Mia Bakes: Mochi Cheese Balls

Many years back, I've once tried to bake myself some chocolate mochi bread (recipe HERE) but they turned out pretty fail. Dense, hard and not as chewy as it should be. 

Fast-forward to 2018, I found Ochikeron. HAHA, who else is a fan of her recipe too, drop me a comment down below! :) 

 

Don't they look cute? <3

So let's get over the ingredients so we can get started!

To get 12 mochi cheeseballs, you'll need:

100g glutinous rice flour 

(ochikeron used shiratamako, but I used those Thai brands glutinous rice flour we can easily get in the supermarkets)

100ml milk

50g grated parmesan cheese

30g shredded mozzarella and cheddar cheese 

adapted from Ochikeron's No Egg Japanese-Style Pao De Queijo

It couldn't get any simpler to make these mochi cheeseballs. First, mix the milk and flour and until it's fully combined. I'll say ditch the spatula or wooden spoon and just go in with your hands. The dough is going to get pretty sticky and tough to mix. 

Then, add in the cheese and knead until well combined. While mixing, you can use your hands and break up any large pieces of mozzarella and cheddar into smaller bits so that they can get more evenly distributed. 

When the cheese are all mixed in, try to squish the dough in between your hands and see if they come together into a ball easily. If they don't, add in a little bit more milk and knead well until they do. 

Shape your dough into a disk or a log and cut them up into 12 equal pieces, or to any sizes you fancy. They're just going to puff up very slightly in the oven, so don't make them too small. 

With clean hands, roll the dough into round balls and set them onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. As I've said, they'll only puff up ever so slightly during baking, so you need not spread them out too much. Just make sure they're not touching each other. 

With a pastry brush, brush each ball with some water to wet the surface before sending them to bake in the oven that's pre-heated to 180 degree Celsius for about 15 to 20 minutes.

And TADAA~ 

These mochi cheeseballs are AMAZING! The outer shell is not exactly crispy, but does have the slight crunch of a french baguette, while the inside is chewy with bits of melty cheese. 

They're best eaten warm, nearly piping hot, fresh from the oven as that's when the shredded cheese are melty and oozy. 

The mochi part of it will still remain soft and chewy even after having cooled down, but those shredded cheese obviously won't be oozy anymore. 

And I've also made a chocolate chip variation by adding some icing sugar and unsweeten cocoa powder to replace the grated parmesan, and some dark chocolate chips to replace the shredded cheese. 

The BF and my mum prefer the sweet version as they thought it's weird having salty mochi, but I personally though the cheese one was DA BOMB! 

Did I mentioned I ate FIVE balls in one shot right after they came out of the oven? 

Till then,

Mia Foo

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Mia's Recipe: Shiroi Koibito Remakes

It has been ages since I last baked (it was some failed, taupok like cookies) and somehow I just got the idea to bake some cookies for my grandma and here it goes. I gave replicating the famous Hokkaido Shiroi Koibito cookies a try, with only a handful of ingredients!

If you have no idea what's Shiroi Koibito, here it is.

 

You will need:

100g Butter

100g Cake Flour (Or AP Flour)

1 Large Egg

60g Castor Sugar

Vanilla Extract (Optional)

White Chocolate (for filling) 

-credits to ochikeron for recipe-

Just that! Simple, isn't it? :)

So moving on, we'll start off by creaming the butter (soften at room temperature) and sugar together until pale and fluffy, like so.

After which, crack in the egg and mix well before sifting in flour and fold until fully combined. 

Add a dash of vanilla extract for flavour and this will be optional. Mix well and fill the batter into a piping bag. 

Pipe out the batter onto 1.5" squares template placed under your baking sheet. If you're too lazy to work out a template, you can just eyeball it. That's what I did. :)

Bake the cookies at 190 degree Celsius for 8 to 10 minutes. Make sure your batter is evenly piped out on your baking sheets if not you'll get uneven browning. 

When your cookies are baked, leave them out on a baking rack to cool and melt your white chocolate over a double boiler. 

You may either spread the melted chocolate between 2 cookies with a butter knife (like I did) or pipe them out with another piping bag.

Freeze to harden completely. 

And there you have it! Crumbly, buttery cookies with yummy white chocolate filling inside. 

And see what I meant by making sure your batter is piped evenly? If not your edges will be over-browned but your centre still too soft. And yes, at one point I just got sick of drawing squares so I switched to circles. HA HA HA!

