My 1st Baked Food from My Oven - Apr-16

My oven began cranking in April ....

- Cranberry Pistachio Biscotti - 

For the longest time, I've been bugging Victor to get me an oven in our kitchen! For the longest time, he's been refusing me as oven is most often associated with baking and butter, and he simply cannot stand the stench (but I call it aroma) of healthy butter!!

The latest gambit I adopted was I need an oven to roast chicken! Well, Victor eats roasted chicken and knows they're tasty!! Anyway, one fine day at dinner time he mentioned about the oven to Ma & shortly after one of Ma's extra ovens was out of her storeroom & shifted to our home!!👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

Well, I wasn't the first to bake in that oven at home; Qi beat me to it. Never mind that. After a looong period of procrastination, I finally used our oven for the first time, and it wasn't for the chicken!😆😆

Yes.. I was missing decent biscotti with my kopi-O too much!! It suddenly dawned on me that with my own oven, I no longer need to depend on generosity and charity, and that I can finally make my own biscotti!!!!!! YAAAYY!!!🎉🎉🎉

After gathering my favourite biscotti ingredients - pistachios and cranberries, and armed with an olive oil version recipe and a YouTube version of another recipe, I finally mustered the courage to begin!!

The dough was damn sticky and extremely challenging. Only the thought of 'cannot let my ingredients go to waste' nudged me on.. Eventually my dough was ready to enter the oven. It didn't matter that I did not manage to split the dough into half, it didn't matter that my biscotti came out weird-shaped and huge, it didn't matter that I thought my few slices of biscotti were somehow not worth the efforts I had put in.. What mattered was the whiff of my freshly-baked biscotti from the oven!! What mattered was my biscotti was simply so choked with my favourite pistachio and cranberries!!!!😋😋😋😋😋

*****

- Lemon Curd Filled Muffins -

Muffins seemed like a must-do on the oven, but now that i have one in my kitchen, I have no urge to bake muffins; I was never infatuated by any muffin I think.

Nonetheless I still scroll through some muffin recipes just so that one will catch my eye.. After all, Victor was on overseas business trip and I can freely bake buttery stuff in the house.. Finally this one made me want to eat it!!

Lemon is sourish and combats and compliments the sweetness of muffins. To have something flow out of my muffin like a lava cake, oooooh!! So I proceeded to make my own lemon curd before attempting to make the muffins. I like the taste of lemon curd!!👍🏼❣

Somehow tho, my muffins didn't turn out too well.. A lil' dry, plus no lemon curd flow out!!?😭😭  Fortunately, at least half of my 12 muffins from a single tray was shared by those who attended the 4D review & planning meeting that very evening. Phew...

*****

- Chicken Thigh -

Since roasting the chicken seemed to be the reason Victor eventually brought over the oven for me, I had to bake or roast some chicken, right?

As a novice, I start small - juz 3 chicken thighs for lunch.

The thighs came out a lil' but very tasty!! I was pleased... (^^)