My first yummy story :D

Hello there. Since this is going to be my first post ever in this new blog I created, I was thinking of posting my favourite recipes. However, considering that I don't have any pictures to post along with, I decided to post a recipe which I just tried today.

Well, at first I wanted to bake some dinner rolls but thinking that I had baked some yesterday, I finally decided to make some sweet buns. I randomly read a few blogs just to get some ideas - more like a recipe, actually. And I've came across this recipe from  here and the original recipe is from here. The buns I made are slightly green but I guessed the colour didn't show up on camera. These buns are soft and fluffy - just how I like it. :)

Instead of using pandan paste as called for in the recipe, I blended some pandan leaves with a little bit of water - 100 ml to be exact, to get the juice out of it. We used to have a lot of pandan trees before we decided to remove some of them because we seldom use them. And now, we only have one fairly big pandan tree.

Pandan Buns :

• 350 g high protein flour 
• 200 ml cold water (I used 150 ml cold water + 50 ml coconut milk)
• 50 g sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon fine salt
• 3 teaspoon instant yeast
• 1 teaspoon bread improver (optional)
• 1 tablespoon powdered milk
• 20 g coconut milk powder (I omitted this)
• 1 small egg 
• 30 g butter
• 1 teaspoon of pandan paste (I used two pandan leaves)

1. If you're not using pandan paste, blend pandan leaves with 100 ml of cold water. Then pour the pandan juice through a sieve. Add the coconut milk and enough cold water to the pandan juice, so that they total up to 200 ml. If you're using pandan paste, just skip this step and continue with the rest.

2. Put all the ingredients except for butter into the mixing bowl and by using a dough hook, mix it on a medium speed until it starts to resemble a dough. Add the butter and knead it again until the dough become smooth and elastic. It will take about ten minutes (or more if you're kneading by hand).

3. Let the dough rise until doubled (45 minutes - 1 hour). Punch the dough down and divide the dough into 16 equal parts. You can use whatever filling you like (kaya, coconut, read bean paste) - I used coconut filling. Shape into dinner rolls and leave it to rise again until doubled.

4. Brush with some milk before baking it in a preheated oven at 180C for 20-25 minutes.

Well, for the coconut filling, I just put some freshly grated coconut with enough palm sugar, salt and some water on medium heat and cook until water has dried up a little bit. (The filling should not be too wet nor too dry). If anyone is looking for homemade kaya recipe (coconut egg jam), you can find it  here or  here.