More baking experiments

My fairly successful baking attempts recently have kept my baking enthusiasm level high - and so I decided to try out a few new recipes for a house blessing "party" over the weekend. I practically spent the whole of Sat baking, and wasted a good 3 hours on baking biscuit sponges for a green tea tiramisu recipe from scratch. However, I just couldn't get it right and in the end I ditched the entire tiramisu project for a healthy fruit tart recipe instead. Thankfully all the desserts turned out nicely in the end - the honey and walnut ice-cream; blueberry/ raspberry fruit tarts and my usual egg tarts as the back-up option.

The failed attempt to whip up decent airy biscuit sponges was rather annoying and discouraging as I had followed the recipe steps quite religiously :( Then again, I also learnt a valuable lesson - that I will prob fail many many more times trying out all sorts of new recipes; but many things worth learning/ mastering are never easy.

D picked some herbs from the garden for his roast veg dish - they were arranged so nicely out to 'dry' that I couldn't resist stealing them for a photo moment!

 Honey and walnut ice-cream topped with a mint leaf from our garden! 

Blueberry and raspberry tarts inspired by the Roost blog post on Vanilla cream pies with summer berries. The recipe comes with a very "lifestyle" video too. I had a very hard time trying to chopper off the top of the young thai coconuts required to make the "vanilla" cream though ;(

OK to add some realism to this post I have decided (after some struggle) to post a shot of my failed biscuit sponges - the bian3 bian3 ones were cos the mixture was too runny and unpipeable; and the fat squiggly ones were after I self-improvised and pumped them up by adding lotsa flour to the runny mixture. I took a bite and not too surprisingly the excess flour had made the biscuit finger too hard. Obviously these eventually went into the bin :(