Popovers...

How good is it to have a long weekend!?!? Although I've been baking and cooking in the kitchen non-stop the last week, but that still didn't stop me from doing MORE baking on the Monday Queen's Birthday! However, I only did something small though!

Recently I've seen a photo from my friends facebook, which she went to a restaurant and had something called 'popovers' - a very interesting name, something that I have never heard of. And then I started doing some research on what 'popovers' is. 

Apparently it's some kind of bread that has a soft, moist hollow center, and crusty outside - sounded something nice! Me being a bread lover, I said to myself that I definitely need to try making it. I've found so many different recipes on the internet, and all of them are relatively easy, but they varies in resting time - some need 1 hour and some don't need any.... I wasn't sure what the resting time is for, so I used the one that require no resting time, just to save the hour! 

Hubby and I decided to go for a swim in the early arvo before going out to the city to take some photos around the circular quay area, and of the Vivid Sydney festival. So we're having a Monday brunch just to avoid the big belly when we go swimming! And the brunch menu was popovers, and sticky rice in lotus leaves. 

Ingredients

1tbsp unsalted butter for the pan

15g unsalted butter, melted and cooled

2 large eggs

250g milk

1/2 tsp sea salt

125g all purpose flour

1. Preheat oven to 220C. Lightly grease a popover pan with 1 tbsp of butter. (I used a muffin pan instead!)

2. Whisk together the cooled melted butter, eggs, milk and salt, then add the flour all at once and whisk until the batter is smooth. 

3. Place the greased pan in the oven for 2 minutes, this helps to boost the popovers rising afterward. 

4. Take the pan out of the oven and quickly divide the batter between cups, filling up to 2/3 full. Empty cups can be filled with some water. 

Popovers in the oven after the first 15 minutes. 

5. Bake for 20 minutes, then reduce the temperature to 180C and bake for another 15 minutes. 

6. Remove the pan from the oven and unmould immediately. Serve warm with butter and jam. 

A very easy recipe indeed. But however, mine turned a bit too brown unfortunately, probably because I had the oven too hot at the beginning! =( But besides that, I really love the texture of this bread. The inside was soft, moist and a little chewy! I didn't have mine with any extra butter or jam, the little sea salt in the batter has already got enough flavour for me! I'll definitely give it another go to make it less burnt! =P

Sticky rice wrapped with lotus leaves

OK... besides the popovers we also had sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves as our brunch. Hahaha... of course I didn't make that, we just bought that from a Chinese grocery store a couple of days ago. There wasn't much filling in there, mostly just sticky rice with a little bit of beans, tiny little egg yolk and pork meat. I remember my grandma used to make these herself in Hong Kong, I think she still does, and of course she would fill it with heaps of fillings to make it full of flavours and extra yummy! I missed all my grandma's traditional cookings - white raddish cake, new year cake, sticky rice... 90 years of cooking experience definitely cannot be ignored!!!