Hong Kong style French toast is one of those indulgent eats that I almost always ordered as a little girl. My family would often go out for Sunday brunch, Chinese style, at a HK cafe, where, instead of the usual egg dishes like omelettes, there would be macaroni in soup sets, fried noodles, and Hong Kong style French toast.
HK French toast is basically one of the best things ever. Usually it’s two slices of fluffy white bread, sandwiched around some sort of spread – you can find it with coconut jam, peanut butter, or condensed milk. My fave as a kid was coconut jam, but they don’t really do that very often.
The sandwich then gets dipped in lightly beaten eggs and is deep fried to golden, crispy deliciousness. They serve it with a pat of cold butter and a mini pitcher of syrup. Not the healthiest, but seriously good. Hope you guys give this a go!
PS – This is a post for Ashley of Edible Perspective. She’s welcoming a baby girl this winter and some bloggie friends have planned a surprise breakfast themed online baby shower. Congrats Ashley! I just know your babe will be well loved and eating well :) Check out the other baby shower breakfast themed posts here on A Couple Cooks & The Full Helping!
Hong Kong Style Deep Fried Nutella French Toastserves 2
2-4 slices thick cut bread (I used challah)
nutella, to taste
2 eggs, lightly beaten
oil, to shallow fry
syrup, if desired
Spread a generous amount of nutella on a slice of bread and sandwich it with another slice. If you want to make smaller french toasts, trim to size.
Lightly whisk the eggs in a shallow bowl.
Heat up oil over medium high heat in a deep sided pan. You want enough oil so that it comes about halfway up the side of your bread, about an inch and a half of oil. When the oil is hot and shimmery, carefully dip your nutella sandwiches in the lightly beaten egg, giving it a couple of seconds to soak up the egg, flipping once.
Carefully add the french toast to the hot oil and cook until golden and crispy, flipping once. Remove, drain on paper towels or a wire rack and enjoy immediately, with syrup, if desired.
A lil round up of the pulse recipes I created this year because it's the Year of Pulses!
We are in the thick of fall, which means lots of rain and cozy nights in. Basically all I want to do is netflix and eat. That’s a thing, right? On the top of my list are foods that are dip-able and eaten with your hands, like miso hummus with crispy onion furikake, black dal and naan, and mini red bean dorayaki!
2016 is the Year of Pulses, as declared by the UN, and this is my little round up post of the three pulse dishes I put up to celebrate. I started off with chickpeas because hummus. To be honest, earlier this year was the first time I ever made hummus from scratch, but as soon as I tasted it, warm and smooth and creamy, I knew that store bought hummus was forever ruined for me. Lucky for us hummus whips up in a flash (after a little overnight soak) so you can get your miso hummus groove on.
If you’re not yet done with dipping into pulse deliciousness, I hope you give this black dal a try. It’s made with black lentils and is hearty, filling, luxurious, and packed full of protein. It takes me right back to the first time I ever tried dal, in London. Indian food is a big thing over there and when we went we tried out a restaurant called Dishoom and fell in love with their dal. Dishoom’s dal recipe is a secret, but I like to think that mine comes pretty close.
And of course, how can you snack without something sweet? I used adzuki beans in a classic Japanese dessert, dorayaki: essentially tiny honey pancakes sandwiched around a sweet adzuki bean paste. I was super fond of adzuki bean paste growing up and these little guys brought me right back to my childhood.
Happy Year of Pulses friends! I love how the UN chose a delicious, sustainable, nutrient rich, affordable food to profile. I happen to be a huge fan of pulses – especially their texture – and it’s nice that they’re getting a bit of the limelight. Oh, and in case you don’t know what pulses are (because I didn’t, before the beginning of this year), they’re dried peas, beans, lentils, and chickpeas!
The other day Mike and I passed out at 8 pm for a little while, then woke up in the middle of the night and decided to go on a walk around our neighborhood. The fog was out and it was spooky and winter-y and all kinds of delightful, until my ears got too cold and we had to go home. We snuggled into bed and I promptly fell asleep until I heard:
Wake up! Wake up! It’s an emergency!
