If Gude­ta­ma were ever made into a cheese­cake, this would be it…

… because I made it in a rice cook­er :D

I lit­er­al­ly just mixed all the ingre­di­ents togeth­er and pressed the “cook” but­ton. Found the recipe from this Japan­ese cook­ing web­site, I chose it because it was the eas­i­est (no sep­a­rat­ing egg whites and egg yokes kind of stuff). I con­vert­ed some mea­sure­ments and sub­sti­tut­ed some ingre­di­ents, and it turned out quite beau­ti­ful­ly if I do say so myself :D so I’m record­ing the mod­i­fi­ca­tions here in case I have to come back to it again, or if any­one is inter­est­ed in try­ing it. Note: I have a 5‑cup rice cook­er; for a small­er rice cook­er, you might have to halve the recipe as sug­gest­ed on the orig­i­nal recipe, so it will cook through.

1. Warm 200g of cream cheese to room tem­per­a­ture (I eye-balled 1/5 of the 250g brick and cut it off), fluff with fork.
2. Mix in 2 eggs (beat­en), 1/3 cup sug­ar, and 1 tbsp lemon juice.
3. Grad­u­al­ly mix in 1/3 cup pan­cake mix (I bought the kind that you have to add milk and egg, not the just add water kind) and 1/3 cup half-and-half cream. Mix very well to elim­i­nate lumps (I used a hand mixer).
4. Grease inner pot of rice cook­er with margarine/butter. Pour mix­ture into pot. Cook on reg­u­lar rice setting.
5. When done, test with tooth­pick to see if the cen­tre is still run­ny. If so, cook on same set­ting again. (Tooth­pick will not come out clean, but as long as the inside is not run­ny it should be ok)
6. Take out inner pot and cov­er with plas­tic wrap, cool to room tem­per­a­ture, then refrig­er­ate for a few hours (I want­ed to min­i­mize the chance of it crum­bling when I flip it out).
7. Flip the cake out of the pot care­ful­ly with my hand (or a plate that fits inside the pot) press­ing gen­tly on the cake (as demon­strat­ed with pic­tures in the orig­i­nal recipe).

Ta-da!

It tast­ed like a cross between Japan­ese cheese cake (light, fluffy, not too sweet) and New York style cheese cake (dense and rich). I sus­pect the dense­ness is due to me cook­ing the cake 3 times. The tooth­pick did­n’t come out com­plete­ly clean the sec­ond time and I thought it had to be, so I think I over­cooked it. Next time I’ll just cook it twice. 

I made it for Mike’s birth­day :D I’ll prob­a­bly make it again for my par­ents, Mike’s par­ents, my co-work­ers, my friends, church potluck… it’s so easy!!

Wish­ing every­one a sweet Sun­day afternoon!

 

p.s. Gude­ta­ma is a San­rio char­ac­ter in the shape of an egg who is very lazy. It also morphs into dif­fer­ent kinds of egg-based foods. His short ani­me are hilar­i­ous, and a bit bizarre… but fun for a short break in the day :)

Usu­al­ly I’d be hav­ing a reg­u­lar work day over Lunar New Year, but this year it falls on a Sat­ur­day! So I thought I’d cel­e­brate by try­ing out a rice cook­er turnip cake recipe :D

I remem­ber my Hak­ka grand­moth­er mak­ing lots and lots of turnip cakes in prepa­ra­tion for new year. Turnip cake is also Mike’s favourite at dim sum. So even though I’m not so good with cook­ing, I thought I’d give it a try. And it actu­al­ly turned out quite well, and tast­ed like turnip cake! The recipe I found is all in Chi­nese, but if you can’t read Chi­nese but are inter­est­ed in mak­ing turnip cake with a rice cook­er, here’s what I did :D 

The main ingre­di­ents are: (they can usu­al­ly be pur­chased at Asian gro­cery stores)

