How to: Edible paint

Oh hey! Another tutorial, didn't see this one coming! 

Yesterday I was simply browsing (Quite aimlessly I must say, in search for something interesting and surprisingly found that "something interesting"!) through one of the homeschooling group on FaceBook that I had joined and there was just this one post that caught my eye "Homemade cornstarch paint" it said.

(This was where the link directed to: Homemade cornstarch paint. I officially absolutely love this blog!)

So yeah, I kinda tried making my own paint today!

Usually I never start on these kinda projects, kinda like the time when I wanted to try out Alan Dunn's Cold porcelain but never actually did it for some unknown reason.. But the instructions were SO simple and the list of ingredients was SO short that I simply had to!

And since the ingredients were only water and cornstarch that would make it edible, right? (Can't wait to try my edible paint on a cake!)

If you haven't viewed her blog yet this is basically what you need to make your own paint-

1 Cup of water

1 Tablespoon of Corn starch

A tiny saucepan/pot to cook your paint in, hmm.. That sounds somewhat funny!

Food coloring

1st stop (Step, stop.. Same thing right? Just a different alphabet in the middle and a completely different meaning! .. But at least it rhymes!):

Fill ye cuppa with H2O (I guess you could use boiled, then cooled water if you are going to paint on a cake or just plain tap water if you aren't going to eat it!) to thy brim.

Pour ye liquid into ye miniature pot.

2nd Stomp:

Plonk in a tablespoon of  corn starch and mix all the lumps out or you are going to be in BIIIIGGG trouble.

I had to make this twice because I actually FAILED on my first try!

I didn't mix the corn flour in and once it boiled my "paint" had little jelly like lumps in them!  

3rd Storm:

Plop the pot onto the stove, put thy fire on medium and stir like no tomorrow so the corn flour, starch err... Same thing! Doesn't settle and form the very un-wonderful lumps!

Stir, stir, your neighbor may think your mad but CONTINUE, stir, stir, your neighbor may officially think you're possessed but CONTINUE, stir, stir!

Hmm, don't you think that would make one wonderful song? 

4th Store:

If your neighbor hasn't taken you to the nut house, you may continue stirring till some scary bubbles start forming!

The scary bubbles is a sign that the paint shows when it's well, PAINT.

5th Star:

Put the fire off and the scary bubbles will go away, if you don't they would probably over flow and you would have to mop up the whole kitchen and trust me, the "paint" is quite sticky and icky.

You should end up with a thicker liquid from what you started with.

Congratulations, you have made P-A-I-N-T!

Now, whip up, I mean OUT some food coloring!

I just kinda realized I don't own "liquid food coloring"!

So if you don't own liquid food coloring you may want to whip out some tooth picks as well to kinda transfer the gel food coloring from the container to the paint.

And.. I kinda just realized I don't own a paint pallete so I used my gem chocolate/candy melts/gum paste/royal icing instead!  

And.. I don't own proper "paint brushes", all of mine are kinda.. Used for dusting gum paste flowers!

Oh gosh, this is hilarious..

So sob, sob, I had to sacrifice a couple of paint brushes for my edible paint "test drive"!

The results from my five minute test drive!

Err... Not exactly my favorite "paint", I would 100% still buy my favorite acrylic paint for art projects and as for cakes.. I guess I am stuck with my SK edible paint or food coloring!

It was a bit too.. Transparent and jelly like, I would rather paint with food coloring, somehow but I guess if you aren't painting details it's completely fine! 

In other words.. Just make a whole tub full for little kids to splatter about! 

Had LOADS, about say.. 1/2 Cup or so of leftover paint!

Chucked it into the fridge, I wonder how long it would last? Will keep you updated!

-Karen Kookingpaint Kake

How to: Extremely FUN Spinach Noodles

Spinach noodles.. I can see the face you have on right now! Who ever eats GREEN noodles? Well, I do and they are surprisingly yummy after you get pass the fact that they are green and spinach is one of my favoritest vegetables so I like the light spinachy taste they have.

Oh and you are probably wondering about the "Extremely Fun" part in this post's title... Well we are getting to the fun part!

Just for your information, it doesn't have to be spinach. It can be basically any vegetable that can be pureed (Carrot sounds nice and it won't seem too gross...) actually, so I guess it will be fun experimenting, huh? Oh! And it's "Health freak" and kid (My three brothers helped me and my Mom out today, should I count myself in the "kid" part?) friendly! Smiley face*

First tried them out in a restaurant at Jaya One quite some time back and found them REALLY nice so we decided to go hunting for a recipe and trying it out, it's our first time making this at home and... I just bought a new PASTA MACHINE (It's actually for rolling out gum paste but well... i guess I am just testing my new toy/machine out today!)!

