Eggless bread pudding

A couple of days ago, something very delectable appeared on my FB feed. HaathiTime was craving carbs, and posted a very yummy photo of the bread pudding she made. And that’s it. It was like madness creeping onto me. I HAD TO TRY IT!

The recipe she posted had egg, so I had to make it eggless, and so I had to customize the recipe a bit. And then, this pregnant friend of mine at work had been asking me to bake her something , and so where others at work. I thought, why not make a big batch of bread pudding and serve everyone I know at work! :)

A beauty called Shahi Tukda…

Also known as Double ka Meetha , Shahi Tukda is a typical Nawabi dessert, served at most Hyderabadi weddings and functions.

However, I’ve been led to believe that  these two – Double ka Meetha & Shahi Tukda have slightly different methods of preparation.

Gasi Laddu, from Mom’s kitchen

How apt that I should start this year with a dessert recipe, that too, something straight off Mom's kitchen. With absolutely no updates/modifications/replacements to her recipe! :) This recipe was born out of one of the zillion techniques adopted by yesteryears' housewives to use every part of a commodity in their kitchen.

As I mentioned before, ever since I started getting full cream milk at home, cream-butter management has become an activity in itself. Once we collect enough cream, I churn out butter from it. So far, I've been giving away the butter to friends and family, but this one time, I wanted to do what Mom does... make ghee out of butter. A first for me, I guess this might be because of that little girl in me who wants to be like Mommy :-)

Biskoot, as we call it…

As mentioned in my previous post, Mom and Maami were visiting us earlier this month.
My Maami is this super-awesome-homemaker-cook-woman who is like the encyclopedia for anything related to Udupi Brahmin cooking. All our cooking prowess can be directly or indirectly attributed to her, and we still refer to her when in doubt for anything related to Tulu cooking. So when she was visiting, I had a list ready - a list of all the things I'd ask her to make for me , stuff that I've been craving for a zillion years. Mom ensured that we had the raw material (some of the stuff isn't readily available in Hyderabad and they got it all from Hidingala, our hometown), and together they cooked them all for me.

This is one of such awesome but simple dishes only my Maami can make. Yes, its not a traditional Udupi dish (yeah, her repertoire of dishes is vast, as I discovered recently), but we literally grew up on these biscuits(pronounced Biskoot, just for the Tulu touch :) ). The recipe has been handed down from generations of housewives, I believe, and is one of the simplest methods to bake a biscuit or a cookie, in this case.

Dark Chocolate Oatmeal… yummm!

Look at this… :-D

Before I get on to the recipe, I have a question - Who likes oatmeal? :) No one?

My next question, who doesn’t like chocolate? The warm, gooey, drippy chocolate? Do I see some hands going up?Yeah, I thought so? :)

And how many of us know that oatmeal is healthy, but struggle with the idea of having it for breakfast ? Well, that’s me. :)

Mango Sorbet

 

Oooh. I am drooling as I am typing this. Yes. Really. ;-)

So what does one do when one’s house is full of sweet smelling , very expensive Alphonsoes, and when the said one is the only person in the household to enjoy them? Well, that person will resort to extreme measures as freezing the fruit, though one has always believed that eating the mangoes fresh is the best way to eat them.

Cherry Chocolate Coffee Cake

With the last couple of cake-baking experiments being huge debacles , it was like I had lost confidence to bake a proper cake again, in spite of having figured out that the mistake in the earlier cases was with the expired baking soda. But hey, you all know how it feels, right? The fear of failure? After having mixed the best of the ingredients, and great plans for that cake, seeing it end up in a crusty mess is not what we want… so yes, I hadn’t baked a single cake in two months now.

But finally, I decided to get over the fear, and bake this cake, the link to which I got from my Pinterest feed. The photographs looks awesome (now, that is what I call food photography! Wanting you to eat that thing right OFF the computer screen :-) ), and the cake looked totally do-able.

Sugar-less Date-n-Nut roll

“Don’t ask any questions and come to my desk. NOW”, my friend J [she likes to be called Mumbai_Chef :-)] pinged me on IM. The events of the last week were very exciting for both her and me, and there were many such “Come to my desk NOW” moments, but little did I know that I was in for a sweet treat.
I’ve always known that she is a wonderful cook and a baker. When I tasted her Undhiyu last year, I gasped, died and landed in Food Heaven.



