I suppose why I really like this recipe is because how simple it really is. No need to even wait for butter to soften because you have to melt it anyway. Here’s the recipe for it:

Ingredients

1 ¾ cup flour

¼ cup cocoa powder

1 cup sugar

1 tsp baking powder

¼ tsp baking soda

100 gms white butter

2 eggs

3 bananas mashed

1 tsp vanilla essence

½ cup toasted walnuts, ½ cup white chocolate chips

Method

Grease a loaf tin and preheat oven to 180 degrees C. Melt the butter and let it cool. Add the mashed bananas, sugar, eggs and essence to the melted butter. Sieve flour with cocoa, baking powder and baking soda. Lightly fold in the dry ingredients into wet and until batter is thick and chunky. Fold in nuts and chocolate chips. Scrape batter into pan and bake for 30 to 35 mins. (You might have to split the batter into two loaf tins)

Tell me how goes when you make it!

On impulse I decided to make it last night. Got Saboor to help me beat the butter. It was merely an excuse to make sure he wouldn’t nod off to sleep before I made dinner and it worked. My leftie son gets awkward with handling these things but for once I was not a monster mom last night and encouraged him to beat it in one direction only. The recipe is very simple and we finished the batter in fifteen minutes, right in time for Masterchef Australia to start on TV.

As an aside, everyone at home watches Masterchef Australia, including my MIL and the kids. MIL thinks that one of the judges, George, constantly bounces on the balls of his feet enthusiastically and she’s nicknamed him ‘uchal-billa’ in Urdu. Ha ha! It merely means someone who is fidgety and constantly jumping around in excitement. I think.

Anyways, without further delays, here’s the recipe. Every time I think I should take a picture, I think I’ll do it later and by then there’s nothing left.

Ingredients

200 gms white butter
2 cups maida
3 eggs
1 tsp baking powder
1 and 1/4 cup sugar (granulated will do)
1/4 cup sugar for caramel
1 tsp vanilla essence
1/2 cup water

Beat the butter and sugar until creamy. Add eggs and beat well. Add the essence. Sieve maida with baking powder and fold into the mixture gently. To make caramel, melt sugar over medium heat until it’s a shade darker than golden brown. Immediately pour in the water (it makes a big crackling noise) and swirl the pan quickly before caramel sets at the bottom and pour into the cake batter. Mix evenly and the batter acquires a beautiful toffee brown colour. Bake in a preheated oven at 180 degrees for 30 to 35 minutes.

It’s hard to describe these bars without going into raptures because they’re so, so good! There’s a crunchy shortbread base at the bottom, topped with a layer of dulce de leche (cooked condensed milk) and further topped with melted chocolate.

For small amounts of chocolate, I don’t mind using Bourneville Dark Chocolate because it’s pretty good and can be used as cooking chocolate as well. So armed with the ingredients, I set out to make these delicious squares which were a great hit the following day at the birthday.

I found the recipe at Joy of Baking and I followed it exactly. I did notice a couple of changes from the first time I made it though. For instance, the dulce de leche was creamier and more evident in this one. The picture in the Joy of Baking website shows the second layer to be almost caramel coloured but I couldn’t achieve it.

For the dulce de leche, I cooked the condensed milk in the microwave at a very low power, around 50% for the first four minutes and then reduced to 40% for another 8 minutes. It’s important to beat the dulce de leche when you remove it from the microwave so it becomes smooth and creamy. And yes, it’s preferable if you cook the shortbread before this step so that the shortbread is cooling while the dulce de leche is cooking. Pour it on the shortbread and spread it immediately or it will begin to harden.

For the layer of chocolate, I simply melted two large bars of Bournville over a double boiler and poured it over the dulce de leche and left it to set for sometime in the fridge. When it was half set I marked lines on the chocolate and then put it back in the fridge. Later that night I removed the shortbread bars and realised I couldn’t remove the first piece without causing cracks on the chocolate surface. So I made a narrow line on one of the edges and removed a piece from it so that I had leverage to remove the other squares. And the narrow edge belonged to moi! All the itsy bitsy pieces of chocolate and dulce de leche covered shortbread was MINE. And I ate it all as I cut out the rest and then when I went to sleep that night, I couldn’t get any sleep because of a butter and chocolate overload in my system.

