gently fold the bananas through the batter. Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan and bake for 1 hour, or until the cake is cooked through in the center and golden brown.
5. Transfer to a wire rack to cool, then cover and refrigerate for 1 hour before serving. You can actually serve this warm straight out of the oven as well.

You can serve this on its own or with vanilla ice cream. Enjoy this with a nice cup of Teh Tarik or Pandan Tea. Hmm…… delicious!

This recipe was recently published in the Dec 2010 edition of the Food Guide Brunei.

Slow Poached Eggs

The famous Julia Child’s cookbook taught many the French ways to poach your eggs. Poaching your first perfect poached egg can be a wonderful experience. When you try to fry an egg, the whites will cook a lot faster than the yolks and you won’t get an even texture. If you poach an egg, both the whites and yolks, will be almost similar in texture, just between solid and liquid and as you dip your fork or spoon onto the yolk, it oozes out like liquid gold. Hmm…. Simply irresistible

Oh would you look at those yolks!

However, many tend to find that poaching the perfect egg takes lots of practice and can be problematic to master. Imagine if you’re hosting a dinner party for your friends and you need poached eggs as part of your menu or ingredients, you’ll find it quite troublesome to cook so many poached eggs, one by one.

I have here – the secret to easy perfect poached eggs. Yes – Easy – and you can even poach 10-20 eggs all at once depending on the size of your biggest pot! This is very convenient for restaurants who want needs to make 50-100 eggs for their customers. Usually in restaurants, they will have an expensive immersion circulator, which allows them to maintain the temperature of the water constantly.

Fortunately, you will not need to buy one of those. I’ll teach you how to do this at home. You will just need an instant read thermometer and lots of patience to execute this! The secret is slow poaching your eggs! Can you imagine, an egg, that when you crack it open, will out pop a perfect poached egg onto your plate!

Beautiful slow poached eggs fresh out of the shell – serve with mustard, sausages, baked beans and greens~ hmmm…..

Famous celebrity chefs such as Wylie Dufresne and David Chang are two such chefs who love using this method to poach their eggs. What you can do is simple. It has the same concept as letting your eggs have a bath in a hot-spring for 40 – 45 minutes, depending on the size of your eggs.

Beautiful fresh out of the shell slow poached eggs goes well with miso butter and garlic fried long beans

First, fill up your biggest pot with water, then put a rack at the bottom of the pot. This is to make sure the eggs don’t reach the bottom of the pan, where it’s too hot.

Heat up the water until only 145 degrees Fahrenheit or 65 degrees Celsius, give or take a few degrees difference. When you drop the eggs down, they will drop a few degrees – the ideal temperature is 143 degrees Fahrenheit for me.

Now add the eggs slowly into the pot, dropping them slowly with a strainer so that you don’t crack the egg before they can even poach. Sometimes, supermarkets might have eggs with very fragile shells, and this can be problematic.

You can pop in as many eggs as you like depending on the size of your pot. Make a lot at one time and keep them in the fridge for up to a week.

Now comes the hard part. That is to maintain the temperature constant for 40-45 minutes! What I did was to set the heat to very low and as the thermometer reads higher than 145 degrees Fahrenheit, I immediately kill the heat and add tap water to it to lower the temperature and if it drops below 135, I will turn up the heat till it reaches 143, and then set it to low heat till it hits 145 again, then kill the heat. Tedious process, but I assure you it is worth it!

After 45 minutes, take out one egg and crack it on a bowl, if the whites are still too runny, give it another 2-3 minutes. At this stage, if you’re going to keep the eggs for another day or so, I would pop them all into ice cold water, and then keep them in the fridge for up to 3 days. When you’re about to serve them, just soak them in warm water (about 140 degrees Fahrenheit) for 3-5 minutes.

If you have an immersion circulator like me – just set your timer to 143 degrees Fahrenheit for 50 minutes. It makes the job a lot easier.

Usually, I would arrange the eggs nicely on a basket or beautiful bowl. When the guests arrive, I would crack one egg in front of them and watch their amazement as out pops a beautifully poached egg from the shell. I assure you, this really impresses your guests!

I cracked one of these beauties onto stir fried chive stalks with Chinese Fermented Tofu – beautiful presentation and guests love to see the custardy yolks flowing out and mixing with the vegetables!

To serve, you could eat them with soy sauce the traditional Chinese way or you can pop one of them into your soup noodles! You can also serve them with grilled asparagus or other grilled vegetables, or simply any recipe that calls for a poached egg! What are you waiting for? Try slow poaching your eggs now!

