Since my last baking update post, Singapore has also entered into the circuit breaker phase, which means that everyone has to stay home unless they have essential business/jobs to do outside the home. Contrary to personal expectations, my baking has not ramped up; I guess inertia has set in.

But I have been able to cook a little! I’ve been making tons of miso soup and have graduated from making a pot at a go to a cup at a time. As it turns out, tea infusers can be used to infuse bonito flakes into freshly boiled water to make dashi, and from there you can stir in miso & add other cooked ingredients. Apart from lots of miso soup, I’ve also made:

Banana Pudding

I always crave Magnolia Bakery’s Banana Pudding and up until now, have been able to occasionally satiate the cravings by making it at home. However, to my shock and horror, I can no longer find Nilla wafers in Cold Storage! I can still find vanilla pudding at the bigger ones, but no Nilla wafers – in stores and online. And so, I started looking for alternatives:

I tried using shortbread and these French biscuits. Learning from the last time, I made the banana putting in tupperware boxes instead of a ceramic pot. My conclusions:

1. It’s the cream/pudding section that counts
2. Thinner biscuits are good if you want the pudding to soften the biscuit into cake
3. Walker’s shortbread is never going to soften into cake.

I personally preferred the thin biscuit version because it was the closest to the original, but my cousin told me he liked the different texture the shortbread provided. Any suggestions for other biscuits I could use? I bought two boxes of the vanilla pudding so I could actually make this again.

Earl Grey Scones

While digging around my tea cabinet, I realised that I still had a lot of the Mariage Freres tea from before. Since The Book of Scones has a recipe for Earl Grey Scones, I decided to make some!

As it turns out, I like Earl Grey Scones a lot better than I like Earl Grey! I think the bergamot isn’t as intense in a scone and it ends up lending a fantastic flavour. Would definitely make these again.

Next up: recipes from Cherry Cake & Ginger Beer! This is a fantastic cookbook (at least if you’re just reading through it) and I’ll probably review it after I try a few recipes.