Till then,

Mia

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Mia's Recipe: Churros

Last week, I tried to bake some Mickey Mouse vanilla cupcakes with brownie centre but failed miserably as I didn't cream my butter and sugar together well. I ended up with extremely dense, brownie like cupcakes. :(

This week, I've decided to give my all time favourite Spanish snack a go, Churros! I've combined Ochikeron's and Ann Reardon's recipe to get a recipe of my own. So let's get on to the ingredient list. 

We will need:

1. Milk - 150ml

2. Water - 100ml

3. Flour (All purpose, bread, or cake) - 125g

4. Unsalted butter - 115g

5. Sugar - 13g (1 tablespoon)

 6. Vanilla extract - 1 teaspoon

7. Eggs - 3 nos.

8. A pinch of salt

9. Cinnamon sugar

First up, combine 1 tsp. of cinnamon powder with 3 tbsp. of caster sugar (you can use normal granulated sugar if you wish) to make Cinnamon sugar and set that aside. Otherwise, just grab a bottle of the cinnamon sugar from the supermarket.

Combine the milk and water in a pot. 

If you dislike the taste of milk, you can use 250ml of water. Likewise, if you'll prefer a richer taste of milk you can use 250ml of milk as well.

Add in the unsalted butter and bring the mixture to a low boil. Mix well until all butter has melted. 

Add in sugar and salt and mix well until all sugar and salt has dissolved. 

Turn down the heat and sift in the flour. Mix vigorously until the mixture comes together into a dough ball. Keep the pot on low heat and continue mixing for a while until the dough starts to leave a skin on the side of the pot.

Transfer the dough into a clean bowl (or you can do it in the pot if you wish) and continue stirring at it to cool it down. This is crucial as you will be adding in the eggs next and you will not want the hot dough to scramble your eggs. 

When the dough has cooled slightly, crack in the 3 eggs, mix well after each addition. 

It'll look like a slimy mess as above when you first crack in the egg and it seems like it will not mix. But trust me, continue working on it and it'll all come together. 

You know you got it when your batter turns sticky like so. (I apologise for the blurry pic. Gotta take it singlehandedly while I battled the batter) 

Then transfer your batter into a pastry bag fixed with a star tip. The "traditional" churros will probably need a large tip (0.6") but since I do not have one, I decided to make some mini churros with my ~0.6cm tip!

I piped out a total of 70 number of 9-10cm long strips like so. There was still a small amount of batter left in my pastry bag so I reckon I could have gotten 75 of them. 

I've piped about 18 to 20 strips on two large baking sheets to be baked at 190 degree celsius for 12 to 15 minutes or until golden brown. Just before baking, spray them down with some cooking oil spray or brush them generously with some melted unsalted butter. 

For the other half of my batter, I've piped them onto smaller squares of baking paper that will be a good fit for my frying pot, 4 strips to one square. Then, I deep fried them in the frying pot sheet by sheet (to avoid the churros on two sheets sticking together) till golden brown. When the batter starts to firm and puff up, gently pry them off the baking paper and remove the paper from the oil. 

When the churros (both baked and fried) are still hot, roll them in a plate of cinnamon sugar and make sure they're well coated. 

Fried ones on the left and baked ones on the right. I know they look burnt in the photos, but actually they're not. I've no idea why the photos turned out so dark.

These churros are crispy on the outside and soft on the inside with a pleasant taste of cinnamon sugar. I personally will prefer the baked ones, not only because they're much easier to cook but also very much less oily. They'll definitely taste good with a cup of hot chocolate or with some chocolate dip!

Do try both method out and tell me which is your preference. :)

Till then,

Mia

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Mia's Update: We baked Macarons!

If you haven't realised, I'm a huge fan of macarons (french macaroons). I absolutely adores the Fleur De Sel from Canele and at one point, buys a box of 6 every week. :p 

On top of that, I'm also a huge fan of those home bakers on youtube. Just to name a few, there's yoyomax12, ochikeron, Laura Vitale and Ann Reardon. 

So I thought, why not bake my own macarons? And hence I did, just last weekend, with my cousin (SY) at her house. And together we form the chincai bakers. But that's not really important, let's take a look at the recipe first. :)

 

Egg whites - 140g (4 large or 5 small eggs)

Caster sugar - 70g

Icing sugar (or powdered sugar) - 230g

Ground almond (or almond meal) - 120g

Salt - 2g

Food colouring (Optional, gel or powdered preferred)

(Makes 40 large macarons or 140 mini macarons)

credits to Ann Reardon

The steps to make macaron are really few and simple, yet to get it right is not easy at all. 