But when I tasted her sugar-less-date-and-nut-roll last week, I knew I was IN Food Heaven, and alive, coz the very next minute I told her that she HAD to post a recipe of this one. And that was how this post came into being.
Ladies & Gentlemen, presenting the first ever guest post on this blog by the lady herself, my very dear friend, Mumbai_Chef…

Hot Chocolate, inspired by a book

This is Valentine’s Day week, and as I-don’t-think-love-needs-a-day as I am, I am not letting this blog go without posting atleast one chocolate recipe this week.

And the chocolate... Do you see the nutmeg sprinkled on top?

I lifted the recipe directly from The Language of Baklava, a book I read a couple of months ago. I was sooo in love with the book and the recipes in it that I read it back to back in just under 2 days, I think. More about the book on my other blog, here.

Chocolate Fudge Brownie

Brownies are an all-time favourite in our house. So is it with my friends also. I have had a very reliable brownie recipe all along, but I felt the need to eliminate other flavours from this and make a plain chocolate brownie, for when the chocolate craving hits.
Here’s a little silly rhyme to go with the whole brownie experience …

Hop and skip in a loop,
Pair with a vanilla scoop.
Its that easy,
Warm this beauty.
Eat it as you lick your lips
And watch it grow on your hips! ;-)

Ingredients
100 gms butter
1 cup cocoa powder
1 3/4 cups sugar
1/2 tsp salt
8 tbsps thick cream
1 1/3 cup AP flour
1/2 cup chopped Walnuts/White chocolate chips (optional)

Instructions
Melt the butter in a pan. Once this cools down, whisk the cocoa powder into butter.
Add the cream and mix thoroughly. And now blend in the sugar into this mixture.
Whisk flour into this mixture and mix well. Fold in the nuts in the end.

Pour this brownie batter in a greased 9x4 tin and bake in a pre-heated oven for at least 30 mins.
Once it cools, cut and store in airtight containers.

Eggplant Lasagne. My first ever!

 

I’ve cooked pasta many times but never lasagne. At first , it seemed to be a very complicated dish. Cooking the sheets, the vegetables and then lining them seemed to be a lot of work. Little did I realize then that this is what happens with a regular pasta also, and the only thing different with lasagne is that it is baked.

So when I made up my mind to actually cook Lasagne, the search for the perfect sheets began. They had to be eggless, and should not be close to their expiry date (if you shopped in the super markets around Kothaguda junction in Hyderabad, you’d know what I am talking about). After a lot of search, I found the a batch of eggless sheets, which were bought right away. And the keeda to cook lasagne has been fed into this brain of mine.

Last week, when I was clearing up my fridge on a lonely evening, I made a big batch of red sauce, in the hope of it easing my work on a Pasta day someday. It happened to be today, and the entire assembling of lasagne took me exactly 20 mins. And another 40 mins to bake it. There, sumptuous dinner was ready in 1 hour.

I did not follow any recipe to do this, except just the basic idea on how to cook the sheets, the lining of the lasagne and the vegetables in the dish, and the baking time. It was all guesswork on how the ingredients would be lined up, and I think that is what happens in all the cases.
In order to appeal to the Indian palate, I decided to season the eggplants when they were being roasted, so that there would be a distinct flavour and a taste when we get to only the eggplants. I also poured some salt on the cheese to ensure that the cheese does not render the dish salt-less. And that worked in my favour. I also sprinkled some black pepper powder along with the salt to make the cheese have some spice too.

I baked this in a 9x4 inch very thick glass dish, and the contents served the two of us, with a little more left. Guess it will be good for 3 also.

