Barquillos

Barquillos or commonly known for biscuit roll, crispy biscuit roll, crisp biscuit roll, cookie roll, love letter, rolled wafer or egg roll is a type of biscuit snack commonly found in many parts of Asia. It is crunchy and can be easily broken into pieces because it is super thin. 

Awesome to pair it with ice cream, pipe cream inside or just on its own. They are made by pouring thin batter onto a wafer iron (barquillera). Once the wafer is cooked to light brown it is immediately rolled while still hot. It becomes a crisp rolled cookie when it cools. 

Here, I will show you how it's made professionally.  

On the video, you can see the barquillera, the flat iron used to cooked the barquillos, now for us home cooks, we can't have all the gadgets we need to make specific stuff, otherwise our kitchen will be fully packed before we know it but I have found a solution for this. 

We don't need a fancy wafer iron machine nor buy the barquillera as long as we have a sandwich press or a griddle, a skillet and a round baking pan. I know, I've mentioned a lot hahaha if you still don't have anything I've mentioned and still you want to try making this, just look around your kitchen and see what you've got that can imitate how it's cooked.

On this occasion,

 I used a sandwich press 

and the back of my wooden spoon 

to roll the wafers.

 

It looks so easy to make on the video, but believe me, it will take a while to master the rolling part as there's a fine line between rolling it and starting to cool down to crisp. On the video, you see the barquillera, the advantage of that is, it doesn't have any sides so you can freely rolled the wafer with your rolling stick without lifting the wafer from the heat. As soon as the wafer were lifted from the heat even a centimeter away, it will start to crisp because it is so thin.

Don't get disappointed if you break your first barquillos or if you didn't get to rolled it quick and it ended up like a flat wafer as you can see above. Actually it's also good to make it flat like that as it is not messy to eat, but of course the rolled ones are fun to eat. As you can hear its crunchiness as you bite them. For me it brings back my childhood memories.

Great for snacks, 
for your kid's lunchbox, 
to bring to family and 
friends visit. 
It will also make an 
awesome gift 
made with love.

Just giving you all the idea about Barquillos. These are super thin rolled wafer, very delicate, crunchy and it breaks easy. If you are not careful biting them, you will have lots of crumbs on your clothes, hahaha just a friendly reminder especially to those who have OCD about cleanliness and crumbs on the floor. But please no offense meant I too have this madness of the crumbs all over the house. But with a kid and a kid at heart, spreading crumbs will be my last concern when I can see my daughter enjoying what I've made.

You can 

make it look neat 

if you fold 

both sides first 

before rolling 

them

There are many recipes 

found on the internet for 

Barquillos.

All Recipes 

Filipino Recipe

Recipe Corner

I would also like to share to you how it is made in the streets of Shanghai.

Now we've seen how it's made by human hands, below witness how a machine do the action.

DIRTY HARRY - Best ever cocktail

Here's a quick and easy recipe for the best cocktail you will ever taste. Refreshing and Dirty Harry has never been this good! For a girls night, chix flix, family and friends gathering or simply just for yourself especially when you have those pick-me-up moments...

An award winning cocktail recipe of SodaStream NZ. I was so lucky my cocktail recipe won the first prize which is the Limited Edition SodaStream Crystal machine covered with Swarovski Crystals! And what more amazing is there is only two of this mean machine in the whole NZ! 

Dirty Harry

SodaStream Cocktail Recipe

Ingredients

 Ice

a shot of gin or vodka

1x lemon

1 tsp honey

SodaStream Lemonade

Procedure

Fill a highball glass with ice

pour one shot of gin or vodka into the glass

add 1 to 2 pieces of lemon squeezed, include the pulp to make it look dirty

add 1 teaspoon of honey

fill with SodaStream Lemonade

stir and serve

garnish with a round lemon slice if desired.

Just found out that my name was once all over internet wayback when I won this cocktail recipe competition. Amazeball!

Double Chocolate Crinkle Cookies

As promised, these cookies are so easy to make, perfect for snacks, sweet treats for little ones, to finish off your meal or for personalized gift made with love.

You can find the recipe here click here

Notes: Just removed the red food coloring 
and make the unsweetened cocoa to 2/3 cup instead 
and add chocolate chips 1/2 cup to 1 cup

Here's how it will look like

Red Velvet Crinkles Recipe

 

incredibly fudgy and chewy...

 

  easy and delicious

Red Velvet Crinkle

cookies

huge hit for family and friends any time of the year

more or less makes 3 dozen

Ingredients

1 2/3 cups all purpose flour

1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 stick unsalted butter, room temperature

