Spiced Plum & Chocolate Yogurt Cake

A while ago, the Ninja Turtle decided to make the most of her countryside life by dragging GodzillaPin blackberry harvesting with her. Not long after, while out on another one of her countryside strolls, she chanced upon a fallen damson plum tree in the next village, Bethelainville. The weather in France has been very bizarre this summer, and in this part of Lorraine, most of August had been dreary, with cloudy mornings, storms and high winds, and lots of rain.

Any chance of wearing summer clothes and getting a tan were out of the question, and even the local flora succumbed to the wild weather, hence the poor fallen tree. Of course, the Ninja Turtle isn’t one to pass up any chance of sampling what Mother Nature has to offer, and since the tree was already done for, she figured it’d be a real shame to leave those luscious fruits to perish in the elements.

Walking the 2 hilly miles home with her pockets loaded with as many plums as she could possibly stuff in them was cumbersome, to say the least. Trying not to squish them made the job even harder, but her heart was bursting with excitement at the thought of what she could do with those.

Gorgeous damson plums boasting a deep, rich, luscious shade of violet, bursting with flavour and flavonoids.

What’s most peculiar to the Ninja Turtle was that Lorraine is generally known for another variety of plum, a small yellow spherical ball of sweet juiciness known as the mirabelle. In fact, the mirabelle is so popular here that in Metz, there is an annual festival in Metz known as the Fête de la Mirabelle, where the fruit is celebrated to the fullest for 2 whole weeks, with concerts, food and wine tastings, exhibitions, activities for the children, a parade, fireworks, and even a beauty pageant that finishes with the crowning of a Queen Mirabelle!

The Damson plum, in comparison, seems to silently fade into the background.

So the Ninja Turtle decided to do it some justice, and celebrate it in her own way – by turning it into a cake, with a recipe which has proven to be wildly popular among friends and family this summer. Enter: the lazy baker’s guide to making scrumptious desserts with minimal washing up.

In fact, these cakes are so popular that she has resorted to making double batches each time because they get devoured in a couple of days.

The Ninja Turtle has received a few requests for the recipe, so without further ado…

Ingredients for basic cake

4 pots (125g) plain yogurt of choice (works with Greek, soy, goat’s milk, sheep’s milk, normal milk, low-fat, non-fat… but this one was with soy yogurt)
4 pots sugar
4 eggs
2 pots olive oil
6 pots flour of choice (this version was a mix of rice flour and buckwheat flour)
3 teaspoons baking soda
1 sachet (11g) baking powder

For this spiced plum and chocolate cake, add:

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cloves
200g dark chocolate, chopped in large chunks
300g Damson plums, chopped in chunks

Instructions

1. Empty the yogurt into a giant mixing bowl. Use one of the pots to measure out all the rest of your ingredients. Mix in the oil, sugar and eggs. Stir vigorously.
2. Add in the next three ingredients of the basic cake mix – the flour, the baking soda and baking powder. Most recipes will warn against over-mixing the flour if you want to avoid dense cakes because over-mixing wheat flour creates gluten, but the Ninja Turtle has figured out TWO key points – gluten-free flours don’t have this problem, and this is a very moist cake batter, so you can mix to your heart’s content without worrying. Even if you use normal wheat flour, the quantity of baking powder and baking soda ensures a beautiful rise so you’ll end up with a soft, fluffy, moist and light cake.
3. For this version of cake, add in all the rest of the ingredients and give it a good stir.
4. Pour into your cake or muffin moulds, about 3/4 full.
5. Pop them in the oven at 180°C (350°F). The Ninja Turtle used deep loaf cake moulds, and these cakes took an hour to be done. However, if you’re using a shallower cake mould, about 40 to 45 minutes will do. If you’re making muffins, adjust to about 20 to 25 minutes. If in doubt, stick a skewer in the largest part of your cake and see if it comes out clean.

The Ninja Turtle has played with various versions of yogurt cake, using those aforementioned blackberries in one, making a chocolate buckwheat streusel in another (that one was a crowd favourite), and even experimenting with a bottle of dark beer in another. The cakes never last, so she’s concluded it’s a recipe worth keeping (and sharing!)

Best of all? Aside from a teaspoon, you’re only using that one little yogurt pot to do all your measuring. How easy is that?

The Ninja Turtle ate her cake tonight for dessert with a dollop of yogurt and some blueberries.

How do you make the most of summer fruits?

What’s your favourite easy dessert recipe?

Harvesting Wild Blackberries

One of the better things about returning to the countryside, as the Ninja Turtle has found, is that time slows down enough for one to think differently. Sure, the city life in Lyon offered the duo plenty of exciting activities year-round, and one is constantly engaged, amused, stimulated… but perhaps that was the problem. It was very hard to disconnect, pull back and simply have some time for oneself.