Ingredients
Red sauce (homemade or store bought) – 2 cups
Lasagne sheets – 8-9, cooked per instructions on the box
Eggplants – 8 small sized ones, washed and diced to be thin inch long pieces
Olive Oil – 2 tbsp
Cajun seasoning – 2 tbsp, or a mix of Oregano and Red chilli flakes
Sea salt – Per taste
Black pepper – if required, per taste
Mozzarella cheese – 1 cup
Cheddar cheese – 2 slices



Instructions
Pat the lasagne sheets dry with a kitchen towel.
In a deep pan, heat the olive oil and roast the eggplant slices in it. Add salt and seasoning to this, and let it be on heat for a while.
Meanwhile, pour one layer of the red sauce into a deep baking dish, and line the lasagne sheet on it.
Remove the eggplant from the stove and line a layer of this in the dish on the sheet.
Line the dish with lasagne sheets, Mozzarella cheese, red sauce, lasagne sheets, eggplant layer and a lasagne sheet lining.
At the top, spread the red sauce in a thin lining and top it up with Mozzarella and Cheddar cheeses.

Bake in a pre-heated oven at 185 for 40 mins, or till the cheese gets a golden brown colour.

This particular photo was shot after I was done half eating. I loved the look of the layers in my plate so much that I couldn’t resist shooting this.

The minute I put a fork full of lasagne into the mouth, there was a medley of cheese, tomato sauce, the seasoning on the eggplants and it was heaven. :-)

Just one ingredient. Yes!

 

Dessert with one ingredient!
Yes, it is. Its completely possible, and is yummiliciously yummy. And yes, so soft that you can scoop it up. And so healthy that you don’t need to add a single tablespoon of sugar, or feeling guilty about eating an entire tin of this one. And no, I am not kidding, you do not have to hate me for this introduction either! :)

During a fun evening where I and this friend were exchanging tips on food and generally yapping about food, she told me about the concept called Single Ingredient ice-cream, the basic steps on how to do it, and asked me to read up a bit more about it, which I did.
Its the simplest EVER recipe to the yummiest EVER ice-cream. No, seriously!

Peel one banana, freeze it till it gets rock hard, blend in a mixer to a paste, and re-freeze it. And lo, you have the yummiest ice-cream ever.

Recipe Courtesy : My friend S, and this link.

You can make your own variations to this recipe, by adding choco chips, blueberries, cocoa powder or anything else into the paste before re-freezing it. More ideas here!

Cherry Brandy Brownies

 

While browsing for some good eggless brownie recipes, I bumped into this awesome brownie maker site, which has practically the recipe for every brownie in the world, using every possible ingredient. I loved it so much that I must’ve used it to bake atleast 5 different kinds of brownies, and all of them have been loved, asked for repeatedly and savoured by everyone who’s had one!

This one is just a template ,and you can substitute cherries for any fruit, and brandy for any drink you want. I baked this when we had friends over to watch one of the world cup matches, and they were finished before the match! Yeah, even the humongous amount of butter in this did not deter folks from digging in… :)

So here it is, a slightly modified eggless version of the original recipe.

Ingredients

150 gms butter
1-1/4 cups cocoa powder
2 cups sugar
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbsps brandy
10 tbsps thick cream (or 5 eggs if you don’t want it eggless)
1-2/3 cups AP flour
3/4 cup dried cherries
1/2 cup raspberry jam (I used cherry jam)
A pinch of cinnamon powder (optional)

Instructions

Pre-heat the oven to 185C and butter the aluminium foil pans.
Slightly melt the butter, so that it melts into a liquid, and whisk the cocoa powder in it once it cools a bit. Mix in the sugar and salt to this mixture.
After this mixture cools a bit, whisk in the brandy, cinnamon and the cream.
To this mixture, add the flour, and dried cherries and mix till it just blends.
Now mix the raspberry (or cherry) jam into this mixture, and mix just till it blends.
Pour this batter into the butter foil pan, and bake for ~35 mins. You’ll know that the brownie is done when the inserted toothpick comes out with some crumbs of brownie.
Once they cool, cut and serve the brownies either with ice-cream or just as-is.

And then tell me how they turned out! :)

Mamma, am coming home…

 

Yes, I was going to Mom’s house after 3 months, and during this period I had started baking. Mom, who is someone who has never asked for anything special to eat for herself so far, actually asked me to make something for her.

