Located in Bentall Centre, downtown, I had never been there previously. It was nicely situated behind a water fountain. However, there was almost no one in the restaurant. Granted, it was the first night of Dine Out, I was a bit surprised.

Click on pictures for description. Sorry the pictures are dark, no flash was used.

Verdict:

Really, quite a mediocre run of the mill restaurant. Nothing fabulous. The best was the appy, but even that was not that great. All in all, I don’t think I would go back again. Nothing wrong in particular, but just not worth the $28. Not in terms of quantity, but quality.

This recipe was originally intended to be used with kobocha, as it was given to me by a Japanese friend who made really delicious desserts. The texture is just like a creme caramel, without the richness. And if you leave in some chunks, then you can really taste the delicious purple yam.

Pictures to come.

 Purple yam custard

200mL            milk (skim)

4 tbsp              sugar (or to taste)

240g                pumpkin/yam paste  

2                      egg whites

70mL              cream (half and half)

1. Mix everything together. Pour into a shallow dish, so that pudding is about 1.5 cm height. Put in a bain marie.
2. Bake in 320ºF oven for 45 min.
3. Chill in fridge for at least 2 hrs. Top with sweetened whipping cream.

(To make this taste that much better, make a quick caramel for it. Do this in the microwave with 1/2tsp water and 1/2 tsp sugar in the bottom of a custard cup for 5 minutes. Watch it and remove when it turns a nice brown colour. It may need a little bit more or less than 5 minutes depending on your microwave.)

On the westcoast, people seem to be especially green and ecofriendly. By this point, you have probably heard about the 100 mile diet, where people eat foods produced within a 100 mile radius of them. That’s right, folks… it’s possible! (Albeit a bit more pricey. I try to buy local, which allows foods to be packed with the utmost nutrients and saving on pollution from the transport by cutting down on the journey travelled.

The key to this is cooking seasonally. As it is blueberry season here, the blueberries came from an organic U-pick farm. Oh, how I love U-pick! It’s a smorgasboard of berry delights, and you can eat until your fingers and tongue turn blue while you’re getting the exercise from picking the berries. In addition to this, the eggs are from a local free-range chicken farm. This free-range thing is really not just a trend, as many civic establishments will only be allowed to use such eggs from now on. So this is my entry for the Earth Food Monthly Mingle.

While I didn’t source the flour and other ingredients from local sources, I know that it could have been done. Although I’m trying to incorporate slowly this local eating so that a practical balance can be achieved. But making a conscious effort to buy locally is my little way of reducing my footprint.

This coffee cake is the most addictive recipe ever! I must warn you, that once you’ve made it, you better have someone to share it with, or you might find yourself eating the whole thing unknowingly. Freeze the extras to be safe. It’s jam-packed full of antioxidant blueberry power, and with only a moderate amount of butter, so it’s well worth the baking effort.

Blueberry Coffeecake

(A recipe from my dad!)

Makes 2- 8″ round/square cakes

Ingredients

A. 3cups flour (all purpose or whole wheat, I used 1/2cup whole grain to add fibre)

2tsp baking powder

1tsp baking soda

1/2tsp salt

B. 3oz soft butter

2ozvegetable oil

7/8cup sugar

2 eggs

2tsp vanilla

1cup yogurt/sour cream/milk

1.5 cups blueberries

Methods

1. Preheat oven to 350F.

2. Sift together ingredients A.

3. Use a mixer to cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Then beat in oil until smooth. Beat eggs and vanilla together, then add into creamed mixture slowly to incorporate well. Beat in yogurt. (I used sour cream because it really adds to the taste, and I cut the richness with some peach fat free sugar free yogurt, and topped it up with skim milk to make 1 cup. Take out 1 tablespoon sugar for every 100mL of flavoured yogurt you add, or just use plain). Stir A into this mixture.

4. Pour enough batter to cover bottoms of parchment lined pans with about 1 cm batter. Then stir blueberries into the batter and spread remainder into pans. Sprinkle with your favourite streusel topping. (I used a mixture of melted butter, flour, vanilla, cinnamon, demerara sugar, white sugar, oats, chopped toasted walnuts and toasted flax seeds, mixed until coarse and crumbly. But use what you like here).

5. Bake for about 30-45 min until a cake tester comes out clean. Cool in pan for 5 min, then cool on rack.

Ok, I think that I’ve done my last basic cake experimentation. My oven is asking me to make something else. Enjoy! I adapted this recipe from Lily’s recipe for Pandan Chiffon Cake. But since I don’t have pandan juice readily available in my pantry, I went with the ever so trendy matcha.

Taste: Today, I made a luxurious tasting coconut milk chiffon cake. The matcha provides antioxidants and a nice light taste. The coconut taste is barely noticeable. If you had not been told that there was coconut in it, you would not detect it. But it adds to the moisture of this cake.

Texture: Very soft and even moister than the Chinese sponge cake!

Coconut matcha chiffon cake

A: 38 g cake flour
1/8 tsp baking powder
pinch salt

B: 75 ml coconut milk
1tsp matcha
38 g sugar
C: 2.5 egg yolks

D: 3 egg whites
1 heaping tsp sugar
1/8 tsp : cream of tartar

1. Preheat the oven to 375F.

2. Warm B until the sugar dissolves. Let cool.

3. Sift A twice.

4. Whisk C until light, then combine slowly with B. Fold in A in 2 portions.

5. Beat the egg whites until foamy, then add in the cream of tartar. Beat until soft peaks, then sprinkle in 1 tsp sugar until stiff. Put 1/4 of egg whites into egg yolk bowl. Mix quickly with a whisk. Then fold the egg yolk mixture into egg whites.

