Date Rolls

I have a lot of dates left from my Christmas baking and I wanted to use it all up for my Chinese New Year baking. I can’t keep the dates for too long as it tends to get dry real fast so I decided to blend it all up in a food processor and used it as the filling of these rolls. It turns out really good and it will be on the bake list for my next Christmas baking.

 

Ingredients for the filling:

600 gram dates – I used Medjool dates
¼ cup sesame seeds – toasted
3 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp soft butter
½ tsp cinnamon powder
1 tbsp orange zest
3 tbsp orange juice

 

Lemon Polenta Cookies

These are crunchy, lemony, and buttery cookies. The polenta in these cookies puts them on the crunchy side rather than soft and chewy. Normally I will just shape these rounds but this time I did something different using piping bag. The polenta absorbed the moisture from the mixture pretty fast and toward the end I find it a little bit difficult to pipe. If this happens just add a bit of milk to soften up the mixture up again.

Brown Butter Blueberry Streusel Muffins

Most of us love blueberry muffins. I baked these often as I will always have some fresh or frozen blueberries in my fridge. I will change the recipe a bit here and there from time to time. This time instead of the usual melted butter or oil I added brown butter to it. It took me just a few minutes to brown the butter before adding it to the batter. It gives the muffins a nice nutty and toasty aroma to it. Since we like streusel topping to most of our bakes I added it to these muffins and it taste like a cross between a muffin and coffee cake. They turn out incredibly moist and light, great with morning coffee or tea. I have to refrain myself from eating more than 2 at one go.

 

Chili Fish/Ikan Berlada

I don’t normally fried fish at home because of the smell especially during winter where it is too cold for me to open up all the windows and sliding doors to give it some ventilation. Lucky the Asian supermarkets here in California do provide the service of frying fish for you. I will only do that on certain Monday as it is the day where they use new oil for frying (inside secret ha ha) Anyway, I bought two pieces of mackerel or something that look like mackerel to me and had them fried it. When I get home all I have to do is cook the sauce and add in the fried fish. I always like mackerel as it has less bone in it. I adapted this recipe from Sajian Tradisional Negeri Sembilan by Chef Ismail