In the quiet and calm of the campagne, far away from the hustle and bustle of the crowds and the commerce, the Ninja Turtle becomes much more pensive. And in her reflections, she begins to feel an immense sense of gratitude, despite her malady. There is, after all, a lot to be grateful for, despite everything.

Grateful for each moment she is alive.
Grateful for each person who’s come into her life.
Grateful for each experience that brings joy, or a lesson.
Grateful for each emotion and every new sensation.
Grateful for the hurt, the sorrow and the pain
Grateful that despite that, she still has much to gain.
Grateful for the kindness from strangers she receives
Grateful for the love friends and family give.
Grateful for existing in this messy world
Where life can sometimes be incomprehensible
Grateful for just being here today
Grateful for tomorrow, come what may.

There is so much richness in life, when one chooses to receive. The Ninja Turtle, in her leisurely strolls along the country road, recently chanced across wild blackberries growing in abundance, free for the picking and ripening at a deliciously alarming pace.

When GodzillaPin returned from his cycling trip a couple of days ago, the Ninja Turtle could not wait to bring him blackberry harvesting. OK, fine, she’ll admit it. After spending 2 hours harvesting blackberries alone the first time, and having the unfortunate experience of falling into the blackberry bramble (an experience which she will never wish upon anyone) when trying to reach for the higher branches, she knew she needed a helping hand from someone less vertically-challenged than herself.

Enter GodzillaPin, 6’1.

Of course when the Ninja Turtle first proposed blackberry harvesting, GodzillaPin thought it was going to be a breeze. Little did he realise that battling the blackberry bush thorns and the stinging nettles that grow alongside, this was less of a leisurely pastime, and more of an extreme sport.

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After about an hour, the duo decided that they’d had enough (enough of being pricked, and enough blackberries to last a few days), so they hurried home excitedly to taste the fruits of their labour.

The Ninja Turtle had recently made a rich chocolate and beer streusel cake, and the acidity of the blackberries married well with the sweet dessert. They also tried the blackberries in a soy yogurt and fruit salad parfait.

They say that on the road to recovery from eating disorders, there are good days and bad days. That was a good day for the Ninja Turtle, and for that, she is grateful.

A Visit to the annual Salon du Chocolat

Last weekend, the Ninja Turtle and GodzillaPin spent a day suffering from sugar overload. It’s that time of the year again, when the Salon du Chocolat comes to the Metz Exposition, and the duo went armed with 2 credit cards and plenty of shopping bags.

First, a meal to give them the necessary strength for the laps to come…

And what the heck, some “premium fuel” for the engine.

There were 60+ exhibitors at the Salon du Chocolat this year. Of course, as the name suggests, it’s a world of chocolate.

Crayons? No, white chocolate!

Chocolate by Mikael Azouz, the best chocolatier in the world

Chocolates in all shapes and forms

Chocolate in all sizes and colours

Liquid chocolate you want to dive into

A chocolate waterfall that melts your heart

Chocolate creations that are better than Nutella

Chocolate sculptures

Chocolate truffles

Chocolate too cute to be eaten

Chocolate to offer your loved ones

Chocolates to get your hands dirty with

The children’s workshop corner was a brilliant idea

Each year, there is also a chocolate sculpture competition, as well as a fashion parade, where the models wear creations made with/of chocolate. The theme this year was Asia.

 

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Of course, it wasn’t ALL just chocolate. There were other types of confectionery on offer too.

Old-school macarons – gluten free!

Baba au rhum, one of the best cakes in the world

More cake, just because.

Caneles from Bordeaux

And of course, the very French nougat

One of the reasons for visiting a chocolate exposition, aside from tasting and buying chocolate of course, was that they got to speak with the experts. Two years ago, the duo had a nice chat with Mikael Azouz, who has won multiple international awards. This time, the duo chose to chin-wag with another chocolate master – Fabrice Dumay, the best chocolatier in Moselle.

M. Dumay was incredibly friendly, and knowledgeable. He explained to them how lecithin was used as an emulsifier, and consequently confectioners also cost-cut with this ingredient (by increasing lecithin by 1%, you can reduce cocoa butter by 10% in your recipe). He went into great detail explaining the various single origins, from Madagascar, to Sao Tome, to Venezuela, and the latest up-and-coming chocolate region in the world: Vietnam! Cocoa was first planted there 10 years ago, and harvest from the first 5 years were terrible, but they are slowly seeing improvements. The production, situated not far from the Mekong Delta, is currently very small-scale, and apparently 100% fair trade. M. Dumay also quickly briefed them on the crop to bean to bar process, and shared his favourite wine to pair with chocolate (if you must know, it’s the Modérato Nectar d’Automne Muscat from Casablanca).