I woke up immediately, sat up in bed and said, “I’m up! I’m up!”
Turns out the emergency was an emergency rainbow outside our window. I totally appreciated seeing the rainbow – it was a magnificent one, but at the same time, I was kind of like, was it really an emergency? The rainbow disappeared soon after we took some photos of it, so I kinda sorta guess it was? Well, it wasn’t so much an emergency as a time sensitivity thing, but if I can start all my days looking at rainbows, I’m not going to complain, especially since we then had our morning coffee ritual and then spent the day baking and cooking. It was a good one, kinda like this challah stuffing.
I love the squishy comfort of stuffing, especially when it’s studded with mushrooms and all the good herbs :) Hope this guy makes an appearance at your Thanksgiving table this year!
1/2 loaf challah, cut or torn into 1 inch pieces, toasted
2 tablespoons butter
1 cup diced onion
1 cup diced celery
1 cup diced carrot
1 cup diced cremini mushrooms
5 sprigs thyme, leaves only
3 sprigs rosemary, leaves only
1 1/2 cups stock of choice
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
Preheat the oven 350°F.
In a large sauce pan, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the onion, celery, carrot, and mushrooms and cook until golden and soft, stirring often, about 10 minutes.
Place the toasted bread cubes in a large bowl. Add the vegetables, herbs, stock, egg, and salt and pepper. Place in a oven-proof baking dish and cover with foil. Bake for 30-40 minutes, remove foil and bake for an additional 10 minutes to crisp up the top. Enjoy!
This Tipsy Cake is based off of a very famous tipsy cake served at one of my favorite London eateries: Dinner by Heston Blumenthal. Mike and I first had lunch at Dinner five(!?!) years ago. We were both slightly obsessed with him, having had some of our first dates in watching his BBC series, In Search of Perfection.
Heston is a crazy chef. His dishes are involved, fun, and ultimately, delicious. Way back in the day, before I started blogging and was just a baby home cook, I decided that I wanted to make peking duck. Soon after, Mike and I watched the In Search of Perfection episode on just that. I was inspired! Heston does some crazy shit where he takes the skin off the duck, sews it onto a wire rack and ladles hot oil over it. I did a botched job and somehow managed to melt a ladle, because duh, plastic ladles and hot oil don’t mix. After that I couldn’t look at a duck for months…
Anyway, the Tipsy Cake (yes, it needs to be capitalized) at Dinner is amazing. It’s an ethereal fluffy cloud of brioche, dipped in sugar, then proofed so it has a cracked caramelized crust. It’s partially baked, then moved to a deck oven and soaked in vanilla brandy cream, which caramelizes as the brioche continues to bake. When it arrives in the most adorable mini cocotte, it’s served with spit roasted pineapple. It’s kind of unassuming looking, but one bite of the hot, fluffy brioche with the crackly crust and creamy caramelized cream and you’ll be wanting another, stat.
This is actually my second try at making Heston’s Tipsy Cake. The first time I did it for a dinner party, untested. Usually I don’t do that sort of thing – I like cooking things that are tried and true because inevitably something goes wrong. And yup, Heston’s recipe, which involves an extremely buttery brioche dough that is frozen overnight then proofed for four hours did not work, surprise, surprise! At that point it was too late and I rolled with it and our guests were very polite about it, but inside I was cringing the whole night.
Anyway, I couldn’t let the Tipsy Cake best me. I felt like the magic lay in the cooking cream and not so much the brioche so when I had some leftover challah dough, I decided to go ahead and make a challah version for our Thanksgiving dessert. You can definitely use your favorite brioche recipe, if you have one.
If this seems like a decadent dessert, it is. I didn’t do the classic spit roasted pineapple to with – I don’t have a rotisserie spit hanging out in my kitchen, but I do recommend serving some sort of fruit with. And, if you’re going to be even more decadent, serve it with some ice cream, because hot fluffy rum soaked bread and ice cream are what dreams are made of.