First up, add your egg whites (aged/or just at room temperature is enough) into a large bowl and beat it until it's frothy. Then add in your caster sugar (you may do so in 3 additions) and beat on high speed until it turns glossy and form stiff peaks (you can flip the bowl over and nothing falls out). Add in gel/powdered food colouring according to your liking. I couldn't find any gel or powdered ones, so we added in a few drops of red liquid food colouring.

If you want to have flavoured macaron shells, add in the flavouring at this point too. We added in one drop of rose flavouring to give our shells a subtle tinge of rose taste. 

Continue to mix until the colour turns even and set it aside.

Sift the dry ingredients (icing sugar, ground almond, salt) and give it a quick mix with a fork or a whisk. SY got mad crazy with the ground almond (chanting: go through, b*tch!) because they simply will not go through the sieve. We chucked away a good amount that seemed fine enough and yet just wouldn't pass through the sieve and re-sift with new additions from the packet, a couple of times until we decided that precision is not really important. Hence, we're the chincai bakers.

Fold the sifted dry ingredients into the beaten sugar egg whites mixture. It was recommended that we do 30 to 50 folds to get the mixture to a molten state. The wet and dry ingredients should be mixed well with no lumps and be viscous enough to ribbon down nicely when picked up and dropped from the spatula yet not runny. (this is the extremely tricky part)

Some other tricks advised is to do a 'cut' down the middle of the mixture with the spatula and see if it merges back together quick enough; or to spoon a small amount onto a plate and shake the plate. The mixture should be viscous enough to spread out into a macaron shape on its own. 

Over-mix and the macarons will be flat and feet-less. Under-mix and they may crack and won't be smooth on top. 
 Scoop the mixture into a piping bag (or if you don't have one, use a plastic bag and snip off the corner) and pipe out the mixture into a circle. The size is entire up to you. You can even make some heart-shaped or hello kitty head shaped macarons!

As we did the mini ones, we ended up with 10 sheets of this. 280 macaron shells, which equals to 140 macarons! *faints*
After we're done with piping, we set them out on the tables to sit for 30 minutes (from the last sheet) before we sent our first sheet into the oven to bake at 150 degree Celsius for 20 minutes.

 That's our very first batch in the oven. We've done a bad thing here, opening the oven as they're baking. It changes the temperature drastically in the oven and makes the shells develop airy pockets. :(

 

To our disappointment, we noticed that our macarons are both feet-less and cracked on the surface. So did we undermixed or overmixed? No matter what, it's fully understood that macarons are really finicky and it'll take many trials and errors to find the ideal final mixed state for piping/baking.

In addition, we've forgotten that the recipe makes 40 large macarons and our mini ones will not need 150 degree C at 20 minutes. We took the cookies out when they started to brown (they should be pink!) at barely 15 minutes and found them in this burnt state.

Yeah, I know. They're not pink, they're brown. And it's because they're burnt. Obviously disappointed with ourselves, SY and I randomly picked one uglier looking one and popped it into our mouth and then simultaneously widened our eyes in surprise. They were surprisingly good! Nothing like macaron shells, which should be slightly crispy on the outside and softer on the inside, but totally crunchy inside out with a tinge of rose taste that was almost masked by the fragrant toasted taste of being almost burnt. The fact that we got the bad habit of opening the oven to look at the shells while they baked also made them develop airy pockets within, which made them tasted better as a meringue cookie. Frankly speaking, I have no idea what happened here.... We baked macaron shells and got some uniquely good meringue cookies instead.

Here's a cute picture to show you what i meant by airy pockets. It's a heart shape, aww!

And then, finally, towards our last 2 or 3 sheets (which has been standing for 2 to 2.5 hours instead of 30 minutes), we saw a miracle.

 Feets! They developed feets!

Now this is what I call macaron shells. :)

And of course, I exaggerated our success. 99% of our mini macarons actually looked more like pink dino eggs.

After this, I have 2 more to-bake items on my list:
1. Salted Caramel Macarons (I gotta find out on dulce de leche first)
2. Mickey Mouse Cupcakes

Stay around to find out if I ever succeed! :)

Till then,
Mia

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