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

2 tbsp buttermilk

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tbsp red food coloring

Icing sugar 

Procedure

Preheat an oven to 375°F or 190C

Line your baking tray with baking paper

or if it's a non-stick baking tray just spray it with baking spray

Put the icing sugar into a bowl and set aside

Sift together all purpose flour, baking powder, baking soda, 

cocoa powder and salt, set aside

Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy

  Add the eggs one at a time

Then beat in the buttermilk, vanilla and red food coloring

Turn off your mixer and add the flour mixture

Beat on low speed just until blended

Cover your mixing bowl with plastic 

and refrigerate for an hour or until firm

With clean hands, form dough into balls and roll in icing sugar

I find it more easy if you can use an ice cream scooper scooping the dough 

or you can use your 1 tbsp measuring spoon so you can get an exact size 

and they will bake evenly at the same time

Line dough balls into your baking tray an inch or two apart from each other

Bake until cookies are puffed and cracked on top

- about 10 minutes- 

but this will depend on your oven

 so I recommend that you should keep an eye on the first batch

you can use a skewer to test if the cookies are already cooked

when the skewer comes out clean when you poke them

cookies will be soft 

so leave them on the baking tray for a while 

(but not for too long as the baking tray is still hot and the cookies will continue to cook

over cooking will affect the fudgyness, chewyness of the cookies)

before transfering them to the cooling rack

Note: If you don't have buttermilk 

you can make it easily by adding 1 tablespoon of white vinegar or lemon juice

into 1 cup of milk and let it sit a for 5 minutes. Allowing the milk to curdle.

Here's my daughter helping me make this delicious cookies. A good thing to do to bond with your kids. But be sure you have something to give to them while making these as the dough itself is so irresistable otherwise you won't have anything to bake at all hahaha

 

Good Monday morning everyone! 

 

Minced Beef Wellington

Sunday Special

Either it's family day or dinner with friends, make this day special by cooking something you haven't tried before. 

 Minced Beef Wellington

Surely a crowd pleaser but very easy to make and don't get intimidated on how it looks as I can assure you that it's simple but delish! This is a Jaime Oliver dish but I changed the process a little bit. You can use any meat that you like, either pork mince or lamb mince. Be adventurous and probably use fish instead.

  

Ingredients

1 onion

1 carrot

1 red bell pepper

1 potato

----- finely chopped -----

1-2 cloves of garlic, minced

1-2 tablespoon of oil (olive oil or whatever oil you prefer)

1 egg lightly beaten

1 tablespoon of tomato paste

 a pinch of cumin and chili powder

500 grams of minced beef

salt and pepper to taste

Pastry 

(I made my own pastry but you can use a puff pastry if you don't have time to make it.)

For the pastry

2 1/2 cups flour

1 tablespoon sugar 

1 tsp salt

2 sticks of unsalted butter(hard cold)

1/2 cup of very cold water

Procedure

Since I decided to make my own pastry, this is the one you have to make first. (But if you will use puff pastry it's ok and then just proceed to preheating your oven into 180C.)

You have to make your pastry first so it can rest while you prepare the rest of the dish.

Put you flour into a mixing bowl and mix the sugar and salt together. 

Cut your very cold and hard butter into cubes(you really need it to be cold and not mushy or in room temperature) and put it in the flour and start rubbing them together with your finger tips. Another technique is you can use pastry cutter but I find it more quicker to do it with my fingers, just make sure you wash your hands first.

 You have to use your fingertips to rub the butter with the flour and not your palm as the warmth of your palm will melt the butter and we don't want that.

When the butter and flour is completely mixed and you don't see any lumps, this will resemble into crumbs like, it is time to add the cold water and try bring them together by kneading inside the bowl and form in into a big dough ball. Wrap it with plastic wrap and rest it in the fridge.

I know you might be thinking I said it will be easy, but it's really easy, its just that the explanations are quite long, but as soon as you know how to do it, you know the techniques, this is the intructions that will form into your mind. A super short one.

Mix dry ingredients

Cube butter

Add butter to the dry ingredients

Rub with fingertips

Add water and mix to form a dough

Knead inside your bowl and wrap in cling film and chill.

Now, while the pastry is resting, it's time to prepare the minced beef.

By the way, if you are really in the mood to make your own pasty, you can make it ahead of time and just stored it in the fridge.

Put a little oil on your pan

Brown your mince beef and add garlic, onion and red bell pepper

cumin and chili powder

Saute them for 1 - 2 minutes until the onion and 

red bell pepper soften and infused the flavor to your mince. 

Add carrots, potato and simmer them for a couple of minutes

until carrots and potato are tender enough, but you don't want to over cook it 

as it will still cook when you bake it.

And then add the tomato paste, salt and pepper to taste. Simmer for another minute. 

Transfer it into a shallow bowl to cool it down while you're preparing the pasty.

Now it's time to preheat your oven to 180C

 Take the rested pastry out of the fridge and start rolling it thin. 

You want to make it into big rectangle so you have plenty of space 

to tuck in your minced beef

I recommend to put the mince in the middle of the pastry 

so that you don't need to roll the whole thing (like how you make spring rolls) and get disappointed that your pastry breaks. So put the mince in the middle of the pastry

like a big sausage. Make sure you didn't include if there's any sauce 

because it will make you pastry soggy.

Brush one side of the pastry with lightly beaten egg and 

fold it on top of each other. 

I also recommend that once you've rolled your pastry transfer it onto your baking tray

and fill it there so you don't need to move the whole thing and might break it.

If you have pastry off cuts, try and decorate the top to make it more pretty 

then brush it with lightly beaten egg to give it the golden brown color.

Bake until you think the pastry is cook.