Hope all my American friends are all Thanksgiving ready! love and tipsy cake, xoxo steph
PS – I recently went back and read some of my old post and they make me so nostalgic. I was getting a little disenchanted with this whole blogging thing – I’ve noticed a drop in comments, so I kinda feel like no one is reading anymore. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter to me if anyone’s reading because I get to look back and laugh at little things that I never would have remembered if I didn’t blog about them. So thank you me (and Mike!), for somewhat forcing me to keep doing what I do, even when I don’t want to.
You can definitely make this smaller, as per how Heston does it at Dinner. Divide the dough into 12 gram portions, then shape and place 5 into each mini cast iron cocotte. When you bake, you’ll need to adjust the time accordingly: bake for 15 minutes, the pour on the cream, about 20-25 grams the first time, then 15 grams each time subsequently.
After the dough has been proofed overnight, take it out of the fridge and tip out onto a lightly floured surface. Divide the dough into 20 equal pieces. You can eyeball this, which is what I did, or if you want to be precise, weight the dough and dived into 20, cutting and weighting each ball of dough as needed.
Once the dough is divided, tuck each portion of dough into a tight ball. Choose a baking vessel that is large enough to hold all of the balls of dough. They will rise a bit, but if they’re snug in the baking dish, that’s fine. I used a 12 inch round baking dish.
One by one, dip the balls of dough into the butter, then roll in the sugar before placing in your baking dish. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise for 1 hour. The surface of the dough will show cracking from where the dough proofs through the butter and sugar. This is ideal!
Preheat the oven to 375°F. Remove the plastic wrap from the dish and bake for 30 minutes. While the bread is baking, blend together the whipping cream, sugars, alcohols, and vanilla.
When the bread balls have baked for 30 minutes, remove from the oven and, using a knife or offset spatula, make incisions in between where the balls of dough meat. Pour in half of the cream and bake for another 5 minutes. Repeat with the remaining cream. Remove from the oven, let rest for 5-10 minute and enjoy hot!
Went on an urban hike (read: long walk) and packed a healthier version of fried chicken made with an actifry!
The very first time Mike and I went to Tokyo, I insisted that we go on a bento picnic. Bento (kind of like a full meal pre-portioned out and packed up very nicely) is kind of a big deal here in Japan. People lovingly make it for their school kids and spouses. There are even some hardcore moms who do very cute and intricate kyaraben. But, fear not, if you don’t have a special someone making you bento, you can do what loads of business people do: pick up a bento at the many combini (convenience stores). Or if you’re looking for something just a bit more fancy, at lunch time, almost every restaurant will put out a table in front of their establishment and sell bento-to-go.
Our very first bento picnic was a casual affair. I wanted to do homemade but, on that very first visit, we stayed in a tiny hotel room and making bento wasn’t an option. So we went to Lawson to pick up some onigiri and karaage-kun (fried chicken). We decided to go to Yoyogi Park to check out the gingko leaves. Everyone around us had picnic tarps, but we didn’t think that far ahead…luckily we spotted an empty picnic table. I love eating outdoors. There’s something about working up an appetite, then enjoying food in the clean, crisp air.
Speaking of working up an appetite, Mike and I have been doing some hardcore urban hiking lately, in an effort to stay active and healthy while eating all the delicious food in Tokyo. What’s urban hiking, you ask? Well, um, it’s just what Mike and I jokingly say when we’re going to go for a long walk. And we’ve been going on some very long walks, as documented by my activity tracker and phone pedometer. We’ve been averaging about 18k steps a day and one day we even hit 40k! And it’s all in the name of food, glorious food.
See, I’m not really one to diet or restrict myself when eating, especially when we’re in what I consider one of the most delicious cities in the world. Still, it’s a new year and I want to be extra active and healthy. So far we’re sticking to that in the most causal form of exercise. It helps that we really love walking, especially when there are things to look at or if we’re on our way to an out-of-the-way restaurant.
