Apple Strudel

Had been thinking and thinking for a long time and finally, managed to do it this time. If you want it easier, you may buy ready made pastry, otherwise make yourself. If you making yourself, start with the pastry, while resting it in the fridge, do the apple filling, then work on the pastry again and the custard cream and back the pastry. This way, you can maximise your time.

Do note that I had used brown sugar instead of castor sugar and I had reduced the amount. If you using castor sugar and have sweet tooth, top up a bit of it.

Ingredients

For the pastry:

• Puff Pastry, refer to recipe here
• 35g brown Sugar (if castor sugar, 70g)
• 1tsp cinnamon powder
• 1tbsp melted butter

For the apple filling

• 5 small size apple
• 50g butter
• 70g brown sugar (if castor sugar, 90g)
• 1/2 tbsp cinnamon powder
• 30g raisins
• Juice from half a lemon
• 7g corn flour
• 1 tsp water

For the custard cream

• 2 egg yolks
• 1/3 cup of brown sugar
• 2tbsp plain flour
• 1 cup cream milk mixture (I used 80% cream and 20% milk)
• 1/2tsp vanilla

Steps:

1. Prepare the puff pastry as per instruction of the recipe link provided.
2. Prepare the filling. First, peel the apple, core it and cut to either small chunks or slices up to your preference. Mine was cut to small slices. Sprinkle half of the lemon juice to the apple to prevent it from browning.
3. Melt the butter in the pot, add in all the apples and stir it till it is well coated. Cook with medium low fire and continuously stir to avoid it from burning.
4. Once the apple is soft and a little wilted, add in the sugar and cook till it dissolved.
5. Sprinkle in the cinnamon powder and continuously stir it.
6. Mix the corn flour with water and the balance of the lemon juice. Set it aside.
7. After cooking for about 5-6mins, slowly pour in the corn flour mixture and stir till it is thicken. Turn off the fire, set aside to cool
8. Next, prepare the custard cream. Stir in the yolks and sugar in a pot till it is creamy. 
9. Add in flour and stir till it is even and no clump.
10. Finally, add in all the other ingredients and turn on the fire, low and stir. The mixture must be stir continuously.
11. Once it started to thicken, turn off the fire and continue to stir till it cool down. Scoop into a container and let it cool in the fridge.
12. Roll out the pastry (half of the recipe, unless you using store bought one) to roughly 1cm thickness and cut it to 3pcs.
13. Mix the sugar and cinnamon and set aside. Brush the butter to the top of the pastry, and then sprinkle the sugar cinnamon mixture to the top of the pastry.
14. Preheat the AF at 200c for 2mins (if using oven, preheat at 180c for at least 10mins). 
15. Place the pastry into the AF and air fried it for 16mins at 160c. If using oven, 190c (fan forced) for 16mins too.
16. Once done, take it out to cool before plating.
17. Arrange the first piece of the pastry and top with some custard cream, apple filling, then the other piece of pastry, custard cream and apple filling and finally covered with the last piece of pastry. Sprinkle some icing sugar to it if you like and serve. 

Below is the other version that I had made using the curry puff mould.

Profiteroles

A friend in FB had just recently posted her profiteroles and always seeing it in the cooking competition tempted me into trying this out. So, I had cooked some cream custard earlier to pipe into the pastry and now the choux pastry itself.

Ingredients:

• 1/3 cup (80ml) water
• 40g cubed butter, room temperature
• 50 (1/3 cup) plain flour
• 2 eggs room temperature (I used 600g, L size)
• some oil to grease (I used silicone mat and the oiled paper, no need to grease)
• custard cream to fill the puff

Steps:

1. Put the water and butter in the saucepan and heat it up. Constantly stirring it till the butter melts and the mixture is about to boil.
2. Remove from heat and add in the flour and stir till well combined. Place it back to the heat (low) and continuously stir for another min or two till the mixture forms a ball and does not stick to the side of the saucepan.
3. Set it aside to cool. Meantime, whisk both the eggs separately (two different bowl). Add one of the eggs into the mixture and stir till well combined and gradually add a bit more from the other bowl. The mixture has to be a little liquid like, but still able to hold its shape. So if it is still quite stiff, add a little more of the egg.
4. Preheat the oven at 200C and lined the baking tray.
5. Filled up the pipping bag with the mixture.
6. If you like it bigger (it does not grow a lot bigger) pipe roughly the amount of 1.5 tablespoon amount of the mixture and give a gap of roughly 3cm apart.
7. Brush the top with remaining egg and bake for 15mins or until it is puffed and golden.
8. Once puffed and golden, turn off the oven, remove the tray. Using a skewer, poke a hole at the top (the recipe asked for bottom, but I find that poking it at the top makes it easier to pipe the custard cream in later).
9. Return the profiteroles into the oven (turned off) to dry for roughly 15mins.
10. Take the out and transfer to a wire rack to cool. Once done, you can pipe in the cream.
11. I kept mine in the fridge so that it won't get soggy.