So the day before I was to leave to her place, I started baking at 7 and finished by 11 :)
I baked her a Paneer Cake, Ukranian Tea Cake, Chocolate Brownies and Peanut Butter Cookies, and she loved them all! :D

Date & Cashew cake

When I was a kid , Mom used to make everything possible in her might to make me drink my evening milk. She used to resort to emotional blackmail, loud screaming, feign ignorance to the fact that I hate the milk and also push that milk glass down my throat. Which kid would love to drink plain milk 4 times a day, that too when there was no sugar added to it, tell me!

Being the strong-willed woman that she is, she always got her way. But she adopted the best of her ways only after about 18 yrs, which we loved. She would make a different milkshake every evening for us(me and my younger brother), and that was something we loved. One of her fave recipes and ours too was the date milkshake. So the minute I saw this cake recipe, I was taken back to the time when we used to fight to finish off the milkshake, this time fondly. She used to soak the dates in milk the previous night and grind it to a paste and then mix it with a larger quantity of milk. This cake has a similar method to make the date mixture.

This weekend was just awesome in terms of the number of cakes baked in my oven. I baked this date cake continuously for three consecutive days, twice for friends and the last time for myself, each time altering the recipe a bit to suit my palate :)

The first time I baked this, I followed the recipe to the T, the second time, I reduced the oil by half and the third time, I baked this with whole wheat flour and with no oil. I got to taste this all three times, and this cake was splendid all the three times. There was a minor difference in texture each time, but something which I could live with.

This is the final recipe that I am going to follow from now for this cake. This recipe yields one 6’ round cake.

Ingredients:

3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
18 dates, de-seeded and chopped
3/4 cup milk
10 cashews chopped into small pieces
1/6 cup oil(if required. Adds density to the cake, but is still perfect without it)

Procedure

Soak the dates in hot milk and boil it for 2-3 mins. When the dates soften, take the milk vessel off the stove and let it cool. Add the sugar to this mixture. After the milk cools, put this in the mixer and grind to a thick paste.

Grease the cake tin with butter and preheat the oven to 200C.

In a large mixing bowl, sieve the flour and baking soda together. Add the date mixture to this, and oil if you are adding it. Mix these two well and add the chopped cashews to this mixture. Pour this paste into the cake tin and  decorate with cashews on top. Bake for 30-40 mins at 200C or till the tester is clean.I bake this at 185C for 30 mins, and at 200C for another 10 mins but this might depend on the oven.

Let it cool and then share with friends. Enjoy!

Each time I baked this cake, I was in no position to take a photo of this one. Either I was giving it away to friends or we just started biting in almost immediately, but I shall put up a pic of this one soon! :)

Recipe Courtesy: Aayi’s Recipes

Marbled Banana Chocolate Bread

 

With this, I feel arrived! Honestly! :)

After baking the Banana choco-chip cake and loving how it tasted, all I could think was to bake Marble Banana Chocolate bread. Since morning, the procedure to do it was running on my head. The visions of chocolate and banana batter mixing with each other were playing havoc with my mind! The bread wouldnt just leave me alone. I thought of it as I was tadka-dalofying to my dal, as I was driving and as I was having my breakfast. It just had to be baked! I just wasnt sure of the quantities. And earlier experiments have shown that baking without proper ingredients is not good for one’s own sanity! :)

So some search on the internet and I bumped into this recipe. What I totally loved about this recipe was that the procedure and the ingredients I had in mind were exactly these, and it can easily be adapted to be egg-less! :D

As I was baking this a sweet smell engulfed my kitchen and I wished over and over again that I should’ve been able to bottle up the fragrance and let it out later… yes, it was that awesome! Like they show in the advertisements :)

So here it is, Marbled Banana Chocolate Bread -

Ingredients:

2 cups all-purpose flour(I used 1:1 ratio of whole wheat and AP flour)
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup (1/2 stick/2 oz/56g) butter, softened
3 Bananas. Ripe and mashed. (This should be about 1 cup)
4 tbsps yogurt (or 2 eggs)
1/3 cup plain yogurt
1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips(I used 100 gms of dark chocolate)

Procedure:

Preheat the oven to 180C and grease a 9’x3’ bread tin.

Melt the butter just a bit by microwaving it for 30 secs. Melt the chocolate in a separate cup by microwaving it at high for 1 min, and then stir it to mix the lumps.