Okay! Let's get started with our super simple spinach noodles!

You will need:

2 1/2 Cups of Spinach leaves without the main stem but the tiny ones attached to the leaves are fine, compact the leaves into the cup, please.

4 Tablespoons of water

1 Teaspoon of Salt

2 1/2 Cups of All purpose flour

Pasta machine or rolling pin.

Yep! No fancy ingredients (Unless you count spinach fancy in which ever strange country you are from.)! Nice, huh?

Oh right, and before you start on the noodle making.. You might need to make the really simple but yummy Mommy's soup.

Ingredients:

A pot filled with water
A few chunks of whatever fish
A few chucks of ginger
Some salt
Freshly ground pepper

Mommy's method:

Chuck everything into the pot and boil.

Okay! There you go! Your soup!

This recipe fed:

1 Obaachan
1 Okasan
1 Otosan
1 Musume
3 Pesky little brothers, I have no idea how to say that in Japanese, yet.

Step 1:


Rip your leaves up a bit, make sure you use your baby brother to do this (Don't have one? Feel free to borrow mine.), it will make things much easier and you won't have to get your hands leafy, unless you enjoy it that is, then go ahead.


Combine the leaves and that four tablespoons of water you have into a sauce pan.
Put it on a medium-slow fire, cook till tender. It would be good if you could put the lid on so it would speed this process up.


Turn off the fire and cool once it is done.

Step 2:


Place your eggs (Oops! One of the yolks got cut by the sliiiccceerrrr! Say with weird evil voice*), salt and spinach into a blender or food processor.

Blend on low speed till it looks as disgusting as this. 

Step 3:

In a mixing bowl, poof your flour into it, make sure you drop it from the ceiling to make an AWESOME cloud of flour. Which will choke you and make you die but.. it was fun right?

Step 4:


Pour the spinach mush into your pristine white floury mixing bowl and... Stick your hand (Putcha right hand in, putcha right hand out! Putcha right hand in and please don't shake it all about! Do the hokey pokey and please do turn your self around.. THAT'S what it's all about!) in and KNEAD! 

Till it looks like this (Add more flour if it's too mushy but I don't think it would be.) then plonk it out onto a lightly dusted table and knead it for about 10 minutes or so..

Step 5:


Get a quarter or so of the dough blob and try flattening it as much as possible and flouring it heavily (You don't want it to end up sticking onto the pasta machine when you roll, do you?) on both sides before rolling it out in the pasta machine.  

Flour the table quite a bit too, to prevent it from sticking or you will have a hard time!
Let the rolled out dough rest for 20 minutes before "Shredding" (Make sure you dust them with yet another layer of flour, it somehow cuts better so you don't get sticky together noodles, I am pretty sure you won't want to eat those..) them into noodles. 

Step 6:


Once you have "Noodle-y-fied" the dough it's time... 
For the "Extremely fun" part! Yippeeee!
(I was supposed to drape them on a rack but it was rather sticky so I did this instead and it worked, WOO HOO!)


Now, to prevent it from clumping together, dust your table yet again then call all your little brothers over then start tossing them into the air! Do this to your heart's content, don't worry the noodles won't protest.
You should end up with noodles all over your table and flour and tiny strands of noodles on the floor. Another smiley* 
I assume this process makes the noodles springy? 


Let noodles rest for another TWO hours before cooking.

Step 7:


Re-heat your soup if it is cold, put some water into a wok and wait for it to boil before putting your noodles in for half a minute, take it out and rinse under cold water, then plop it into your bowl.


Pour the soup in and garnish with anchovies (Make sure you deep fry them first, ya?) and some weird edible leaves (Boil them a bit first.).

YUMMY! Had one of the best lunches EVER! Huge grin*

~K

Avril

Oh! I mean April! Funny how I always get those two mixed up!

A very surprisingly busy month for me, never had this many cake/cupcake orders in a month before! (It must be something telling me to stay in KL and not move to PD I assume..)
Oh! And to make this month even MORE special... I am in the mids of working on my first EVER wedding cake order! I am SO happy! And was very excited before I started.

And... I got myself addicted to Junior MasterChef since one of my friends post this: Junior Masterchef : Pierre!! ♥ ♥ ♥  as her FaceBook status!

Then it hit me!
Pierre! (My all time favorite contestant, too bad he only reached the top 4 or was it 5.. Too bad almost everyone that watches it loves him too! Wasn't very happy with the winner since he did cheat in one of the episodes, ugh. I absolutely hate cheaters since I experienced the winner of the ICCA Teen cake competition cheating. Jeez, still can't get it out of my head!) Junior Masterchef! My all time favorite show when I went to Perth for a holiday sometime last year! Watched it everyday or was it every week? 


