Experiment #1

Invited my parents and brother over for tea yesterday... kononnya since yesterday was a holiday, I wanted to do some baking (try out the new kitchen la lebih kurang... hehehe) Last week I tried out the oven we got as a wedding present (yep, the oven's slightly more than 5 years old already, and I'm just using it now :p), but used a Betty Crocker mix just to test the oven (so I cheated a bit....) The resulting cookies were deliciously chewy and moist, just the way we like 'em, so I know the oven's ok...

So anyway, was feeling ambitious yesterday, so decided to make a banana walnut loaf and pengat pisang. Now, I've baked cakes before, and have had some successes and failures (hehehe... looks don't count right? As long as the taste is still the same...), and I think I'm quite OK at making bubur kacang & bubur pulut hitam, but both items for yesterday's tea were new recipes for me. I could have gone with either bubur, but since they're not really Hubby's cup of tea, and my dad can be pretty picky at times (oh alright, he is picky about food), I can't just bake the cake and whip up a batch of cookies, can I? So, with a lot of prayer, I spent about a quarter of the day slaving away in the kitchen...

The result?

I thought the pengat pisang tasted sweet enough, and even got Hubby to verify the taste. The cake wasn't really to my liking, even though it wasn't too bad... When my family came over, though, the pengat was cool enough for us to realize that it wasn't sweet enough! My dad also compared my banana cake to my mom's (even though he's very often her harshest critic!). My dear mama backed me up, saying that my recipe's different, so you can't expect the result to be the same. Nevertheless, the pengat got eaten, and I heated up the leftovers and added more brown sugar to sweeten it up more.

The cake... well, both loaves got sliced up for Hubby and I to bring to work... passed them around for feedback (hehehe... shameless? I wanna learn beb!) Those who didn't like sweet cakes found it just nice... others thought I should have used a different type of banana (I think so too...), the walnut bits were yum... all in all, not that great a result, but I'm gonna keep trying! I just pray my family members and friends won't get upset tummies from downing my efforts! hehehe...