6. Bake until a cake tester comes out clean (depends on the size of your pan, mine took 45min).

Taste: This one is moist with a light crust on the outside. It is a Chinese-style sponge cake. It’s similar to what you would buy in a Chinese bakery, where they sell it as a paper-lined sponge cake and “gai dan goh”. Or in a Chinese fresh fruit cream cake. If you wish, you can add some vanilla for a nice fragrance. But I generally leave it out if it will be in a filled cake.

Texture: Definitely sliceable when cool. The texture is just a bit drier than the hot milk sponge cake, which makes it more sliceable. But as you can see, the crumb is also very fine. There are a few tricks to getting the crumb this way. It doesn’t work for me everytime. But when the egg whites are just beaten in the right way, they will produce this nice crumb. It stays moist when well wrapped in plastic wrap or a cake case. Let me know if you would like to know how I beat the meringue. Although it’s a pretty forgiving recipe.

Chinese Sponge cake recipe

Ingredients:

one Angel cake pan

6 Eggs

1 cup Flour

1/2 Cup Sugar

1/8 teaspoonful Salt

4 tablespoonfuls Oil

1/2 Cup Water

1/8 teaspoonful Baking Powder

1/8 teaspoonful Creme of Tarter

Methods:

** beat egg yolk and egg white separately**

1. beat up egg yolk with Beater, mix in Sugar, Salt, Water, Oil. Mix in Flour in 3 portions.

2. Add Baking Powder and Creme of Tarter to Egg white; beat up with Beater until creamy (the most important step, egg white should be beaten so well that it won’t drip even if the bowl is put up-side-down)

3. Add egg white into egg yolk; cut and fold; be as gentle as possible

4. pre heat oven 350F, bake 35-40 minutes

5. after cake is taken out from oven, let it cool up-side-down (so it stays spongy)

Coming off the delicious high of the chocolate lava cake and cookies, I wanted to make something low fat. So I opted for a simple cake. The hot milk sponge cake is nice and easy because it doesn’t require you to beat the egg white and yolks separately. I believe that this changes the crumb of the cake a bit. Compared to the chiffon cake, this cake has a very fine and even crumb with no opportunity for large air bubbles.

For this recipe, I adjusted a hot milk sponge cake recipe I found on RecipeZaar. I used directions from Alice Medrich’s hot milk sponge cake because her sponge cake is the best I’ve ever made. It retains its moistness days later and freezes very well. However, there are many egg yolds and more fat in that I recipe and I wanted to see if I could cut down on that.

Taste: The aroma was nice and it was definitely delectable. For my tastes, it was a tad on the sweet side. So I think that I would cut back on the sugar to 1/3 cup and see if it still tasted sweet enough. I will try to cut down on the baking powder to 1/4-1/2tsp. I think that this might have affected the depth of the flavour, so I would adjust this before increasing the butter a bit.

Texture: It was very very soft and moist. I really liked the fine crumb of this compared to the chiffon cake. So I think that I would prefer to make this to the chiffon cake because the crumb is more beautiful. Sorry, but the picture doesn’t do it justice. The compromise is in the height of the cake, as it is not as high as the chiffon. But this cake will also give more consistent results, and there is not as much room for error in the folding.

Hot Milk Sponge Cake

A: 1/2 cup skim milk

1tsp butter

1/2tsp vanilla extract

B: 3.5oz cake flour

1 tsp baking powder

C: 1/2cup sugar

2eggs

1/4tsp salt

1. Preheat oven to 350F. Line your pan. I used a 6″ round pan.

2. Heat A in a small pan over medium heat until butter melts, then turn to the lowest setting to keep hot, but not simmering.

3. Sift B twice. Return to sifter.

4. Whisk C together over a pan of barely simmering water until lukewarm. Then beat at high speed until volume has tripled and mixture has cooled. It should look like thick whipped cream.

5. Sift B into C in thirds and fold in until almost no flour is obvious.

6. Pour A into batter and fold well until it is homogenous.

7. Baking times depend on your pan. I cooked it for 30min. Check doneness with a cake tested inserted into the center. It should be golden brown. Unmold after 5min of cooling in the pan. Continue cooling on the rack.

The only change I made to the recipe was that I didn’t have maple syrup, so I used blueberry syrup and honey. No blueberry taste was present (which I wanted, or else that would be kind of weird). The cookie ended up crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside warm from the oven. Then it was just a delicious chewiness afterwards.

Result: It’s kinda like a slice of jello, but a bit chewier and less sweet. The crunch of the ample chestnuts gives just the right crunch and sweetness. And if you believe in TCM, then water chestnuts have a cooling effect on the internal body as well. So you get a therapeutic bonus!

Ingredients:

250g water chestnut flour

1 chunk of rock sugar

200g water chestnuts, chopped

1L of water

50mL vegetable oil

Mis water chestnut flour with 2 cups of water. Let sit while chopping the fresh water chestnuts. Put water into steamer to start boiling.

Make a sugar syrup with 2 cups of water and rock sugar. Then add water chestnuts, bring to a boil. Turn down to low heat and stir in oil.

The next step requires 2 people. Take off the heat. One to stir the pot continuously, the other to pour in the water chestnut flour/water mixture in slowly. It will turn opaque and thick. Transfer into steamer and steam for 30-40min until solid.

Chill in fridge. Slice and serve cold. The typical way to serve this is pan-fried at dim sum places. But it’s just too hot for that today.

I had hid a bit of white chocolate in the batter to melt and ooze out. But the result was that the chocolate sunk to the bottom. (Not enough flour perhaps?) And the white chocolate did not really melt, while the dark chocolate was still quite raw. The whole concoction tasted quite eggy. The plus side was that it was a small recipe and it didn’t take too much of my time or my beautiful chocolate. In the garbage you go! And I’m just disheartened enough to try again…

(I’m not including the recipe for obvious reasons.)