homemade strawberry jam

TOTALLY forgot to write a post about this!

It all started like this,


I'm so lucky then when I reached Australia, it was the season of strawberries and they're selling like AUD$5 for two big boxes. So cheap and couldn't resist but to keep buying every time I finish it. So there's always be a box of strawberries in my fridge!

2 months ago, I brought a food container filled with fresh strawberries to university as snack between meals. Eunice was beside me and I offered her some. She knew that I'm having menstrual period and she said :"Do you know that we can't take strawberries when that thing come? Coz it'll stop the blood"
This fact scared me, most of the time I obey all the "Do and Don't" for menstrual period such as don't wash hair for the first 3 days, no cold and icy drinks, no melon fruits and etc. I know alot of female health problem are caused by the lack of care during menstrual period.

So...what can I do now, there's a big box of berries in my fridge! And they're going to spoil in 3 days. I don't wanna waste these sweet fruits. The idea of strawberry jam popped out, just-in-time. I remember I made some back in Malaysia but it failed because it became juicy instead of sticky jam.

Back home, I decided to try one more time as I have all the ingredients.

The recipe is very simple. You can Google it or read mine!
Just the cooking takes time.

All you need is :

Strawberry

Sugar 

Lemon juice

1. Remove the leaves, cut the strawberries into smaller size. Not necessary to mash it.
2. Place all the strawberries on a saucepan with low heat. 
3. Add in sugar. The amount of sugar depends on how sweet your fruit is. If it's ripe and very sweet, add in 1/4 of the amount of the fruit. If it's sour-ish, add in 3/4. It also depends on your preference. Not hard to control, you can always taste it in the process and add in.
4. Stir the sugar & strawberry together and leave it for 2 hours. Let it boil slowly.
5. Stir it once in a while.
6. After 2 hours, you'll see all the berries are soften, dissolved and sticky.
7. Add in about 1/6 (agak-agak lah) of lemon juice. 
8. Check the texture, it has to be thick and sticky.
9. Pour the jam into sterilized container and set them in the fridge to cool down.

Note : Lemon juice is a natural preservative and that make your jam last for months ;)

If you wanna have some chucky texture, Take out some half-dissolved strawberries during the 1st hour of cooking. Add them back at the last step!

If you're still unsure about it, google the recipe online.

In the fridge

And that's it!

Healthy homemade strawberry jam, perfect spread on bread.

some not-to-bad baking

I was never in the baking thing. As I mentioned before, there's a well-built oven in my kitchen and no one uses it except me. Since I'm having a 2-months long holiday, I listed down what I'm going to do and BAKING is one of it.


First thing I do is re-challenge muffin. Again, I failed. Somemore im using cups this time with cute bears. Wasted my money.
Failed as in it didn't taste chocolatey. The bitter taste of excess vanilla essence is all what I tasted on the first bite. Edible, but you won't want to finish even one muffin.

Mum told me not to do muffin ANYMORE.

So the next thing is COOKIES! Chocolate cookies without chips.
Here're them in the oven. I even made them in HEART SHAPE!



I can't say it is very delicious compared to Famous Amos but it's way much better than muffin.
I made a lot. Mom still disagree with cookie. She asked for cakes. Simple cakes as my family aren't cookie lover.

So I picked up the most simple recipe from internet, and the one I kept in my notebook years ago. Follow two recipes to make the simplest butter cake.

It doesn't looks attractive but it's tasty! And it was finished in a day! Finally something that my family likes. So I bake another one after a week.


This one looks like banana cake.By mentioning banana cakes, attention to my primary school friends! I always have a image of our class teacher forcing our classmate (a guy) to eat banana cake and he refused! Because he HATES banana cake! Do you all remember who is he?! I have the image with blurred face. It's either leow zi hao or lee man djun. anyone remembers???

After trying butter cake, I made cheesecake that I'm very familiar with.
I baked it. It's no longer chilled. And I made this conclusion that baked cheesecake taste yummier than chilled!

Again, with the cracks, it doesn't looks tempting.

This cake was finished within 2 days.
Proved that cakes are the most welcomed in my home.
Next time I should make more cakes instead of cookies and the never-going-to-success muffins.



I used the remaining ingredient from cheesecakes and made douphinoise potatoes.
This was quite energy consuming as I had to layered the sliced potatoes. gah.
This time it was abit watery because I added too much milk!!!


That's all about one of the thing I did during my holiday! I think it's quite meaningful. At least something contributing to the house lah. Also showed evidently that im talented in making simple cake. heeheehee.






Lastly, a random picture taken by HTC Desire. Whaddaya think?