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Butterscotch Bread

I remember when Gardenia’s Butterscotch bread first came out. People were literally waiting for the bread guy to stock the shelves (I think it was every Wednesday) before snapping them all up like piranhas, and they were gone in a flash. At that point in time I was working in Menara TM, and since I always came in pretty early I had the small advantage of grabbing a couple from the MyNews downstairs first thing in the morning. Lucky me.

Years passed, and the novelty wore off. Until one day, I got to know Faizal and he mentioned how he’d always bring butterscotch bread back to the States whenever he’s here on holiday. We spoke briefly about how I love to bake bread, and he suggested I try figuring out how to make homemade butterscotch bread. Why didn’t I think of this? I made a mental note to seriously give this a shot. Soon after, I found butterscotch chips at Bake With Yen. It’s a sign!

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Pizzaman (Japanese Steamed Pizza Buns)

I’ve always loved Japan and so many things about it, the language, the culture, and of course their food. Japanese konbini or convenience store food is practically a whole unique segment of Japanese cuisine, and one of their most fascinating food items is pizzaman, literally a steamed bun stuffed with pizza-flavored filling.

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Homemade Italian Sausage

In my earlier days of cooking I focused on one chef in particular – Emeril Lagasse. His recipes often called for Italian, Spanish chorizo or Andouille sausages, and oftentimes I could only obtain Italian sausages at more upmarket grocers like Village Grocer or B.I.G. Even then, there was only one type available, and I couldn’t differentiate between the sweet or hot varieties the recipes called for. Fast forward many years later, when looking at the basic sausage sauce recipe from one of my pizza cookbooks, I decided to make my own Italian sausages.

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Copycat McDonald’s Chicken Sausage McMuffins

One of my guilty pleasures is the McDonald’s breakfast menu. I particularly like their Sausage McMuffins (even better with egg). But nowadays breakfast ends earlier at 10:30am and I always end up missing the window, and of late I also noticed that their sausage patties are insanely salty. It could be just me getting older and my body is instinctively rejecting salt for the sake of my blood pressure, but in any case, I got inspired to make my own.

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Air-fryer Donat Susu

As always, during the month of Ramadan, the uber-famous Malaysian cooking content creator Khairul Aming (@khairulaming) shared a video of him making Donat Susu, which apparently went viral for some time. Honestly I didn’t even know this was a thing until I saw his post, nonetheless the idea of using sweetened condensed milk in bread dough *and* dipping fluffy donuts into a mixture of powdered milk and sugar was too compelling to resist.

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Roti Paung

This post has been refreshed to reflect new learnings.

When I was younger, afternoon tea was pretty much a daily routine.  Mummy would drive out (practically every place in Kuala Terengganu was only a 5 minutes’ drive away) and buy cakes or snacks for our afternoon tea, such as banana fritters, traditional Malay kuih, and occasionally, freshly baked roti paung.  A favorite place for us to buy roti paung was a stall at a specific Shell station on the road towards Chendering from Batu Burok.  I can’t remember the exact address now.

Nowadays I very rarely return to my hometown, and sadly, I never see roti paung anywhere here.  So, I decided to try making my own.  I’ve experimented with several recipes, and finally came up with my own version here.   Soft and fluffy, I finally get to savor a taste of home.  Enjoy!

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Christmas Roast Duck

This amazing Western-style roast duck by Jamie Oliver has been my go-to recipe whenever I feel like having duck at home. I recently made this for our usual end of year get-together in place of turkey, due to a complete shortage of turkey in the market this year. I’ve updated the recipe with some improvements on the method to reduce handling time and utensils used.

Duck fat roast potatoes: to die for. Reserve the carcass to make lovely duck stock.

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Chocolate Swirl Bread

When I was a kid, there was a local bakery which sold a two-colored white and chocolate bread loaf. We called it ‘roti kahwin’ (literally translates to ‘married bread’) at home, for some reason.

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Vietnamese Duck Noodles in Soup (Mi Vit Tiem)

Back when I was living in New Haven, I used to frequent a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant called Pot au Pho. Especially on those cold winter afternoons, mi vit tiem, egg noodles with braised five-spice flavored duck and shiitake mushroom, was my go-to order. I think the restaurant has closed down now, and even here I haven’t been able to find local restaurants serving this particular dish. Well, I guess if you wanna eat something you can try to make it yourself, so here we were.

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Che Nom’s Lepat Pisang

Achievement unlocked: lepat pisang!

I generally love bananas and every form of dessert or snack we can make with bananas, and lepat pisang is one of my favorites. The thing is, this Malay kuih isn’t as common as some others, and quite often the ones I get are quite disappointing.

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