 

Lecithin, vanilla, and other ingredients that go into chocolate

Cocoa in its original form

The Ninja Turtle with M. Dumay

All up, it was a fantastic excursion, and look at the bounty they lugged home that evening:

Just don’t ask how much they spent on this (it’s an eye-watering sum).

Our Living Heritage

This week, the Ninja Turtle had the excellent fortune of being invited to the private residence of one of Mother Turtle’s oldest friends, Auntie Sylvia, with the express purpose of learning how to make ang ku kueh. What? you say.

A little bit of context: just as the French people don’t simply call themselves français when speaking among themselves, but rather from the geographic region of origin: i.e. “je suis Parisenne/Bretonne/Vogienne/etc“, the Ninja Turtle identifies as Teochew, in reference to the Chaoshan region of Guangdong, where her forebears originated from.

Ang ku kueh, or 红龟粿, translates literally to Red Tortoise Cake. Red because it’s an auspicious colour for the Chinese, and tortoise for its longevity, good fortune and prosperity (or so says Wikipedia). Looking at the key ingredients – sweet potato, mung beans, tapioca starch and glutinous rice flour, the Ninja Turtle was pleasantly surprised to learn that this dessert is in fact, gluten-free! (It’d be a long stretch calling it Paleo-friendly with the food colouring, but hey, 80/20 rule, right?)

Although ang ku kueh is still widely available for purchase in local bakeries, the sad reality is, like the spoken language of Teochew, the art of making traditional desserts is slowly dying in this globalised world. Hence, when the Ninja Turtle received the invitation to learn from Lao Sim, a master of traditional cakes, she jumped at the opportunity.

Meet Lao Sim, a mother, a grandmother, an expert cake-maker, a Teochew woman. She has lived through WWII, she has known Singapore before it was an independent nation. She speaks in Teochew, Mandarin and English. She is a living piece of our history.

As most expert cuisiniers are wont to do, the way Lao Sim treats the food scale borders almost on the ornamental – that is to say, she can be quite unspecific with quantities. When her students requested to measure and record the quantities, they would be met with the retort “ah ka ah ka jiu hor lah, ming jing zhung!” which translates to “a guestimate will do” but said in the tone that implied food scales were for weaklings.

From many years of experience, she works with her eyes and her hands to determine how much of what ingredients to use. Her judgement will yield either a frown followed by a brisk addition of some flour, shaken straight out of the bag, or a slug of liquid into a mixture, or a satisfied nod and grunt of approval, whereupon the work would proceed to the next step without fanfare.

As such, the Ninja Turtle feels compelled to disclaim that despite her best efforts in recording, some ingredients’ quantities weren’t always made clear, hence she cannot take 100% responsibility for queer results. Nonetheless, if you are feeling adventurous, here is a recipe with photos.

Ang Ku Kueh Recipe
Equipment
Food scale
Blender
Steaming baskets
Moulds for ang ku kueh

Preparations

Banana leaves can be cut into size in advance.

1.5kg Split mung beans, soak for 2.5 hours in boiling hot water, or 4 hours in cold water.

Drain,

set in steamer baskets

with pandan leaves

and steam for about 30 to 40 minutes.

1.5kg red sweet potato, boil with pandan leaf 30 minutes.

Drain and set liquid aside; blend.

Skin of the ang ku kueh

The following list of ingredients is to make one batch. If you’re making two batches – one sweet and one semi-salted, the quantities must be doubled. To differentiate the two types, work with each batch separately and leave out the red food colouring in one batch, or substitute it with another colour if you’re feeling wacky.

• Glutinous rice flour 300g
• Tapioca starch 300g
• Course sugar 7 teaspoons
• Pinch of salt
• Unspecified quantity of oil
• Blended sweet potato 650g
• Sweet potato liquid
• Red food colouring

Add the blended sweet potato to the sweet potato liquid, and mix to an even consistency.

Add in red food colouring and oil.

Reheat the mixture until hot.

Dry ingredients (missing salt in photo)

Mix the flours, add sugar and salt.

Add the liquid and blended sweet potato mixture – enough to hold the dough?

Knead with hands

until dough is elastic…

or until you get tired…

which is about 15 minutes?

Lao Sim’s method of distinguishing her batches is to leave out the red food colouring

Voila!

Cover with damp cloth and set aside.

Fillings

Remove the pandan leaves from the steamed split mung beans

Blend till you get a powder, also known as tau sar

Half-salted filling

• 1kg cooked bean powder
• 300g sugar
• 1 teaspoon of salt
• 1 cup pandan leaf water
• 3 tablespoons shallots

Sauté shallots until caramelised, remove shallots.

Add sugar in oil, reduce heat to low. Melt sugar.

Add water and raise heat till boiling, stir till dissolved. Reduce heat, add salt.