I’m really not willing to give up food, especially food like fried chicken, so, through a combo of walking and making fried chicken using an T-Fal Actifry from Best Buy Canada, I think we’re doing pretty good. The other day, I whipped up some healthier chicken karaage, picked up some stuff from the store across the street and Mike and I went on a walk ending in a picnic. It was a pretty perfect day.
Hope you guys are staying on top of your 2017 goals, if you have any. If you’re looking for some fitness gear, make sure you check out bestbuy.ca!
PS – How perfect is that egg that I got from the convenience store?! The onigiri was on point too :)
Giveaway: Best Buy Canada is giving away an Actifry!
To Enter: Leave a comment below with your favorite snack/meal to eat while on a picnic. I want to hear ALL the details! I’ll randomly choose a winner and notify them through email. Open to Canadian residents only. Contest ends January 25th at 12pm PST. Please be patient as it may take me a while to approve comments. Good luck!
Congrats Dave! Actifry parties here you come! Keep your eyes peel for an email from me :)
Notes on the chicken: I used my recipe for chicken karaage and popped it into the top shelf of the Actifry for 18 minutes. They turned out crispy and juicy
I love leftovers because you can eat in basically the amount of time it takes to heat them up. To me, that’s magic! But, as much as I love eating leftovers as is, I am absolutely fanatical about making leftovers into new dishes, like these Thanksgiving croquettes.
What’s not to love about deep fried potato-y things? Croquettes are French, from the verb croquer, which is to crunch. Interesting right?! I don’t know random food knowledge by the way, I just like googling things. Anyway, croquettes might have started out French but I’m pretty sure that every culture has a version of croquettes because deep fried foods are popular the world over. Japan is no exception. Croquettes are called korokke here and they are ubiquitous as fried chicken in supermarkets/convenience stores. There are even dedicated korokke stores.
I absolutely love Japanese korokke, with their creamy mashed potato insides and crispy crunchy panko-ed outsides. I took a page from the korokke book and made Thanksgiving croquettes: leftover mashed potatoes, turkey, and stuffing. A quick toss into flour, egg, and panko and a hot oil bath later and these guys were definitely bestovers. Everything I love about turkey dinner turned into a convenient hand held tater tot shaped deep-fried bite. I loved them with a bit of cranberry sauce, but they were also excellent with tonkatsu sauce. Seriously good!
Leftover Thanksgiving Croquettes Recipemakes about 24 mini croquettes
1 cup leftover stuffing
1 cup leftover mashed potatoes
1 cup diced leftover turkey
1 egg
salt and freshly ground pepper
1/2 cup flour
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 cup panko
oil to deep fry (I like grapeseed)
cranberry sauce or Japanese tonkatsu sauce, to serve if desired
In a bowl, add the stuffing, mashed potatoes, turkey and egg. Season with salt and freshly ground pepper and mix well. I like to use a cookie scoop to portion out the mixture. Scoop out about 1.5 tablespoons and shape, compacting into a tater-tot shape, until all of the mix is portioned out.
Set up a breading station with three shallow dishes. One with flour, one with a lightly beaten egg, and one with panko.
Working gently, with one egg at a time, dip the croquettes into flour, shaking off excess, then coat in egg wash. Roll in panko to coat.
In a deep sided, heavy bottomed pot, heat up 1-2 inches of oil over medium heat until it reaches 375°F.
Gently place the croquettes in the hot oil, being careful not to overcrowd, turning occasionally and maintaining oil temperature of 350°F, until the breading is golden brown and crisp, 5–6 minutes. Use a slotted spoon to transfer to paper towels to drain. Let cool slightly and enjoy hot with cranberry or tonkatsu sauce!
I love angel food cake. I never make it because it involves whipping up egg whites and all that jazz. And well, to be honest, I don’t make cake that much, so I never really get the chance to eat it. But, back in high school I used to be obsessed with store bought angel food cake. I know, I know, they kind of taste like overly sweet styrofoam, but hey, to my unsophisticated teenage palette, they were squishy wondrous slices of deliciousness.