I’ve made this chicken dish before also and it won’t win any prizes for innovation. The only prizes it would probably win is in simplicity. And that it can be cooked really quickly. A word of caution though. Since cooking is an art for me, I don’t really use proper measures, just approximates so adjust according to your taste. And don’t blame me if something goes wrong!

Ingredients

Add the chicken pieces turning them over and sprinkle garam masala,salt, red chilli powder and haldi. Stir well and shift the chicken around in the kadhai until it starts getting cooked. Add the dhania powder and pepper powder and mix properly. When the masalas have coated the chicken add the chopped tomatoes and lower flame to let the tomatoes soften. Cover with lid and let it simmer for some time. Mix well and add chopped coriander and cook for a little more before switching off the stove.

I tried taking a picture but it didn’t quite come out well so I didn’t bother. If you’re trying this out, let me know how it went or if I can improve it?

This one actually happened. And my sister in law helped me flush it down the toilet. The tomato soup I mean.

I always thought I was a reasonably good cook. And then I got married.

Only after said event did I realize that making toast without burning it and boiling water for a tea bag didn’t count as cooking.  In fact, my husband did that better than me.

Back in those good old days when I was newly married and could get away with just about any crime in the kitchen with the simple words ‘I don’t know’, life was good. We usually had takeaway dinner and lunch from the neighbourhood restaurant and no one really minded that the little eatery had got a fancy canopy and had expanded tremendously since we moved to the locality.

Then one day, the inevitable happened. My mother in law came to visit us. Which was totally fine, except that I felt slightly weird ordering food from the restaurant when she was there. She knew I didn’t cook. But I think she thought that the moment I got married, some dormant gene in me must have got activated and I was now churning out all sorts of yummy dishes for her laadla beta.

Before I could tell her that the only work I did in the kitchen was hunt for take away restaurant menus, she put me on the spot by asking me if I could make tomato soup.

Where was a Knorr packet when you needed one? To make things worse, she added ‘I’m sure you can make tomato soup, dear. It’s the easiest thing there is.’

I kept my mouth shut. It was easy. She said so herself. Maybe I could wing it. She was visiting us for just a few hours anyway, and all she’d asked for was tomato soup. Well, no harm done.

I opened the fridge, took out a couple of tomatoes which we kept for salads or face packs and washed them in the tap water. From outside, I could hear the sound of the TV.  I tossed the tomatoes in a pot of water and put it to boil. Sometime later, I saw that the peel was floating on top and the water had started looking distinctly red.

Pleased with myself, I switched off the gas and strained the water into a soup bowl. But something seemed wrong here. I peered into the pot and saw that the tomato was all mushy. Maybe we had to put some of that mush in the bowl. Using a spoon, I ladled some of the bits and pieces into the soup bowl.

This still didn’t look like the soup we ordered in restaurants, so there was something missing. Salt? Pepper? Yes. I liberally sprinkled both into the bowl and watched. Would it transform itself into something thick, like soup?

Furtively, I called Sunita to ask her if she knew how to make tomato soup. Sunita was my younger sister by the way. She was out shopping and the sound of the traffic interrupted what she was saying. I could only hear the words cornflour and eggs.

I ended the call and thought for a moment. We didn’t have cornflour, whatever that was. But there were a few eggs in the fridge. I dumped the contents of the bowl back into the pot and switched on the gas. Then I broke an egg into a bowl and then dropped it into the boiling tomato soup. Was this the way they made egg drop soup? Yeah, I probably was an instinctive cook, I thought. I only needed to be let loose in the kitchen and things would rearrange themselves magically and emerge perfectly. I only needed my mother in law to make me aware of that fact. I thought of her a little fondly as she watched some soap on TV outside.

A moment later I turned back to the pot and saw that the horribly curdled mess in the pot didn’t resemble tomato soup from any quarter. Maybe it would settle down once I put it in the bowl. I watched with horror and fascination as huge lumps of egg fell into the bowl, along with tomato water.

This was no tomato soup.