And the episode that I first watched was a pressure test (I personally am not very good at caking under pressure    
I am not sure how they can produce and plate up the dish so beautifully in that small amount of time! I would have fainted when the clock started ticking! Especially Pierre, he is like oh today's we are cooking ____? Okay then. Starts chopping, mixing and cooking* I feel very completely useless next to all of them!) or something like that with PIES as the "thing-every-contestant-has-to-cook" and one of my favorite foods in the world are pies. (I hate fruit pies though, meat pies are AWESOME!)


I was completely in awe on how much knowledge those kids from 8-12 yrs have!


So this was my MAJOR distracting to caking since the start of April until today... When I discovered that YouTube deleted (Due to some copyright reasons ans blahblahblah!) the uploader's (MasterChef, Junior MasterChef, Hells Kitchen etc. Loved that channel!) channel!
Oh well, I did choose to stop watching since Pierre got eliminated! It was no fun watching after that because it got rather boring, yawn.


I am pretty glad I got this addiction (Speaking of addictions I got re-addicted to Cake Boss again about the same time as MasterChef! So the last week has been basically spent on Youtube watching videos!) over and done with so I could finally get back to caking!


So besides caking, we (As in my 3 brothers and Mommy.) went to the National Science Center or Pusat Sains Negara (I prefer my English version!) for an onion DNA extraction experiment thingy and we got to build a DNA err.. strand? out of 2 strips of foam and straws. (They were colored to represent 4 funny names which I cannot remember..)
We have been going there SO often since we became members of the library over there, it is starting to get a wee bit boring...


Anyways I was running low on supplies since I wasn't expecting so much this month so I decided to stop by my 2nd home, it's ICCA if you remember/read my Miri blog post and have some yummy Spaghetti carbonara and a Chocolate milkshake (2 of my favorite foods in the world! One step above pies!) before that since I didn't have much before leaving for the Science Center.   


Ahh... I always loved that feeling that I am going up the lift and then greeted by a very happy Nina (That's the shopkeeper/cashier/my friend that I talk to when ever I arrive too early for my Wilton courses because my Dad had an early appointment and help with her personal baking projects. Man, I miss those Wilton course days... i just wish I could re-experience everything over and over again! And going out with my "Auntie" course mates for lunch after the course finishes, I felt so grown up and of course VERY happy! Now all I want is to go to Never Never land so I would never grow up so that I could master EVERYTHING before I reach a certain age.) and seeing all the baking and cake decorating tools and supplies in front of me. 
Heaven. Bliss.


But today was something a bit unexpected happened.
When I rung the door bell and as usual Nina opened the door with that mega watt smile on her face and screamed "KAREN! I missed you SO much! You grew taller!" (Typical, she always says that sentence.).


I did my shopping in a jiffy, I would know where everything is with my eyes closed!
  
Then there was a group of students (From I am not very sure what caking class.) that just exited the "class room" and Nina said these words: This is KAREN Evereee boddeeeee! (No she did not say the "Evereeee boddeeeeee" part, I just love the way Grover says it!) The 13 year old girl who _________________ (I don't feel like bragging much today!) and then everyone turns to me and...
Shakes my hand?! (And goes "It's GREAT to meet you!")
I was like " Err... Waahht is going on?! 


What an awesome shopping experience!


~K 

Vegetable puff

Hooray!
I made a batch of Pohpoh's recipe vege puff (A.K.A Chai pu) successfully today for tea time!
And it tasted original!
Yippee!

Here is the Vegetable puff recipe for you to try out:

Ingredients:

2 Large eggs
2 Cups Plain flour
1/2 or 1 TSP (Depends how salty you like it..) salt
Some dashes of pepper
1/2 Cup Fried anchovies (Pounded)
1 Cup Carrots (Shredded)
3 Cups Cabbage (Chopped finely. There is no way you could shred it right?! LOL)
2 Medium sized onions (Sliced)

10 Steps to yummy vege puffs:

1-Beat eggs
2-Add pepper and salt. Beat it some more...
3-Add in flour (It should be batter-ish. Add some water if it is too dry.)
4-Add anchovies
5-Add the vegetables in bit by bit...
6-By now it should look like coleslaw :P
7-Let it rest for 10 minutes or so...
8-Give the mixture a mix and you are ready to fry!
9-Deep fry with high heat till golden brown.
10-Serve with tomato sauce or/and chili sauce or by it self or with whatever you wish!

Hope your vegetable puffs turn out as yummy as mine did!

~K