Every so often, my mom would buy one. You know the ones, in the black plastic bottom and handy-dandy plastic lid? I’d cut out a slice, wrap it up in plastic wrap and take it to school in my backpack. When I found out that Mike liked angel food cake too (yes, we were kind of sort of high school, not sweethearts, but something) I left him a generous slice with a lil note in his locker. It happened more than once and in my memory, it was one of those cute high school things you do for someone you’re sweet on.
But, apparently Mike doesn’t remember this at all, because while we were on a crowded escalator, in the middle of Tokyo rush hour, we had a very quiet conversation about it.
Me (almost whispering): Remember how I used to leave you slices of angel food cake in your locker? Mike (normal voice): No. Me (slightly too loud for Tokyo, even during rush hour): WHAT? Mike: Shh… Me: You don’t remember? It was so cute! Mike: Well how many slices was it? Me: At least two, twice in a row? Jeez, how many slices would it have took to get you to remember? Mike: At least a whole cake? Me: It was so cute! Do you really not remember? Mike: um, yeaaaaah, it was super cute…
I’m pretty sure Mike still doesn’t remember. If I got cake in my locker in high school…well, let’s just say it would have been a high point. Anyway, Mike’s faulty memory aside, we both like angel food cake still. Recently I made an angel food cake loaf because cake toast!
Cake toast is, simply, toasted cake! It’s delicious because the edges get hot and crispy and the insides stay, well, cake-y. My angel food cake didn’t rise over and make that classic bread shape and instead of getting down about it, I just cut it so that it looked like bread. To be honest, I’m pretty sure angel food cake can’t dome the way bread does – usually it just kind of levels off, so I guess I was setting myself up for failure. But, it ended up being a good thing because these little slices are so cute.
I toasted the slices in a dry pan and the sugar in the cake caramelized and turned a lovely golden color. I topped off some slices with whipped white chocolate and sprinkles but I really just enjoyed the plain toast best of all. And of course, you can’t really have sprinkl-y toast on your own, so a few good friends and I got together, virtually, and threw a cake toast party! I wish we were all eating cake toast together, listening to Christmas music and decorating gingerbread, but virtual cake parties are the next best thing :)
Be sure to check out the other cake toast offerings:
PS – If you want to follow along on our Tokyo adventure, you can check out daily iPhone photo dump on our Flickr stream. I’m not the best at updating, but I do get around to it, eventually. Also, I just got into Flickr and I absolutely LOVE it – you can upload multiple photos at once, which is perfect for me. I would do the whole insta thing but I take way too many photos and I find that people on insta are kinda sort of weird when you post too much. So, Flickr for the win! Only check if you wanna see lots of random photos, not just of food.
PPS – Shoutout to Lyndsay for the perfect palette of sprinkles!
In a grease-free stand mixer bowl, add the egg whites and whip on low until foamy, about 1-2 minutes. While the eggs are whipping, whisk the sugar, cream of tartar, and salt together in a small bowl.
Raise the speed to medium and add the sugar mix slowly in a small stream, whipping until the eggs reach medium peaks, 8-10 minutes. Do not over whip, the whites should be smooth and soft, not dry and clumpy.
Beat in the vanilla and almond until just combined.
Add a 1/3 of the flour and fold to combine. You can be slightly vigorous with this step as you’re tempering the egg whites. Add the remaining flour in 2 additions, gently folding in, leaving no streaks.
Pour into an un-greased loaf pan and smooth out the top with an offset spatula.
Bake 30-35 minutes. The top should be brown and cracked, and spring back when you gently press down. Cool in the pan, inverted on two cans set on the edge of the pan. Remove and slice, toasting for an extra bit of crunch! I topped mine with some whipped white chocolate and sprinkles for a bit of extra oomph, but toasted angel food cake on its own is divine as well!