‘Are you done yet dear?’ she called out from the living room. ‘Can you make croutons to go with it?’

Croutons? She asks for croutons? I found myself giggling nervously like a maniac as I wondered how I could salvage the situation. I could probably tell her that the soup was disastrous, but she’d want to look at it. And then she might relate it to everyone about how I cannot make even an easy tomato soup.

Simple solution. I’ll tell her that I was ladling it into a bowl and my hand slipped and everything fell inside the sink. Yes. Unceremoniously I dumped the contents of the pot into the sink and watched bits of egg float and then block the sink. So now my sink was all clogged with steamy red stuff and boiled egg pieces. And I had a mother in law outside waiting for croutons to go with it. There were two messes in this kitchen. One was the sink and the other was me. Any ideas on how I could get out of it?

Poor KK didn’t have an enterprising sister in law like I did.

For the inventor of the cake pops, it must have been a moment of pure inspiration following a disaster when the cake didn’t come out clean from the pan. How I wish someone had told me that it was possible to salvage a cake from the pan back in the days when I had started baking? I’d have been saved so much teasing from everyone.

Anyways, I don’t quite recall how I came across chocolate cake pops. Maybe it was on Bakerella, or probably some other such fantastic website and I made it one day thinking it would be a pretty easy thing to do. Surprisingly it was! What it was though, was time consuming. I had to stay up till around 1.30 in the morning making these cake pops and in minutes they were gone.

They’re very popular and the kids keep demanding I make them but I haven’t made them in months. Simply because I get a bit sick from licking off all that chocolate from the bowls and my hands.

Here’s how they’re made -

One cake yields around 60 cake pops.

Chocolate cake

This is my standard chocolate cake recipe, although you can make it the way you usually do also.

200 gms butter
1 1/2 cup sugar, (powdering it is optional)
1 3/4 cup maida (all purpose flour)
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence
1/2 cup curdled milk ( 1/2 cup milk with a tsp of lemon juice, let it stand for sometime until milk curdles)

Beat the butter and sugar until fluffy.

Add eggs one at a time and then the vanilla essence.

Sieve maida with baking powder and fold it into batter gently.

Mix the curdled milk but don’t over beat. Mix, until just incorporated. Bake in a preheated oven at 180 degrees C for about half an hour.

Let the cake cool and then in a huge bowl, crumble it all up. This is the fun part because your cake doesnt have to look perfect or emerge from the pan perfectly either.

Chocolate frosting

Now this is what I keep forgetting each and every time. I mean, I simply forget what kind of frosting I make and I improvise each time. So, doing this from memory now. I make a terrible absentminded cook .

3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup cocoa
1/2 cup milk

Mix everything and cook for a minute. Beat well until it is glossy.

To assemble cake pops

Pour the chocolate frosting over the crumbled cake and knead it like dough. Make small balls out of it and line it on parchment paper. Freeze for half an hour.

Melt chocolate in the microwave or a double boiler. Dip each ball into the melted chocolate and let it rest on the paper. The chocolate hardens slowly and you can lift each ball off the paper easily enough.

So, as I was saying, my mom found this recipe for firni in the recipe book that came with my Sumeet Mixer Grinder. She tried it once and immediately we were transported back years ago to Kolkata where we’d tasted similar firni and I’d never quite forgotten it. The delicate aroma, the texture and the taste seemed almost similar to what I’d had eons ago. While I do hold my olfactory senses to be very strong (or khatarnaak  naak as my husband says), I was very young when I had that firni back there. So it might actually be nothing like it, but it works pretty well for us now.

See, Kolkata was on our route to Hong Kong back in those days when there were no direct flights from Bangalore. The trip to Hong Kong was such a big adventure because we had to travel to Kolkata, go to Dhaka, take a flight to Bangkok and then go to Hong Kong, and I guess Abbu kept such a convoluted route because he had some work to take care of in each of these destinations. So in Kolkata, my memories were always of food. However, I don’t recall much about that also, except that the aromas of even the curries were sweet in a way that was very appetizing.

