MERRY CHRISTMAS WORLD!

Merry xmas!!!! yesterday was really busy, so I'll be posting up the stuff I made today. A real quick post today basically, it's christmas after all! I made bread pudding and eggnog yesterday.

The bread pudding was ok, but it wasn't completely cooked yet, maybe that's why it was  mushy. Here's the recipe:

Ingredients

10 slices white bread, cut into cubes
1/4 cup margarine, melted
1-2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
6 eggs
3/4 cup white sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 cups hot milk
1 pinch ground nutmeg

 

 

First, preheat the oven to 375F. Then, cut your bread up into cubes. Then mix the cinammon and butter together (1 or 2 tsp of cinnamon to your taste) and pour it over your bread cubes in a bowl. Toss the cubes before transferring it to a 2 quart baking dish. The dish might seem a bit small, but trust me, it's just the right size.

See? Exactly right.

In the same bowl, beat the eggs and sugar until dissolved. Stir in the vanilla and salt and whisk the hot milk in GRADUALLY. You don't want the egg to curdle!

No curdles :O!

Now pour the mix all over your bread cubes...

And sprinkle the nutmeg over top before leave it to soak for 5 minutes.

Before 5 minutes

After 5 minutes. Look different?

Pop it in the oven for 35-45 minutes, or when you insert a knife in the middle, it comes out clean. While this was baking I prepared the turkey

TURKEY!

It was basic; chop up some onions, celery and carrots with some baby potatoes to fill the bottom of the roasting pan and rub the turkey with a lil' salt and pepper and butter. Ta-da! By then, the bread pudding was cooked, at least I thought it was. You see, I didn't check it :( Oops!

Not bad at all

I popped the turkey in for about 3 1/4 hours then made my eggnog. 

Ingredients
6 eggs
3 cups milk
8 tablespoons sugar
3 teaspoon vanilla essence
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg, ground

Pretty thick, considering we didn't use cream, but make sure you mix and refridgerate it well. THIS CONTAINS RAW EGGS. Anyways, in a large bowl, beat the eggs using an electric beater 

 

 

By turn, add milk & sugar.

Sugah

Milk

Continue beating until mixture thickens slightly. Add in the vanilla essence & ground nutmeg.

Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until chilled (at least 3 hours).

Eggnog :)

Looks good? It's pretty good, but I suggest you cut the vanilla down by half or by 1 tsp at least, it's strong. Later on in the day, we finally got to eat that cheesecake! I took a picture of it finally.

See them blotches? :S

I didn't put any coolwhip on top--too lazy--but the icing was from that snowman decorating cupcake thing from a day or two ago. It was scrumptious, by the way, but we only ate half of it. 

I wish everyone a merry Christmas and a fantastically Happy Holiday! Don't forget it's boxing Day tomorrow :)

Day 2!

Baking day 2. Means 3 days until Christmas! Today was the day where I was sort of out of whack. Still, I managed to bake the stuff I wanted to. Lemon bars and cheesecake anyone?

Actually, lets start with this morning. I was planning to wake up early so I could make my lemon bars in the morning. But guess what? I didn't get up until it was almost eleven. Luckily there was leftover soup (and donuts! :D ) in the fridge for lunch , and then I managed to get the lemon bars in the oven before 12:00. That probably explains why they turned out a bit odd. Are lemon bars supposed to taste over the top OH my GOODNESS lemony? It looked OK. Or at least a bit nicer than disgusting. As my sister loves to say: they looked very interesting.

Yeah, the camera's pretty fuzzy, but you get the idea. I put them on this stand thing made up of plastic cups and plates. Not very Christmasy but sufficient enough.

Some more pictures

Haha, the plate's so messy

Best pic of the three. What do you think?

The cheesecake. Where do I start with the cheesecake. How about the frozen cheese? Have you ever frozen cream cheese before? Well, it turns out they lose an awful lot of their moisture and ends up more like ricotta instead of  a creamy spread-like mix that doesn't crumble into bits when you try to work with it. Well, I used it anyway. To tell you, it worked fine. The cheesecake turned out fine too, I guess. I put it in a 10 inch springform pan, that was way too big so the cake resembles a thick pancake, but it wasn't overcooked; so maybe that was the intention of the recipe poster. It looks marbled because I'm making this double layer pumpkin cheesecake. Too bad it's not supposed to be marbled, because it looks like there were random blotches of white from the layer underneath that resurfaced. I knew I didn't pour it in carefully enough. On the upside, that cake is DELICIOUS. It's like pudding or a custard and it tastes absolutely wonderful. I got it out of it's pan and tasted the bits that got stuck onto the pan, and I think it'll be good once I pipe some coolwhip on top of it. I didn't get any pictures (oh no!) Because I just put it in the fridge and I really don't want to take it out after playing around with the spaces in the fridge just so it could fit.

I actually got my baking goal finished early, so I started learning an awesome new song on the piano... The Pirates of the Caribbean theme song! YEAH! I heard it on youtube and it just sounds amazing. Hopefully  I can learn at least 3/4 of it before the winter break, because after winter break are the finals for all my subjects. But here's the video I listened to:

That is just awesome. Awesomeness wrapped in an aura of pure awesome. Just saying :)

Bye for now!