bake a cake

So, more than a month ago, after my sissy and I bought our mom an oven, I gathered the ingredients to make Sylvia Tan's flourless chocolate cake. It's a fail-proof recipe -- if you heed her warning towards the end -- I've used many times before which is 10 years old and I finally found time to bake it today.


It calls for nine eggs, separated into yolks and whites.


A bag of Hershey's semi-sweet chocolate chips and one-and-half blocks of butter (not pictured because they look even worse than the chocolate chips, which also look quite bad).


Whip the egg whites first into stiff peaks (again, bad photo, so that step is not shown) and set aside. Then, in a separate bowl, beat the egg yolks.


Add one and half cups of caster sugar and mix well.


Oh yes, in the meantime, melt the butter and chocolate chips in the microwave for about four minutes and let the unphotogenic mixture cool. Then add it to the egg yolks and sugar and mix well. Last step is to fold in the egg whites.


Bake in the middle of a 160 deg C oven for 50 minutes in a lined baking tin. Do not, I repeat, do not remove the confection from the oven when it goes ding, no matter how awesome the smell is. Let the cake cool completely, or you will end up with a squidgy texture inside (which is what happened to us).


See where the cake has sort of collapsed onto itself and formed some sort of muffin top? It isn't very pretty. But it sure is yummy!

(I wish I have more patience and time to style the ingredients and final product with colourful plates, flowers, placemats, etc. But we just really wanted to dig in after all that hard work.)

In non-domestic-goddess-wannabe-related news, I finally could not stand not being able to turn my head to the left (due to a stiff neck and tense shoulder) any longer, and went for tui na after putting it off for months.

Not 10 minutes into the torture, I was moaning, "Hen tong!" to the therapist and tears were streaming down my cheeks.

More than nine hours later now, my back and neck feel like a gang of gangsters had beaten me with big sticks -- instead of one unarmed Chinese woman with very strong fingers and elbows.

I've signed up for nine more torture sessions. It hurt so good.