Tis the Season - Durian Galore

It's durian season again. I am surrounded by durian lovers - my father and my father0in-law (FIL) are avid durian lovers.
So chances of multiple durian sessions are inevitable during this period of time.

My dad picked up durian picking off some forrest in the vicinity last couple of years and during the season of the spikey fruit, he will have a bountiful harvest.
However, as these durians are not farmed, there is a high chance that these durians pulps are not that great, meaning to say they may be not too ripe and lack the creamy and rich taste. When this happens we try to make some derivatives from these pulps.

Since I have recently developed a love for baking, I decide to make a durian quickbread to "get rid" of them. I used the Banana Quickbread recipe and replace the banana with durian. But alas, the mashed durian pulp proved to be too much and I used too much in the 20cm square pan that the whole cake ended up too dense. There were still leftover durian so I baked another with a tube pan.

Surprisingly, there was a lack of durian fragrance during the baking which I anticipated. But overall, this durian quickbread was very dense and moist and tasted like almost like those brown durian paste (in stick form) pple get from the stores. And this is a taste that I do not take to. So I guess I will not be in a hurry to bake this again.

Another baking failure......

Banana Quickbread

The same day I made the healthful muffins, I proceeded to make this loaf of Banana Quickbread.

I got the recipe from Happy Home Baking, a baking site that I frequent due to the detail instructions from the author.

This was really quick and simple to make. I could not get any over-ripe bananas so I just went to NTUC and bough some ripe looking bananas. My MIL later told me that I shoulg get those that are small in size as those will taste better and have a strong aroma to the baked products.

Mr HB says that these tasted very bland and that the texture of the loaf is really coarse. But I think the taste is ok, packed with banana flavour and moist enough though the texture is really full of holes.

Blueberry Muffin

Unduanted by my last baking failure, I went ahead and tried a different recipe for muffin.

I came across a recipe for this blueberry muffins that are really heathy, no butter nor oil is used and in replcement, it uses yogurt.

I decided to give this a shot. The preparation and baking process was quite smooth this time and in about 30mins time, the muffins were in the tray and into the oven for baking.

I had 1 muffin the following morning and it tasted OK but lacks the usual buttery richness found in "normal" muffins.

Something to keep when one is on a diet.

Of Muffins and Cookies

I had to wait a week before I had the chance/time to bake again.

On a Saturday night (after a long day zipping around in JB) with a headache, I made my first batch of muffins.
After a long decision making process, I decided on chocolate chip muffin since I thought anything with chocolate ought to be a hit with most people.


Couple of glitches along the way. The first being not leaving the butter at room temperature for long enough, this causes the creaming process to be more difficult and the result is a not-so-fluffy tasty muffin. The second being the muffin cup was too small and this makes the muffin looks smaller and not as delicious without the dome. Other than these, the chocolate chip muffins turn out ok.


The following day I continued my baking stint and made some chocolate chip cookies. The whole process was quite disasterous. The cookie batter was relatively eacy to make but the baking was puntuated by difficulties. The recipe called for a 8-10min baking time but the total baking time for this batch of ccokies ended by close to 30 mins with 2 consecutive bakes as the centre of the cookie was uncooked!

So the outer rim of the cookie was very crispy and was browned out but the rest of the cookie was somewhat limp if you ask me.

I brought some for my colleagues and they finshed it up and most of them even commented that they were delicious! Talk about differences in standards.

My First Baking Entry!

I finally baked something!

I decided to start my baking adventures with scones for 2 reasons
1. I H.E.A.R.T them
2. They are easy enuf for me to attempt them.

I made them over the weekends, consecutively for 2 days.

Here, some illustrations of my hard-tolled products.

Ever since my SIL moved out, we have been void of a proper oven. What's left behing is a microwave oven that I use for my baking (mis)adventures.

My first recipe called for baking in the oven for 8-10mins but I ended up baking them for 20 due to my unfamiliarity with the microwave oven. But the scones turned out ok though my family commented that they tasted salty (could be due to the salt and/or the salted butter?).
The scones were quite dense probably due to the amount of milk that I used. The recipe called for 90ml and I think I ended using 200ml as the dough simply doesn't seem to be able to hold with flour falling off. And in the final stage I have poured in too much milk resulting in the dough to be sticky and hence the density of the scones.

The next day, I baked another 2 batches (with raisin this time) and tried with a higher temperature (230 degC) instead of the 180 the previous day. Again I made the same mistake of pouring too much milk. As a result the scones were browned on the outside and not totally cooked on the inside. I had to bake them at a lower temperature once more.

Not wanting to give up, I baked yet another batch of scones. This time round, I got the right dough, something that binds but does not stick to the hands. I was very happy when I managed to achieve that.
They turned out to be pretty tasty (by my standards).

Btw, I had scones for breakfast consecutively for 3 mornings after that.