400g daikon radish (I don’t have a scale so I don’t know how much I used for sure, but used one aver­age size daikon radish)
80g Chi­nese sausage (I used one)
80g pre­served meat (?) (not sure what it is in Eng­lish, did­n’t use)
3 shi­itake mush­rooms (soaked for a few hours to rehydrate)
1 tbsp dried shrimps (soaked for a few hours to rehy­drate. I prob­a­bly used 3 tbsp, as pic­tured. Did­n’t mea­sure. 1 tbsp of shrimps just seems too few. I like shrimps.)
1 cup of rice flour (I used about 1/4 cup more because it looked like I had more daikon than called for)
1 cup of water (I used about 1/4 cup more, and used the liq­uid cre­at­ed from shred­ding the daikon, as well as the soak­ing water from the mush­rooms, for flavour) 
I also used a small amount of cilantro, chopped

Sea­son­ing for the daikon:
1 tsp chick­en instant stock mix
1/8 tsp sug­ar (did­n’t mea­sure, used a pinch)
1/8 tsp salt (same as above)
a bit of white pepper

Sea­son­ing for mushrooms/shrimps/sausage:
1/8 tsp soy sauce (a few drops)
1/8 tsp sug­ar (a pinch)
1/8 tsp rice wine (did­n’t use, because I don’t have rice wine)

1) Chop mush­rooms into thin strips. Rough­ly chop shrimps.

2) Chop Chi­nese sausage into small bits

3) Mix mush­rooms, shrimps and sausage togeth­er with sea­son­ing (the soy sauce, sug­ar and rice wine)

4) Heat wok (I used a fry­ing pan because I don’t have a wok), quick fry mush­rooms, shrimps and sausage with 1 tbsp of oil. Put in a dish and set aside.

5) Peel and shred daikon. Drain and save the liq­uid in a bowl, add water (I use the water from the mush­room soak, fil­tered with a cof­fee fil­ter) to make 1 cup. In a bowl mix this liq­uid with rice flour. Set aside.

6) Heat wok (I used a large fry­ing pan), quick fry the shred­ded daikon with the daikon sea­son­ing and 1/2 tbsp of oil. Turn down heat and cov­er, cook for a few min­utes until soft. Mix in the mushrooms/shrimps/sausage and cilantro. Turn off heat. Mix in the rice flower mix­ture quickly.

7) Grease rice cook­er, pour mix­ture into rice cook­er. Cook in rice cook­er on white rice setting.

It looked like I had enough to make 2 cakes so I made an extra small one on the steam­ing rack in the rice cook­er, on a greased tin plate. When the rice cook­er fin­ished cook­ing for the first time, the small turnip cake did­n’t look cooked, and I was­n’t sure about the larg­er one in the rice cook­er, so I cooked it again on the “quick steam” set­ting. After that the large one looked done (has a slight translu­cent qual­i­ty), but the top one still looked uncooked (opaque like rice pud­ding), so I steamed it the old school way, until it looked cooked.

Here’s the large one cooked in the rice cook­er. I’m quite proud of how it turned out! :D

The large one is for a fam­i­ly gath­er­ing tomor­row. The small one we cut up, pan fried and ate :)

It’s stick­i­er than it’s sup­posed to, I think I used too much daikon, and did­n’t drain it enough (I think one is sup­posed to press the shred­ded daikon to get all the liq­uid out). But it tast­ed like turnip cake! Which is a Chi­nese New Year mir­a­cle giv­en my culi­nary skills, or our rice cook­er is mag­i­cal :D

May the new year bring you good health, much suc­cess and lots of happiness!
 

I’m bat­tling a cold as I write this. I rarely get sick so this feels par­tic­u­lar­ly sad :’( but maybe this is the body’s way of telling me that it needs to come first sometimes.

Any­way. I was talk­ing with a friend about break­fast habits one day, and I told her that I often can’t stom­ach more than a frozen waf­fle or a piece of but­tered toast in the morn­ing, and end up feel­ing extreme­ly hun­gry by 10am. She shared about her new found excite­ment for overnight oats and gave me some ingre­di­ents to try. I don’t like the tex­ture of oat­meal very much but I thought it was an intrigu­ing idea (soak overnight? No cook­ing? No bak­ing? You can add all kinds of fruit and top­pings? Like a sun­dae?), so I did give it a try.

