Long Holiday

We had a 4-day Easter holiday. It was a good break, no school for the girls, no after-school activities, Adrian was home and I baked (lots!). On Good Friday, we spent a leisurely day at Emily and Gerald's place. Geez! I didn't realise we'd not seen them for so long. We had hail, sleet and snow in just a weekend. The weather is really becoming weird. It's supposed to be the start of spring and the temperature went dipping. The snow was light and even when parts of the roofs were white, it wasn't heavy enough to form on the ground. Nonetheless, we were excited everytime we saw white flurry outside.

So! I managed to make our family favourite - daosa buns. I think I much prefer baking bread to cakes. The kneading part, which to some, is boring and tiresome but it is extremely therapeutic to me. I like to see the dough doubles in size at the end of the fermenting process and the fragrance of freshly baked bread lingering in the house. I think nothing beats serving freshly baked buns to the family. My first attempt at making the red bean paste? So laborious! I swear my arms ached after I managed to force all the pureed red bean through a sieve. I skipped the step of squeezing extra liquid from the paste as the paste looked dry to me. But to my horror! Once I added in the vegetable fat (the recipe called for shortening which I don't have), the paste became very runny. So I thought to cook it till it dried up (like the pineapple jam) though I wasn't sure it would work or not. I was determined not to let it go to waste after all the sieving I did. So between cooking and stirring it which took almost an hour to get it to become a paste again, I washed the mountain of dirty dishes in the sink. Did I say that I baked a pandan cake earlier? While waiting for the red bean to boil and cook and the dough to rise, I baked the cake as I had some leftover coconut milk. Like my previous tries, the top browned quickly when the inside was still uncooked. So I lowered the temperature of the oven so as not to burn it. The texture was moist due to steaming effect of the low temperature and wasn't to my liking. Next time, I will use another recipe which is for a smaller cake mould. Hopefully, it will bake evenly.

Oh and my dough was very sticky and wet (I used another recipe). I had run out of bread flour and being Easter Sunday, the shops were closed. So I added cake flour to dry it. The dough did rise but was still too sticky. I had problem filling the paste and shaping the dough. So I only test baked 4 buns as I didn't want to waste the red bean paste. They turned out alright though.

I went to Tesco yesterday to get more bread flour since I have plenty of daosa left. I just don't get it. I followed the recipe closely again and this time the dough was OK. I got the girls to help with the kneading and prepared another one for myself. Before I could start kneading my dough, the girls gave up. I had to knead 2 batches of dough at the same time! Louisa suggested combining the 2 doughs together but I didn't because I used 2 different recipes and wanted to taste the difference. The rest of the baking session was uneventful. I made 11 daosa buns and an assortment of others. I tried a braided pattern and they turned out very pretty. It will be nice to bake once a week.