Cin-ful Buns

For some odd reason yesterday I felt like making cinnamon rolls, so I did.

Went to get the groceries from the hypermarket up the road. It was such a beautiful day.

Laid out all the ingredients on the table and got my baking groove on.

First I scalded some milk, vegetable oil and sugar. Just as it came to boil I switched off the fire and put it aside to cool.

In the mean time I melted some butter. What are cinnamon rolls without it? Unfortunately, I didn't look at the packet properly and bought salted butter. I used it anyway...

After the milk mixture cooled I added the yeast and then the flour and put it aside for an hour to prove. In that hour I went back to my mum's place to borrow her rolling pin.

After the proving, I added another cup of flour, some baking soda and powder and kneaded the dough slightly and formed a rectangle like so.

Then came the fun part, first you drench the dough with butter.

Then with a cup of sugar (I used brown).

Then with lots and lots of cinnamon powder.

Then you roll it all up and cut then into an inch or inch and a half pieces and dump them in a greased baking aluminum dish. I didn't take any photos of these because by this time my hands were oily and dirty.

Then you pop these babies into the oven at 190 degrees for about 15 minutes. In the meantime I whipped up some icing sugar, butter and vanilla essence for the frosting. Poured it all over the baked buns and Ta Da!

The recipe made about 7 trays of 5-6 buns so I'll be spending today delivering it to some lucky people.  

But be warned, it's a messy, messy job!

Godsent

There are just some stories that you just can't make up. 

This is one of them...

Two days before we moved into our new place I received a phone call from my sister, telling me that she needed someone to dogsit while she was away in Bangkok for an entire week. I repeatedly asked her if there was anyone else she could leave Wallis with but the fact that she called me meant that all her other dogsitters were unavailable. So despite my viral fever I agreed and dogsat.

Within the first 10 minutes of Wallis' arrival, she had already pooed at the foot of the staircase, I scolded her, put her back in her crate and cleaned up the mess. 'How am I going to spend an entire week with this dog?' I thought. I was also told that Wallis was not the brightest and would walk all over her poo if her crate was not cleaned fast enough. So I'd be stressed waking up every morning hoping that she was not soiled. It was not fun.

However, after 3 days, Wallis and I got into a little routine and I have to admit I fell in love with her. We moved into the new place with her and she seemed to follow me everywhere I went. To the kitchen, to the bathroom and she'd even plop underneath my legs on the sofa. 

I loved that the new house didn't seem so big with her around. She seemed to light up every time I came home and would endlessly shower me with affection. How could you not fall in love with a creature like that? Dog or not...

When it was time for Wallis to go home, I said goodbye with a very heavy heart. It was then that hubby promised that we'd get a pup as soon as possible.

So, like we do everything in this household, we started our research - to adopt or buy, pedigree or mixed breed, male or female. We read up on beagles, dobermans, german shepards, golden retrievers, jack russell terriers. We visited breeders, went to SPCA, PAWS, the pet shops in Mid Valley, The Curve, GE Mall, Tropicana Mall, and then I was told to check out petfinder.my and discovered the KL Pooch Rescue Team.

It was here that I fell in love with a puppy named Charlie. He was the most handsome puppy I'd ever seen. He had a beautiful shiny black coat of fur, long muscular limbs and what I'd like to call lion-like paws. Charlie was de-wormed on the day we saw him so it was a little hard to see his real temperament so we decided to come back in 2 days and it was then and there we signed the papers to adopt him.

We were given till Friday to prep our home for the little pup but in the mean time we started thinking of names for him. We thought of Bulan, since it was a full moon on the night we adopted him. But for some reason I thought of the name Angus and was adamant on naming him that but hubs refused to let me give our puppy from Klang, a Scottish name.

The day before Charlie was supposed to arrive, we were told that he had fallen ill. We were told that he may have eaten something that caused him to throw up and gave him diarrhoea. We were also told that it was not a cause for concern because puppies tend to eat anything and everything and it was a normal problem however, they said that they would wait for him to recover fully before bringing him over to our house.

For the next 3 days, Charlie seemed to get progressively worse and on Saturday morning, I received a phone call saying that Charlie had taken a turn for the worse. He was going to be discharged so that he wouldn't have to spend his last night alone. He didn't make it and passed away at 3 am on the 12th of February.

I learned that he suffered from the very fatal parvovirus, which attacks the gastrointestinal tract of puppies. However, as they say, every cloud has a silver lining.

The KL Pooch Rescue Team informed me that Charlie had a brother who was recently discharged from the hospital. Ironically, he survived from the very disease that killed his brother and the name that the rescue team gave him was...

 Angus.

Of course when I heard this, I kept his name to myself and just told hubby that we needed to go over and have a look at Charlie's brother. We were very hesitant on adopting him right after his brother had passed but after we saw him we knew that he was waiting for us all along. After we agreed on taking him home one of the KL Pooch Rescuers called him and hubby did a double take and asked "What is his name?" I giggled. It's not even funny how I always seem to get my way!

We have had Angus for 2 weeks now and I can't even imagine what took him so long to get here...

Leading Up To Lent

With Ash Wednesday coming up, hubs and I thought that we better get our meat fix before we begin our 40 day vegetarian fast leading up to Easter. So what better way to stock up on meat than a juicy, melt-in-your-mouth steak?

I was fixed on having two tenderloin steaks, so I popped over to Ben's General Food Store, Publika and I was in for a treat!

Wagyu tenderloin! I'm not a steak person but I was not going to say no to some Wagyu, so we bought two slabs of 200g tenderloin. After the sheer excitement of imagining myself eating the steak wore off, I realised that I had to cook it perfectly. Come on, I didn't want to be known as the one who ruined a Wagyu steak!

So I got home and started googling 'How to cook a Wagyu steak'. There were many schools of thought on how to make the 'perfect' steak. Some required searing the outside and then popping it into the oven, which seemed a little risky and complicated because I didn't have those thermometers that you can stick into the centre of the meat, so how would I know when the meat was done?

Plus, if I had such a good cut of meat, why would I want to cook it so well? I wanted to eat it rare so that it would be juicy and just dissolve in my mouth. *Drool*

So I came across a video on youtube and I think that this method would probably be the best way of preparing a steak. A steak should never be accompanied by sauce/ gravy because it would completely hide the flavours of the meat! Unless that was the exact intention of having gravy in the first place.

So what was the secret method of preparing the steak? Very simply:

Step 1

Make sure your meat is at room temperature. Season with salt and pepper and oil lightly with some olive oil. Heat up a DRY frying pan on high for 5 minutes.

Step 2

Place steaks in the pan and make sure they don't touch each other because it will cause the meat to boil instead of fry. Give each side a minute (for thinner slices) or a little more and flip. Cut a garlic and rub gently on each side followed by brushing some butter on the meat. The time the steaks take to cook depends on how you like your steak. The softer the steak it to the touch, the rarer it is. 

Step 3

Remove steaks from the pan (should've taken about 3-4 mins to cook) and let them rest on a plate for 3-4 minutes, depending on the thickness of the meat. Transfer steaks to a separate plate and mix the juices from the steaks with a knob of butter and pour the 'resting' juices onto the steaks and serve immediately with your favourite veggies. I also like to place a knob of butter on each steak simply because you can never have enough butter!

Pure bliss!