Learn from our mistakes

I haven't been idling since my last entry. My old GEC convectional oven is working hard these past few days, and in the process, I also burnt a few fingers *Ouch*.

Last Friday I baked 2 loaves of bread. The dough was rolled up like a swiss roll with chicken floss as the filling. I think it proofed too much so it didn't look remotely close to what I wanted it to look like. Too embarrassed to show you the results.

Then came the next ambitious project. Puff Pastry. I have tried it once before, but it became such a gooey mess I lost faith. Recently, I chanced upon a video of 2 lovely ladies who made it look so easy I decided to give it a try again.

Putting negative thoughts aside, and with a renewed faith, I embarked on my dream of making the perfect puff pastry. In fact, I lost several nights of sleep just replaying the whole process in my head. On Monday, I laid everything I needed on the table and started.

I regretted not consolidating all the information I had in my limited RAM (a.k.a my Brain) before I started, instead I relied solely on the video. The frozen butter was so STIFF I took such a long time to get the dough working. (* On hindsight, it did me some good. I found my long-lost stomach muscle. The stiff butter, and later the frozen dough was so hard I had to use so much strength to roll and in the process I worked some muscles that I thought was extinct. I actually had sore stomach and tricep muscles the day after! *)

From the title above, you must have guessed what the outcome was. This time round, however, I was closer to making it work. I told Ken I was not daunted, my puff pastry will make a come-back again. His remark was encouraging. 不屈的精神,值得鼓励. Well, though my curry puff didn't puff up, I had a little success when I cut out a portion of the dough to test out before the rest went back to the freezer. This is what came out from it.

I cut the dough using a flower mould and placed some raspberry jam on top. Notice how the puff actually puffs up a little! Anyway, I messed up the rest of the dough but my dear guinea pigs at home still finished them up without any complaints.


Lessons learnt:

• If a voice inside your head tells you "NO!", Listen. That voice is almost always right
• Be systematic, TRY to take notes on information you have gathered. For myself, I have an unreliable memory, so it always take me ages to scour through info in my head
• A tip from Gordon Ramsay - "Don't scrunch them together in a ball or you will lose the layers". I saw this tip too late. Forgot the number of times I scrunched the dough. Silly.