Gula Melaka Ice Cream

I've made many kinds of ice creams. But I've always wanted to do something of a local flavour. Durian comes to mind easily but I wanted to do something different (and a little less intense). 

After pondering over it, gula melaka comes to mind. It would just replace normal sugar in a basic recipe and yet give that distinctive Malaysian flavour. So I finally gave it a try.

The result was a luscious creamy ice cream. I guess part of the reason is that boiling the milk reduces the water content further so there were no crystals formed during freezing. I added a small amount of water during boiling though, because I think too much water was going off.

The only downside is that it is very sweet. And it seems to melt very quickly. So I'll just have to eat it in small quantities, and quickly!

So here's the simple recipe. Happy trying!

Teddy Bear Cookies

I've been wanting to make these for ages. I saw them on on Pinterest and other sites and I thought my kid would love to have them (and make them with me).

The ones I saw, however, used icing for the eyes and mouth. I wasn't in the mood of making royal icing. So I thought I'd just use the dough for decoration. That way, I wouldn't have to make any icing and there's no time wasted in waiting for the icing to set. What a splendid idea! (So I thought to myself)

You can invert the colours so that you have some teddies with white face and chocolate ears and some with chocolate face and white ears, as show in the picture below.

This is how they look like before baking:

And out from the oven:

As for the recipe, I adapted it from Sweet Explorations. Here's my version of how to make them Teddy cookies.

 

Here's my Emma enjoying the finished product. I'm sorry my face is in it too. There just wasn't a better picture of her and the cookie. Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this post (the blessed few of you who read my blog).   :)