Little Joy Factory

Steamed milk pudding is a popular Chinese dessert , which is famous for its silky smooth texture and nutritional effect for complexion. Serve warm or cold, it's a sweet treat to impress your family and friends!  I used to drive all the way to a famous dessert house at Temple Street,  just to have a bowl of this "beauty" dessert.  Until one day, I decided to make my own milk pudding at home, which is much more economical. The recipe is very simple (see my earlier post ). It only consists of 3 ingredients: milk, egg and sugar. However, getting it done to perfection is not as easy as it seems. I know everyone is busy, and we all like to follow recipes and succeed at our first attempts.  So, let me share with you some tips on how to make a perfect milk pudding at your first attempt.  It's Thanksgiving week now, there are so much to be thankful for.  As a food blogger, this is my way of saying thank y...

During weekend,  I have been busy cooking, baking and pinning. It's so pinteresting! My initial plan was to pin the most popular posts from blogs onto my  Popular Foodie Posts board. After I started pinning, I realized it's not as easy as I thought. Firstly, not all the bloggers publish the popular list. Secondly, there are overwhelming posts out there. I browsed from one blog to another blog, reading, admiring and pinning. Sometimes, I stayed in one blog too long, and slowly drifted away by pining the popular post of my choice rather than readers' choices :).   It's tiring but rewarding. I've got to know many talented bloggers and their amazing posts. If you own a blog and have a Pinterest account , please drop me a note ( mylittlejoyfactory@gmail.com ) . I would be more than happy to invite you as one of the contributors to Popular Foodie Posts . Feta, Roasted Tomato and Chicken Sausage Pasta was inspired b...

The weekend is finally here,  and it looks like it will be a beautiful one as I am "going" to a potluck party at I Heart Cooking Clubs !  This passionfruit syrup Bundt cake is the one I will "bring" to the party.   I started to appreciate passionfruit recently after I learned how to select ripe passionfruit. A friend told me that ripe passionfruit is the one with wrinkled, dimpled and dented skin, not smooth skin. What?! This is the first time I heard people perfer wrinkles :). Seems passionfruit is an ugly duckling. It tastes intensely aromatic, richly fragrant. No wonder it has an alluring Chinese name “百香果”, which means "fruit with hundreds of fragrances". Furthermore, passionfruit is rich source of antioxidants, vitamin C and fiber. I eat it every other day now. Can't wait for them to ripen. For those who still don't know how to appreciate passionfruit, here is the secret : Choose passionfruit that looks plump despite any wrinkles. If...

Inspired by tasty soups from Souper Sundays , a weekly blogging event hosted by Deb in Hawaii ,  I bought a piece of butternut last week and intended to prepare a bowl of creamy pumpkin soup for my family.  One week has passed, the butternut still quietly lying in my fridge. Maybe we are really not a  "soup" family?  Nobody seems bothered to check with me about the soup.     Before the butternut started to rot, I decided to make my favorite Chinese pumpkin cake instead. I tasted pan-fried pumpkin cake for the first time during a trip to Shanghai few years ago. These small cakes were served as a dessert in a Chinese restaurant. They were orange in color, soft, chewy on the inside, and crispy on the outside. So delicious!    I searched for the recipe immediately after the trip,  and found a good simple one. Made a few times at home, they are as ni...

November is known as one of the Monsoon months here in Singapore. It rains almost everyday, sometimes with thunderstorms. I hope it won't rain today as we have Family Day at Sentosa later in the afternoon,  an event organized by my company to promote family bonding. This is the 2nd time we participated Family Day after I joined this company. The last time was in 2009, when we just returned from U.S after one year assignment in Utah.  Kids have grown up from preschoolers then to preteens now.  The years are flying by!  Whenever I look back, I do share the feeling that the days are long, but the years are short.  So, let's get the most of life and enjoy every moment with our family. Right now, I enjoy myself very much in cooking and baking for my family, especially with friends from  I Heart Cooking Clubs . This week, we are baking tarts and pies, which are a fantastic way to celebrate any occasi...

Singapore is situated near Equator ,  no distinctive seasons. So, what's in season now?     When I Heart Cooking Clubs put In Season as the cooking theme for this week, I am rejoiced at the abundant choices I have.  With only raining season and dry season , everything seems fit for this theme.  However,  I chose to settle with Beetroot, which is a vegetable available all year round, but is totally unfamiliar to me. Hope I can learn a new dish and bring to my family.

I am not used to spicy food even though I have been living in Singapore for a decade. Whenever I order food at hawker center,  I always tell the server to put less chili for me. That's the reason I seldom cook red curry dish at home. Its color gives me an impression that red curry should be very hot!  Well, since everyone in my family love the taste of curry, we choose Japanese curry roux (mild) instead. We often cook it with vegetables without any meat,  and everyone just can't get enough of it, especially eat with a plate of steamed rice.        Last Saturday,  I chanced upon a Thai Red Curry Fish recipe from  Women's Weekly magazine.

Egg fried bread is served in my family whenever we have leftover bread. Simple yet comforting,  it's a good way to start the day. This morning, I decided to spoil my family by doing a little bit more to the usual egg fried bread, with an indulgent recipe from Donna Hay . First,  spread the bread with delicious olive tapenade and top with a slice of Cheddar cheese. Sandwich with another bread. Dip the whole sandwich into the egg and milk mixture, then press into Parmesan. To make a perfect fried bread, you've got to use butter instead of oil. Place the sandwiches on a thin pan over medium heat. Keep turning while frying, until they turn out golden with a crusty outside, and cheese is melting inside. Yummilicous! I should thank Donna Hay for this recipe, which elevates our favourite egg fried bread to a whole new level. My family enjoyed olive tapenade for the first time, and it really enhanced the taste of sandwiches. I would explore healthy olive tapenade, a...

Sandwiches are one of the simplest stables we have at home during morning rush hours. Grab two slices of bread, sandwich with one fried egg, one lettuce leave, and a slice of cheddar cheese. Heat up in microwave for 15 seconds, pack and go! When I Heart Cooking Clubs announced Sandwich Sensations  as the theme of the week, it offered a good opportunity for me to prepare a "deluxe" sandwiches for my family. The first step is to choose the bread. Since we always use store-bought bread for convenience, it's time to put in some effort and bake my own soft and rich bread.

Peach Brioche Bun is one of the creations I made when exploring the classic Brioche. As you might know, Brioche is an enriched French bread that comes up often in bread pudding and french toast. It has high egg and butter content, which gives it very soft, golden crumb and rich, tender texture. The method used to make Brioche is quite new to me. It starts with a yeast mixture by adding yeast into half cup of water and half cup of flour. Wait until this loose paste has risen, then add all the rest of the ingredients and knead into a dough. This is equivalent to three times proofing, whereas other bread I made normally requires only two times. Since it took time for the dough to proof,  I had plenty of time to think how to "design" a  lovely Brioche bun.