But the dessert was always firni. Yes, this same firni. The only difference was that it used to be much more thick, and set in clay bowls. So, we had to scrape off the firni from our bowls, and I think the clay added its own special aroma and taste to the firni. This isn’t really like a recipe with ingredients and method unfortunately. It’s more of me rambling on about how you can do it or how you shouldn’t do it.

Soak half a cup of rice in water for half an hour, drain the water and run in the mixer until it becomes a smooth paste. Remove the paste from a mixer into a bowl and keep separately(I have a very good reason why you should do that. Will elaborate later)

Then, boil one liter milk and let it simmer for about five minutes. While its simmering, pour the paste into the milk while stirring continuously. – If you let the rice paste remain in the mixer, then what happens is that it becomes a bit difficult to pour with one hand. (Because you have to scrape out all the rice paste from the bottom, between the blades and all that jazz) And if you don’t stir with one hand while you’re pouring, you’ve got lumpy firni. And who wants lumpy firni?

So, keep stirring, scraping the sides and bottom of the pan until the firni looks a little thick. Add sugar(how much ever you prefer, or how much ever your sweet tooth allows you!). Stir well and switch off the gas.

Let it cool and then mix in a few drops of rose water or kewra essence and then sprinkle generously with slivered almonds and pistachios. Pour into individual cups and let it set in the fridge.

I’m pretty positive you can’t make firni quicker than this. And if you want to know how we make traditional firni at home? It’s very different from this quick fix firni, I assure you – You’re going to have to wait till my book comes out. And I’m not kidding. I really have written a food book (given my penchant for laziness and inability to copy-paste traditional recipes) I will be just talking about the food there. I can see that you’re not amused.

Anyhow, I was determined to learn how to bake a cake properly and even attended classes (yes!) to learn more about cakes and baking etc. One course that I did in 2003 was pretty good. It was conducted by the Institute of Cake Baking and Cake Art (that’s the name I think) and we got a one hour lesson on the science of baking, something that pretty much boggled me considering that I still think that cooking is an art. So I learnt baking and I was finally able to bake proper cakes for the first time in my life, a fact that amazed me as much as it astounded my mother (who had to do most of the cleaning up after my cake adventures when I was small.)

Now, I’m considered something of an expert at home. Ahem. Yes.

See? See??? I told ya!!!

Yes, I made it. Not now though. Umm, a couple of years back and I can make it again if I wanted to. Really.

And I’m being very nice and giving you the recipe as well which I adapted from a book called the McCall Book of Cakes and Pies.

Ingredients for Cake (make 2 of these)

3 eggs
1 cup granulated sugar

1/2 cup hot milk
3/4 cup maida + 1/4 cup cocoa sifted together with 1 tsp baking powder
vanilla essence

• Break the eggs into a clean bowl and beat them using an electric egg beater until they’re foamy and acquire a light lemony colour.
• Add the sugar and continue beating on high for about 5 minutes until the mixture is thick.
• Add essence and slowly fold in flour+cocoa mixture and beat on low for a little while.
• Add the hot milk and mix properly.
• Bake at 200 degrees centigrade for about thirty minutes
• When cake is done, cool and invert on a plate

Icing

Fresh Cream

Sugar

Ice cubes

Beat the fresh cream with sugar over ice cubes until thick. Keep aside.

Decoration

1 tin cherries

grated choclate

Assembling

Moisten each cake with the sweetened sugar syrup present in the cherry tin can. Spread haf the cream over one cake, arrange the cherries and sprinkle grated chocolate over it.

Place the other cake on top. Spread the whipped cream all over the cake, and sides, decorate with cherries and grated chocolate.

I get these huge complexes when I watch shows like Masterchef Australia where they come up with such fabulous looking desserts but I just have to go back and see these pictures and it helps me feel tons better. While I would never survive even one episode of a Masterchef episode, forget winning anything, it’s nice to know that for those who don’t know any better (like my family and friends), I’m pretty much a master at what I do. I think.

Every episode featured the popular dishes of some country. We’d watch professional chefs preparing sushi or baked trout or bean curd packets filled with rice and it was probably the production values of those days, just a slightly sardonic narrator and no glib chefs that made it seem as though we could actually taste what they were making.