Add bean powder and stir to a paste.

Add glutinous rice flour to make paste sticky.

Sticky paste to Lao Sim’s satisfaction.

Sweet filling

• 1kg cooked bean powder
• 500g sugar
• Pinch of salt
• 1 cup pandan leaf water
• Unspecified quantity of oil

Heat warm water. Add sugar.
Let sugar dissolve over medium heat – do not caramelise.
Add bean powder and stir to a paste.
Add glutinous rice flour to make paste sticky.
Add oil to make the paste smooth.

Sweet and half-salted fillings must be worked on separately. Don’t confuse the batches!

Putting it together

Measure out filling according to the size of the kueh desired

approx. 40g for large, about half that for small.

Work the skin dough till elastic. Cut into sections, roll each section into a log, cut into pieces and roll.

Place the filling in the middle of the skin dough

and fold.

Pinch it till sealed and fit into moulds.

Tada!

Repeat until all dough and filling are used.

On a steaming basket, arrange pre-cut banana leaves and brush lightly with oil.

Place kueh on the banana leaves.

Brush kueh with oil, and steam for 5 minutes over a strong flame. Reduce to low flame and steam for another 5 minutes.

Done!

Lao Sim, vous êtes formidable…

Choc Chip Cookie Reloaded

OK OK, so the saying goes that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Or something about not reinventing the wheel. You know, those wiseasses and their very clever sayings about not tinkering around and experimenting. Well, to those people, we say pshaw! There is always value in mucking around for the sheer pleasure of it, because who knows what you may get as a result? Sure, there is always the risk of a catastrophic outcome, but en même temps, there is always the promise of a happy surprise.

This chocolate chip cookie did not happen by accident. It happened by compromise. The Ninja Turtle had, for the past several months, started poking her nose where it didn’t really belong (i.e. Paleo websites) and found some mouthwatering recipes that made her wish she was not a Ninja Turtle, but a Cave Turtle. Man, who knew the paleolithic era featured such culinary delights? Did civilization kill off our cooking skills or what?

GodzillaPin, one must remember, is French and therefore, the idea of removing wheat from his diet is sacrilège! In fact, it’s rather interesting to see how well the whole Paleo thing would go down here in good ol’ Gaul, where half the country’s economy is built upon wheat. But we digress…

True to the Caveman spirit, GodzillaPin requested – nay, demanded – the Ninja Turtle to make him some cookies, as his sweet tooth had started raging. As the Ninja Turtle was pottering around the kitchen, the idea of trying out one of those fancy recipes crossed her mind. Out came the linseeds, coconuts and all those weird things that the Paleo community has laid claim to. As soon as GodzillaPin saw those ingredients, suspicion began to grow, and he offered to help chop the chocolate as a pretext to hang around and see just what on earth the female was doing. Imagine the horreur when the suggestion of a wheat-free cookie came up.

Right then. In went the T45 flour, with all the other fancy ingredients.

Before we continue, we wish to make one thing absolutely clear, as some people tend to be readily offended by the slightest hint of a joke. This post is not intended to mock the Paleo community. If anything, we’re increasing publicity of the whole movement. No, we humbly acknowledge that in our weakness, we are unable to give up lovely, lovely wheat for the moment, despite being enticed by the principles of the Paleo lifestyle. We thought we will try and ease our way into it by incorporating parts of it, and if we don’t break out in a rash/withdrawal symptoms, we will progressively relent and repent, we promise. For now…

Chocolate Chip Cookies with Fancy Stuff

190g flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
115g butter
130g sugar (any type, we used brown)
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
50g of dessicated coconut
30g whole linseed
60g chopped dark chocolate

Preheat the oven to 180⁰C. Line your trays with baking paper.
Mix the first three ingredients in a bowl. Cream the butter and sugar, then mix in the egg and vanilla essence.
Fold in the dry ingredients and mix until you get a consistent mixture. Mix in the coconut, linseed and dark chocolate.
Scoop mixture by the tablespoon and place them on the baking paper about 2 inches apart. They don’t spread, so you can put them a bit closer if you wish, but ours liked some breathing space.

Bake for 12 to 15 minutes until they turn a reasonable shade of brown.

When they are done, let them sit for about 5 minutes before transferring onto a cooling rack.

Well, as it was mentioned at the beginning of this post, there are some instances when one regrets mucking around with a tried and true recipe. This was NOT one of those instances. Of course, it must be stated that one must enjoy coconut to like this, but the addition of coconut and linseed created a rich and complex texture to the cookie that we never would have imagined.

So, it was with the deepest regret that we retired the two packets of cookies we bought earlier that day, because who wants to eat that stuff when there is the homemade variety, right?

Which do you prefer? Only one of them hasn’t got added preservatives, although all three of them do contain obscene amounts of flour.