In a mixing bowl, mix the sugar and butter. Add the mashed bananas and yogurt to this, and mix well.

Sieve the flours with the soda and salt. Add the wet mixture to this and mix it well to a batter consistency.

Take about half a cup of this batter and mix it with chocolate in a separate cup.

Pour the white batter and the chocolate batter alternatively into the bread tin. And mix them with a spoon, just once. The layers should be visible in this bread.

Bake at 180C for about 75 mins. I baked it at 185C for 60 mins and at 170 for 15 mins. Check for the tester to be clean.

Cut it in slices, and serve. This bread stays better and tastes awesome when you let it in the fridge overnight. We ate it for breakfast the next morning, and absolutely loved it!

Banana choco-chip cake

 

I bumped into this recipe when I was searching for some fruit based cakes. I had grown tired of baking the same recipes over and over again, and so this one was a total welcome bake. The banana flavour blended with the chocolate flavour and tasted heavenly. This is a dense cake, and I followed the recipe to the T. This yielded me one 6’ round cake, and two 3’x2’ square tin full of cakes, which I gave to friends who seemed to like this too.

So here it is. I slightly modified the recipe from here, to make it eggless.

Ingredients:

1 3/4 cup Flour
2 tsp Baking Powder
¼ tsp Baking Soda
1 tsp Salt
¾ cup Brown Sugar
2/3 cup Chocolate chips
3 Bananas (overripe), peeled. You can either mash them or paste them.
1/6 cup Oil
4 tbsp thick yogurt

Procedure:

Preheat the oven to 200C and grease the cake tins.

Sieve the flour, salt, baking powder and baking soda together. In a large mixing bowl, mix the yogurt and sugar together. Add the oil to this mixture and whisk well.

Mix the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients just about enough. Add the choco chips to this mixture and fold in.

Pour in the cake tins and bake for about 30 mins at 200C or till tester is clean.

Simple Fruit cake (whole wheat)

 

If there has been one thing that I have always loved in a bakery, it was the fruit cake. I would go to every bakery that I’ve ever seen, pointed to the fruit cake and asked the salesguy if it was egg-less. And they would shake their heads, thus shaking my dream of digging into the cake. THe dream of eating an egg-less fruit cake had just been unrealized. So when I figured out my cakes were turning out pretty neat, I knew I was going to bake this.

Some blog-hopping last night, in search of the recipe to the Christmas cake, I bumped into Raaga’s blog, and saw the recipe. Now, this one says 3 cups flour, which I knew was way too much for our family. So I reduced the quantities accordingly. Also, I had soaked raisins in rum 4-5 weeks ago, in the hope of getting to make the Christmas cake someday. But since this one is simple and very close to my dream cake, I thought I might as well use up few from that tin as well. And then, there is no way I would be baking a cake with Maida, when I know its me and my family eating it.(:) the logic is that we dont eat Maida at all at home, and if I am gifting the cake to others, I might as well make it tasty which is with Maida :)), so I substituted maida with whole wheat flour.

So here is the scaled down recipe -

Ingredients:

1 cup wheat flour
1 1/2 cup fruit mixture (raisins, sultanas, figs, tutty fruity)
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda

2 tbsp yogurt
2 tbsp fresh cream
1/4 cup vegetable oil
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp of cinnamon and cardamom powders each
2-3 drops of vanilla essence

Procedure:

Pre-heat the oven till 200C.

Beat the cream and yogurt together with the oil and sugar. Mix them well with the spice powders and vanilla essence.

Mix together the flour, baking soda and mixture.

Fold in the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients, and mix. Add the fruit mixture to this, and mix well, so that the fruits are evenly distributed.

Pour into aluminium tins, and bake at 185C for 30 mins, or till the tester is clean.
This mixture fit into 5 tins of 4x3 inches, and I baked all of them at the same time.

Let it cool for a while.