One of these videos featured Pavlova. I was enthralled each time I saw it. That beautiful white mound topped with strawberries and kiwis which were pretty much a dream back in those days seemed like something too difficult to accomplish. I could never contemplate making it myself because although I was around 10 or 11 I’d already subjected my family to rock hard cakes and plenty of burnt biscuits.

Years later I discovered Joy of Baking and pretty much tried out quite a few of the recipes there with huge success. When I came across Pavlova, I remembered thinking that maybe I could take it up now. How difficult could it possibly be to bake a meringue and fill it with whipped cream?

And on one eid I decided that’s what I would do. I got everything ready, spooned the meringue on the parchment paper and started baking it as in the recipe. So far so good. But every time I checked it was still not done. And I had to do another one as well.

Around an hour later I realised that making a pavlova with a single small oven like I had wasn’t such a great idea. Also the meringue wasn’t getting cooked properly and I was getting a distinct egg smell.

About two hours later I stared at the meringues which refused to peel off from the paper easily. I got frustrated and when that happens I get angry as well. So without thinking clearly (like what would I tell everyone as I had shooed them away from the kitchen while I baked the dessert), I broke off the meringue in pieces and then, inspiration struck.

No one needed to know what a Pavlova looked like. The only people who had seen those videos were my mother and brother. I could possibly hoodwink my mother and my brother wasn’t in town. So I arranged the meringue in small cups and layered it with sweetened whipped cream and fruits and voila, my dessert was ready!

Mini Pavlovas

Although everyone loved it, I haven’t been quite inspired to try it again. The recipe for pavlova can be found here. I pretty much followed the instructions in the recipe although the video hadn’t been there when I made this the last time around.

It wasn’t fun making this and unless you’re sure of how your oven works and unless you’re really, really positive and confident, you shouldn’t really try it out. But then who am I to stop you? If it doesn’t quite work out the way it’s supposed to, you can always break it down. Like I did.

Yes! This is as easy as it gets. All you chocoholics out there, listen up! Here’s a simple way to knock the socks off anyone you want to impress. These homemade chocolate truffles look delicious and are very very very very smooth and chocolatey. And the best part is that they’re so simple to make!

Boil a packet of fresh cream. Pour over a bowl of chopped cooking chocolate (which you can easily get in Nilgiris). Let it sit for half a minute and then start stirring. It should look something like this…




Yes, this is the same recipe as you would normally make for chocolate ganache which can be used to fill and cover cakes. But once it reaches this smooth consistency, let it cool a while and then pop it in the freezer for sometime.

Try and keep it in the freezer for at least half an hour. Here at home, Saboor wouldn’t let me keep it inside for even twenty minutes! The first time I made this, it was a big mess. I scooped spoonfuls of the ganache and rolled it around an almond but it started melting in my hand itself. No problem, I licked it off, but then I had to give up on creating something which looked as good as it tasted. Of course, the whole plate got over in less than a minute. Maybe thirty seconds!

This time, I decided not to use almonds. I suddenly remembered my trusty old piping bag. I fitted it with a star nozzle, pushed some of the slightly hardened ganache inside it and piped out swirls of chocolate.




As you can see, these have already started melting.




So pipe them out quickly. I didn’t feel like greasing the plate but if you want these truffles to slide out easily, then its a good idea. These truffles had to be scraped off with a spoon and once again, the plate was empty in mere seconds. Luckily, I remembered to take pictures before showing the plate to the kids!

This chocolate ganache has many uses. The initial runny version can be used to cover cakes. When it hardens, you can use it to pipe rosettes as I have done. I think my truffles need more chocolate because they don’t seem to be getting hard enough. Or we’re not leaving them alone that long!

If you can get them hard enough and if you don’t really mind messy hands, do try making the original chocolate truffles which are made by rolling around small portions of the ganache into perfect rounds which are then dipped in cocoa powder. The bitterness of the cocoa gives way into the sweetness of the truffle inside and that is surely like a bite of heaven!

The bitter cocoa covering will not be appreciated at home so I didn’t bother to do it. But anyway, I got to lick the bowl clean and that happened only because the kids were watching TV and didn’t know that I wasn’t washing up in the kitchen!

Oh yay!! Another post up!!!