Even your instant noodles can be transformed by cracking one or two sous vide eggs to it to serve.

Foodilicious Cafe now taking orders

This will be my little shop for taking orders for gourmet pastas and burgers, tempura marinated baby octopus and some other desserts.
Pick up points will be at Bengkurong and orders through email and phone calls.

Asian style pesto - Fresh tasting Asian Style Pesto and it's dairy free! A fusion of Japanese, Thai and Western Cultures for this Pasta ~ for sale at $30 per portion (enough for 10 ppl)

Kim Chi Alfredo Pasta with Crab Meat. The marriage of creamy alfredo sauce with Kimchi makes this dish a must try for Kimchi and Korean Food lovers! Using kimchi bought from Airirang in Sg Liang.
$35 per portion around 10 ppl. (kimchi is expensive)

Chocolate luva cake~ Award winner at the Foodie Bloggers Desserts Challenge. Rich and seriously sinful molten lava of chocolate will ooze out of this cake! Goes super well with vanilla ice cream! $4 each - you can bake it in your oven just right before serving. Minimum of 12 cakes per order. Temperature settings will be taught :)

Pasta tossed with Creamy Salted Duck Yolk Sauce.
$30 per portion (enough for 10 ppl)

Satay Bee Hoon. BeeHoon Stir Fried with home made peanut spice sauce and deep fried mussels.
$30 per portion (enough for 10 ppl)

Asian style marinara.
Oven roasted Tomatoes for at least 6 hours and then tossed with basil and extra virgin olive oil and a touch of fish sauce makes this marinara light and refreshing. You'll never go tired eating this dish.
$30 per portion (around 10 ppl).

Nonya Seafood Dry Curry Pasta. An award winning dish in the Brunei Foodies Challenge! This dish combines the favourite nonya curry recipe as a base for this pasta sauce. Be ready for the spicy kick from the aromatic spices and creamy texture of this dish.
$35 per portion (around 10 ppl)

Japanese Style Carbonara - A lighter version of carbonara - rich yet light with a tang. Japanese Mayonaise with chives, herbs and shredded crab meat.
$30 for 10 ppl portion.

Chocolate Yogurt Orange Mini Cakes --> Seriously moist with a hint of citrus! $2.50 each – minimum of 12 cakes.

Cheesy Potato Muffins with Grilled Clam and Japanese Seaweed. Coming soon~

Banana Muffins with crispy butter crusts on top! Hmmmm!!! $2.50 per muffin. Minimum of 12 orders.

Tempura Marinated Baby Octopus. $25 per portion – Around 60-70 pieces of tasty sotong. Available fried or unfried version (so you can fry in your own kitchen just hot to serve your guests)

If you’re interested, please call Thanis at 8828810 or email me at thanislim@gmail.com. I’m looking forward to your orders. Please give at least 3 days in advanced notice.

Olive Oil Poached Seafood.

If you’ve been to fine dining establishments, you’ll probably come across seafood poached in olive oil or butter on the menu for quite an expensive price and wondered what it tastes like. Well, for starters, the seafood, be it prawns or fish such as tuna, salmon or halibut, will be perfectly cooked to just the right tender texture, seasoned and infused with rich flavours.

You might assume that such techniques require a lot of culinary training and expertise, but the truth is, this can be easily done in the home kitchen! One advantage of cooking using this technique is that it’s very difficult to overcook the fish, it’s easier to control the cooking time than frying, steaming or baking the fish the traditional way. Health conscious or vain people like me might be concerned that poaching in oil may sound like it would produce oil-soaked fish, but it actually seals in the juices and results in tender, moist fillets. After that, the leftover oil can be strained to be reused for extra poaching, for making salad dressings or sauces. They keep well in the fridge for up to 2 weeks.

This is warmed extra virgin olive oil – to the temperature of a warm hotspring or bath. I tossed the freshly peeled prawns I got from Jerudong Market (good quality frozen prawns will do too), tossed them with some salt, pepper and spices, then let arrange them onto the oil bath, making sure they don’t overlap too much, as I want as much exposure to the oil as possible. I also threw in some garlic and thai basil for that added oommph!

Pop the oil bath into a moderately low heated oven and leave to bake slowly. Once you see little white specks forming, it means they’re done. They might look uncooked but you can definitely eat them at this stage.

The succulent fresh tasting prawns and the garlic taste fabulous! *Smacks lips* Simply delicious!

Slow roasting tomatoes: Simply Delicious!

Oven-Roasted Tomatoes