If you bake a lot like Annie does, you’ll use a lot of vanilla extract in your recipes. That can be costly, as commercial vanilla extract is expensive. The recipe for how to make your own vanilla extract at home is seriously easy to do, and cheaper in the long run than buying commercial vanilla extract.
But first, let’s back up a bit. Do you recognize this tree?
This is the story of a food experiment gone awry.
It all started when I read an article in the paper about Arthur’s Day, a day to commemorate the signing of the lease on Arthur Guinness’s brewery, over 250 years ago. You know, the maker of the popular Guinness Stout beer. The company is holding a worldwide music festival on September 22 to celebrate.
That article sparked an idea in my head to cook something with Guinness beer in time with Arthur’s Day. But I wasn’t interested in making an Irish Stew. I wanted to revisit a cooking technique that I hadn’t done in a long time, since before we moved from San Jose to Kuching: Beer Can Chicken. In the past, I’ve gotten tasty results using Heineken beer, so I figured to try making it again, only this time using Guinness Stout instead.
That was the start of the troubles…
Here’s a fun and cute way to use up the leftover dough and filling after making a batch of Traditional Baked Mooncakes.
This is the recipe for the traditional, baked Chinese Mooncake that is typically eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival. The mooncake filling consists of a salted egg yolk, surrounded by sweet lotus seed paste, which is wrapped in a thin, tender skin and then pressed into a round or square mold to impart a design onto the skin. The cake is partially baked, brushed with an egg wash, and then finished in the oven.
Last year, I got into making snowskin mooncakes and pandan spiral mooncakes for the Mooncake Festival. (The pandan spiral mooncakes are seriously awesome; I already have orders for more.) However this year, I decided that I had to try my hands with the traditional baked mooncakes. After making three batches of these mooncakes recently, I can say that they’re pretty simple to make, and they come out as good as or even better than store-bought.