I had this spicy black pepper lamb pie at secret recipe ystd. it was really good. really spicy!! at RM5.90, I highly recommend it. The crispy hot pastry goes very well with the bits of lamb and potato inside...and the sauce is really nice and black peppery. it was VERY spicy because of the copious amount of pepper in it. anyway I like my hot pies with ketchup on top.... [although my friends thought it weird]

Ok I havent been blogging here for a long time.......coz i've been so busy. So, my apologies to you all who've been checking here often..I hope you hvent gotten bored yet. I baked more cookies yesterday. so I decided to take more photos. Here on top are the peanut butter cookies all stacked up on a trusty airtight Tupperware container. Yeah you gotta love the tupperwares. they're top on every housewife's wishlist. back in the 80's-90's they were the "in" thing so my mum stocked up on heaps of them. I have them in every imaginable size and shape, and i even have a cute tupperware egg separater device where you crack an egg into it, and the yolk stays on the thing while the whites fall through. really nifty. and Joy gave me some limited edition Tupperware cookie cutters some years back. Not to mention now I'm using this perfume by Tupperware [yeah who knows what they'd come up with next?]

These are my new creations! Chocolate chip walnut cookies. I thought it would look pretty to put the walnut pieces on top. also posing on top of a tupperware lid...

and here..................... is something very interesting.. [to me anyway] gavin's been to a new exotic land..where they have exotic looking cheese. This is Haloumi, which is a Cypriot goat's milk cheese [I THINK!!] that the middle eastern folks like to eat. I've seen a lot of it in cookbooks but it's hard to find around here [i saw some at TMC in Bangsar but it was RM16.90 for just a small piece, 180g!] but gav brought some of it home and i've been enjoying it everyday in lotsa weird ways. it's ussually fried or grilled [fried cheese!! can u imagine!???????????? as if it werent fattening enough!!] and eaten with a sprinkling of lemon juice and oregano but i've been frying it with scrambled egg, putting it on my rice, on my noodles and even on my maggi mee. yeah it's so fun to microwave coz it has a very high melting point so instead of melting, it gets nice and chewy and squishy. it has a really nice salty tangy flavour. I even chopped some up and put it in yoghurt to make some sort of a dip. in Cyprus it's eaten with watermelon, I read.. i cant imagine eating cheese with watermelon though..one's salty and the other's sweet. isnt that like..wrong? it's like eating chocolate with garlic. [ugh!]

the one about the fruitcake...[it's after christmas but well, it's time to reflect on what happened at Christmas is it not?]

ok u know how people talk about fruitcakes as if they're the worst ever dreaded thing but somehow you keep having to deal with it. like at weddings..and at christmas. mostly weddings, in our malaysian society. [yeah remember those ubiquitous prepacked rectangles of fruitcake you get at the dinner that wasnt part of the BIG 6 tiered cake?] i've met lotsa people who hate fruitcake [rach is one of em...] and yours truly [im a recent convert!] it was martha who asked me last year if i were gonna make any for Christmas. she said "Christmas cake" and I thought..what's a christmas cake?? I thought any cake consumed at Christmas could be deemed Christmas cake. after all...as long as u decorate it with christmas themed decorations or eat it at a christmas party, isnt that christmas cake? apprently not. "Christmas Cake" is actually fruitcake. I didnt pay much attention to it after that coz i was not a fan of fruitcake but after taking out my Christmas issues of Donna Hay and Martha Stewart magazines, i saw that fruitcakes took centre stage. so I had to try my hand at it. my first try was a flop..it was too dry and crumbly. so i tried again and this time, i did it the longggggggggggggggg way that takes a lot of patience. Yes, i soaked the fruits on rum...for a week [!!] then baked the cake..then poured some rum over it..then kept it for 3 weeks, pouring "some" rum over it every 5 days. at this point, some people i think, overdo it so the cake becomes some massive alcoholic thing but well, some [most] would say thr's no such thing as too much alcohol. so, anyway, the result was, according to my relatives who gobbled it up at christmas dinner, fantabulous. I wasnt there at the dinner coz I was home sick. [probably coz of the frantic insane amount of baking i did in the week leading to Christmas] It was only my 2nd attempt, but I was glad they liked it. when I tried some myself, it was nice and moist and had a very strong rum flavour and you coudl still feel alcohol warming up your throat. Ok,s o maybe next year we'll have some fruitcakes up. I wanna experiment with adding other types of fruit in it..like chopped dried apricot or even dried pineapple.

You know what music I like to listen to while baking? Explosions in the Sky. Seruiosly. Somehow..their music is so..inspiring...so invoking. it makes me forget the tiredness...it just moves me into action..and i just go on doing and doing..getting lost on another world...so surreal. thr's no stopping. You have to listen to them..each track is just so.. full of emotion. so deep...so profoundly...melancholy.

while making giant chocolate chip cookies today i was listening to them, in particular "look into the sky" which is sooo........ it involves the feeling of... uh something like although everything's fallen apart and crumbled, there's hope for tomorrow. yes, this song involves that feeling!! it starts out being kinda depressing..like smtg terrible's happened and ur whole world has fallen apart..but still admist that feeling of devastation there's hope...there's a little glimmer of hope... so, that's the way the cookie crumbles [sorry, i know that was lame...hahahhahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaa ]

these giant cookies are giant because they're supposed to be chewy. so they HAVE to stay big. if they're made smaller [and i tried] they become crisp.

they're as big as your palm.

price: RM2 each, min order of RM10

weight: i didnt weigh them

Ok this isnt about baking but I just love Vegemite! it's one of my favourite foods... Im just crazy about it! It's so sad we dont have it in malaysia...so I brought a big jar and tube back from Tassie last year but it finished pretty soon. a few months ago Aunt Linda brought me a BIG jar from Melbourne so now I'm getting into that!

I hated it at first but somehow the black gunk just grew on me...I remember seeing my friends devour it on hot slices of buttered toast and soon I was hooked as well. But the first time i tried it, I thought it was like peanut butter so i smeared it on too thick so it tasted horrible! So the trick is to just spread a scraping of it and there MUST be butter or else it wouldnt be nice. There's something about vegemite on toast that gives you that.... high! Oh and it's not just a breakfast thing...i've had it for lunch and dinner and supper too. [Then again i've had cereal and milk for dinner....] Gavin's weird though in that he likes to mix it with hot water to make a "soup" that he floods his rice with. Back when I was working at the hotel, I always had jar of it in case the employee's food was inedible [which is quite often..] then I could just have it with bread.