Thank you all for your comments and enquiries about cakes, cookies, macarons and classes! I apologize for my tardy replies and general silence on this blog. As you may already have guessed, I””ve just had a baby girl this March.

Baking pans and kitchen mixers have been replaced with diapers and bottle sterilizers these past 4 months. And have I mentioned the sleepless nights?

That having been said, we””re greatly blessed that Ashley is generally a very happy (and very active) baby. I””m hoping that sanity will be restored in our lives soon and that I””ll be able to bake more frequently.

All I””ve managed so far are 2 trays of brownies, which I wouldn””t even have baked if it weren””t for the fact that I felt embarrassed turning up at a friend”’’s place empty-handed.

I also wanted to make some sort of cake for my sister”’’s civil wedding reception, but only managed the bridal bouquet with lots of help from WL, who has a wonderful talent for arranging the most gorgeous bridal bouquets and who also very graciously helped satisfy my macaron cravings these past months.

And that”’’s all the update I””ve got time and energy for at the moment. I hope to find some time to whip up a batch of macarons soon, so stay tuned!

I”d be the first to admit that I”m not a huge fan of cupcakes. Given the choice between a cupcake and a slice of cake, I”d invariably go with the slice.

I think it has something to do with the frosting-to-cake ratio and the fact that the few times I”ve made cupcakes, the cake tended to shrink away from the waxy cups, leaving an unsightly gap between cake and cup.

So why did I bake these cupcakes? There were two reasons. One being that it’’s the Lunar New Year and the first year ever that my family didn”t make pineapple tarts (dad and mum are away on vacation in Beijing), I couldn”t help but feel that something was missing if I didn”t bake anything for the festive season. The second was a cupcake-related email and blog post by Ivan.

The recipe I chose comes from Cheryl’’s The Cupcake Bake Shop. I decided on this particular cupcake because of the Asian elements of green tea and adzuki beans (something in line with the festive season theme) and because of the very pretty photograph of the cupcake’’s cross-section in her blog post.

The sis was very skeptical about the flavour combination, especially when I told her about the red bean paste component, but she actually liked the cupcakes when she had them!

I personally liked the taste and texture of the cupcake. The cupcakes did shrink somewhat, especially the ones that I kept at room temperature and the frosting was slightly grainy, but I felt that the cupcakes turned out great overall. Thanks for generously sharing your very inspiring cupcake recipes, Cheryl!

Note: If you do intend to try the recipe out for yourself, be forewarned the adzuki bean paste is indeed very time-consuming to make as Cheryl already states in her recipe.

When KJ suggested a potluck get-together for us ex-RJC classmates at JY’’s place, I was excited for two reasons. The first being the prospect of having tea with old friends at JY’’s swanky apartment, the second being an excuse to bake something before I run completely out of energy.

I was certain that my contribution would be some sort of dessert. Macarons would be too much work and muffins, cupcakes or brownies would be too boring, so I settled on a chocolate cake recipe that I”d already tried out on several occasions.

The devil’’s food cake was easily baked in the evening before. I was pretty sure that making the chocolate ganache would be a breeze to and I left it to the morning before the tea party. That was until I weighed the chocolate on my trusty digital kitchen scales and realised just how much 24 oz of chocolate was.

Chopping chocolate to a degree fine enough for ganache has never been an activity that I look forward to and 24 oz of chocolate was daunting. After the 2nd block of chocolate, I threw in the towel and decided to just cut the chocolate into smaller blocks, melt the blocks in a bain-marie and add the hot cream.

The ganache turned out fine and I”ll probably be using this method for larger quantities of chocolate in the future. I was slightly concerned that the whipped ganache would be difficult to use given the really hot weather on that day, but everything went well.

Most importantly, my friends enjoyed the cake (at least I hope they weren”t just being polite ) and we had a great time catching up.

The recipe for this cake, courtesy of MarthaStewart.com, can be found here. Note: I only covered the cake with the whipped ganache and left out the last layer of ganache glaze. 2/3 of the ganache recipe is more than sufficient for the entire cake, including the ganache glaze.