As usual, this is a bad pic, but no, this does not relate to the way this cake tasted. The husband even thought it resembled Dil Pasand, that sweet we used to eat in road-side bakeries as we were growing up :)
I gave a tin each to two of my good friends, and they seemed to love it too. So I guess this recipe will stay with me! :)

Coffee cinnamon cake with walnuts

 

Its been a very very busy day, with me not having time to even have my lunch. Well, lets just say that I didn’t realize it was 1:30PM till a friend called me for a coffee. And all day long, all I could think was that I would come  home and bake a cake and of course, listen to CokeStudio, Zeb and Haniya in particular.

Now, there is more than one occasion. P, a colleague at work didn’t get to eat the nutmeg cake that I baked, and she wanted me to bake a chocolate cake for her. I convinced her to agree to the walnut coffee cake, and somehow she agreed. Also, FIL was returning from his travel and he loves anything sweet. So, I thought I will use this chance and bake something, for him and for P too.

A search of recipes led me to this one on ChefInYou, but I was not very sure I wanted to bake the cake this way. So instead, I drew inspiration from the ingredients, and made my own recipe.

Ingredients:

1 cup AP flour(since both FIL and P like taste more than health, I decided to give the wheat flour a skip this time)
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp dark choco chips
1/4 cup chopped walnuts
A pinch of salt

2 tbsps yogurt (you can substitute this with one egg, but I honestly dont know whats the difference)
2 tbsps strong black coffee
1/4 cup melted butter
3/4 cup sugar(I used regular sugar, but you can powder it too)
1/4 cup milk(if required)
1 tsp ground cinnamon powder

Procedure:
Preheat the oven to 200C and meanwhile, gather the ingredients.
1. Whisk butter and sugar in a bowl, and add yogurt and coffee to it. Whisk them all together. Mix in the Cinnamon powder too
2. Mix all the dry ingredients together along with the chopped walnuts and the choco chips
3. Mix the wet and dry ingredients in a bowl, but do not overmix them
4. Pour in a aluminium foil box or greased cake tin
5. Bake for 30 mins at 185C
6. Decorate with powdered sugar if you want
7. Let the cake cool and dig in

The cake tasted pretty neat, but I figured out quickly that even coffee cake does not appeal to my palate. FIL liked the cake, and so did the husband though he said this certainly loses as compared to the nutmeg cake. :)

Update: Folks at work also liked it! Awesome!

Cake experiment - 1

 

Ever since I laid eyes on Arundati’s whole wheat nutmeg honey cake, I could not rest at all. No, I am not kidding. The desire to bake it and taste it has been so intense that I had to eventually give in to it, and make it.
May be it was the brilliant recipe or the need to prove to myself that I can bake a decent cake, or to have a nice cake recipe at hand when I call N and her family over for dinner, I baked it last night, on an experimental basis. The idea was that if this turns out good, I am going to bake it this weekend, for N! :)

I had all the necessary ingredients at hand, and since the recipe is so simple and easy, I came back from work, I got around to mixing the ingredients. After seeing how N had baked her cake(which btw was the best cake I ever ate, still waiting for her recipe so I can try it too) in small aluminium foil boxes, I decided to do the same too.

So, this is the recipe. I didn’t want to fiddle around with the ingredients and replace any, since I wanted to be honest with it.

I did some variations, though.

1. Instead of dry ginger powder, I grated fresh ginger and mixed it with the wet ingredients.

2. I felt I didnt need 1/2 cup of milk, and so I added milk at the end, directly to the batter when I felt it got a little tight, like the muffin batter. Thankfully it mixed well. I must’ve used up 1/4 cup of milk

3. I ran short of honey too. It was little less than 1/3 cup of honey and so I compensated it with sugar

4. Now to the part that I am not proud of. I got lazy and didnt powder the sugar. I mixed it as it is into the dry ingredients and then cursed myself for having done that. Thankfully, it mixed well and I could not feel the crystals when the cake was done

The cake needed exactly 35 mins of baking at 185C, and it came out of the tin pretty easily, though I didnt dust it. The picture does not do any justice to how the cake tasted, honest to God! And the fact that it doesnt have any maida(I dont use maida at all! AT ALL!) made me feel really good about it.

There it is, my first ever proper cake. I did bake a carrot nutmeg cake for the husband on his birthday, but I knew I could’ve done much better than that. The husband who is a total non-sweet-lover also loved this cake, and asked for a second serving, which is a lot! :)