Aspiring to be a Domestic Goddess

I love being in the kitchen. I cook and bake when I'm happy. I cook and bake when I'm stressed or angry too. So you can imagine how often I'm in the kitchen.

Between cooking and baking, I have to say I prefer the former. Read from somewhere that cooking is an art while baking is a science. When cooking, you can follow your own preferences and adopt different ingredients, herbs or seasoning to create the kind of taste you like. There is no right or wrong to cooking. Just a matter of whether or not it taste good, and of course edible enough to not result in any toilet disasters. In baking however, you often do have to follow a recipe strictly. Any difference to the measurements of the flour or sugar can result in a sponge cake turning into a rock cake.

I bake because I think a dessert completes a meal. But being someone who has always preferred heavy duty food to pastries and cakes, I don't always eat much of the desserts that I make. But once in a while, I like to experiment with new baking recipes and play with flour and butter in the kitchen in my aspiration to be a domestic goddess. Here are some of my recent baking.



Apricot Nectar Cheesecake (I couldn't find apricot nectar in my local supermarket so I used mango nectar instead)




Pumpkin bread (this was surprisingly easy to make. But it takes sometime for the dough to rise and the kneading part was exhausting)




Strawberry Tart (I used blueberry in the middle section as I ran out of strawberries. Turned out to be better as it added a little variety to the otherwise boring tart. The shortcrust pasty was made from scratch too as it is quite hard to get frozen pastry in the japanese supermarkets. I prefer a homemade pastry base anyway).

A slice anyone?