And it’s the best thing ever! :D

There are a lot of recipes for overnight oats (like this list!). I think it’s some­thing that you can just put what­ev­er you want in it and it would taste pret­ty good. I gen­er­al­ly use 1/3 cup oats (old fash­ion, not quick), 1/3 cup milk, some kind of fruit, and 1 table­spoon of this Qia cere­al mix (it was on sale at the super­mar­ket and has chia seeds, hemp seeds, buck­wheat, almonds and cran­ber­ries in it. I thought it was a more sen­si­ble pur­chase than buy­ing full bags of chia seeds and hemp seeds when I was just try­ing things out). Here are some com­bi­na­tions of ingre­di­ents I’ve tried:

Clock­wise from top left:
Apple, cin­na­mon and honey
*Delux!* Strawberry/peach/mango frozen fruit mix, straw­ber­ry yogurt and vanil­la soy milk
To cel­e­brate Year of the Mon­key — peanut but­ter, banana and honey
Hum­ble blue­ber­ry and honey

Noth­ing fan­cy, but super fill­ing! Now I start feel­ing hun­gry at noon instead of 10am! :D

I don’t have it every day, but have been mak­ing it for both Mike and me espe­cial­ly when we antic­i­pate a busy day ahead. I find it less mushy than oat­meal. Cold oat­meal some­how tastes a lot bet­ter to me than hot oat­meal. And I like hav­ing fruit in it. And it’s so sim­ple to put togeth­er the night before, saves a bunch of time in the morning!

See­ing that it is Chi­nese New Year tomor­row, here’s wish­ing every­one a year of good health and happiness!

祝大家新年快樂,身體健康!

Last year I helped a friend make these as wed­ding favours. I thought it’s the most bril­liant thing! And very cute-look­ing with the marsh­mal­low on top. So when Mike and I were think­ing about small gifts that we can make a lot of at once for our cowork­ers, we decid­ed to give this a try again.

We fol­lowed the recipe from Dessert Design Life. There are many hot cocoa on a stick recipes out there, but I chose this one because it’s got some pret­ty good tips about the ingre­di­ents and meth­ods that seem to be help­ful for peo­ple who don’t bake or make desserts much, like me.

It’s actu­al­ly REALLY easy to make. It does­n’t even involve turn­ing the stove on (we melt­ed the choco­late in the microwave, but one could use a dou­ble boiler).

We crushed up some can­dy cane in the Mag­ic Bul­let (sift­ed out the fine powder), and sprin­kled some in the bot­tom of the ice tray before pip­ing in the chocolate.

After the choco­late was melt­ed, we mixed in cocoa pow­der and icing sug­ar, and piped them into an ice tray with a cut-up zip-lock bag. We added a marsh­mal­low on top and put in a stick (bam­boo skew­ers from the dol­lar store).

Here they are, set­ting in the ice tray. (with our fes­tive table cloth in the back­ground :D)

We put them in the fridge for about half an hour, and voilà! We were wor­ried that they might be more dif­fi­cult to de-mold with the can­dy cane bits in the bot­tom, but they popped out like ice.

I brushed a very small amount water on top of the marsh­mal­lows and sprin­kled more can­dy cane bits on top.

Mike made the styl­ish tags :D And we just put them in clear sand­wich bags and tied them up with yarn :)

We made about 50 sticks in a day, and it was a lot of fun :D

After giv­ing them away last week we had just two sticks left over. Which means we can cel­e­brate the begin­ning of win­ter with a cup of hot cocoa togeth­er :D Hap­py win­ter solstice!

 

 

I should make this more often. It’s so quick and easy. And I love eggs. I’ve made it before using this recipe from Instructa­bles. High­ly rec­om­mend it if you like bread pud­ding! :D

Have a sweet week­end, everyone!