Hot Cross Bun

Easter round the corner and the supermarkets are all selling hot cross bun. But the one we bought last year tasted super terrible and since I have some custard cream in the fridge, (leftover from the profiteroles), so I decided to churned some out today.

And recently a friend just posted her hot cross bun that looks so good, I got even more tempted. She told me she used the 5c method and there after some online "research" (the marvel of computer), it is also known as the cold batter or overnight poolish. Ok, here is the recipe for the hot cross bun using home made custard cream.

Ingredients:
For the cold batter or overnight poolish:

• 150g bread flour
• 150g luke warm water
• 0.5g (1/8 teaspoon) instant yeast

Mix all ingredients in a bowl. According to the recipe, leave it to proof for an hour before sending it to sleep in the fridge. However the itchy me, just prepare that at 10.30pm and got no time to wait, so I  leave the bowl in a big pot of water, heat up the pot for 2 mins (if you are using gas and not electric cook top, should be just 1min or less. Please remember NOT double boil method, put a rack to create steam effect instead. The direct heat may affect the batter.

Next take out the bowl of batter and leave it to cool (should just take less than a min). Cover up the bowl and send it to camp in the fridge over night (or at least 5hr).

Main dough:

• 250g bread flour
• 100g plain flour
• 50g caster sugar
• 1 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 1/4 tsp instant yeast
• 1 egg lightly beaten (I used 600g type)
• 30g cold milk
• 50g hot water
• 50g room temperature butter, cut to small pieces/cube
• some milk to brush
• custard cream to pipe on top

Steps:

1. Mix all the dry ingredients in the mixer bowl (or the bowl u going to use to knead with your hand or the bread maker mixing bowl). Give it a stir to mix the ingredients evenly.
2. Next add in all the wet ingredients (excluding butter) including the cold batter. Knead till the mixture forms a nice springy dough. It took me bout 2mins with my machine on high speed.
3. Next knead in the butter (if using machine half by half and if using hand little by little). If you are using hand, it may takes up to 20mins of good hand exercise before the butter is well incorporated into the dough. My machine got it done in bout 40seconds (speed 6).
4. Cover up the dough and let it rest for at least an hour or till when u give it a push with your thumb and the dough does not bounced back.
5. Cut it up to size equal pieces (mine is 99g each, very precise), formed round dough and placed on the baking pan that is greased with a little oil slightly apart.
6. While resting the dough, preheat the oven at 190C. 
7. After resting for 10mins, brush some milk on top of the bread, and use a butter knife to cut the cross on the bread. Pipe the custard cream on top.
8. Finally, bake for 13-15mins at 190C.

Home Made Custard Cream

Seeing a friend posted profiteroles and those contestant in the cooking competition preparing it, felt like trying it out on my own. But, wait, I need some custard cream and I know we can do that at home without using the custard powder.

So, started my googling and did a little adjustment to meet what I have in the kitchen.

Ingredients

• 1.5 cups hilo milk
• 0.5 cups of light thicken cream
• 3 egg yolks
• 3/4 cup sugar (need to reduce this, I find it too sweet)
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 2 tbsp cornstarch
• 1 tbsp flour

Steps:

1. First, mix the milk and cream together in a saucepan. Put it on high fire and leave it to simmer till it starts to bubble, lower the fire to as low as possible. I'm using the electric cooktop and I remove the entire saucepan from the heat.
2. Mix the egg yolks with sugar, vanilla extract, salt, cornstarch and flour till even.
3. Slowly pour the egg mixture into the milk mixture (at this point, I had return the milk mixture to the cooktop, but did not turn on the power yet.
4. Make sure you continuously stir the mixture so that the egg does not curdle up and ended up with cooked yolk rather than custard.
5. Once both the mixture are evenly mix together, turn on the fire up high for half a min while constantly stirring the mixture. Once thicken, quickly remove from heat and still stirring it to ensure that there is no plastic like layer formed up and this help the mixture to cool down.
6. Pour it into a container, cover it up and let it cool in the fridge.