Am a photographer, yay! :)

Couple of weeks ago, I shot some pics of a beautiful cake my friend baked. She is a master baker – The Dream Cakes, and is a professional and her cake was selected to be featured in Cake central Magazine. I shot these pics a little too late, and so we missed the deadline… it sure did feel bad, but her cake still got featured in the magazine, and the pics were shot by her friend. Here is another link from the magazine’s site.

For this shot, I planned , conceptualized and shot every pic, and the pics came out pretty good. Am super proud of these pics and have waited all this while to share them. [I couldn’t share the pics earlier because of some condition laid by the magazine guys]. And here are the pics… every part of this cake is edible, and I tried to highlight all the different aspects of this cake.

And there is more…

Eggless Sponge Cake, with a surprise

Sponge cake is a forever favourite in our house. Yes, its heavenly – the rich , smooth , heavy cake. But I stop myself from baking it ever so often, because of the amount of butter it takes. So imagine my joy when I discovered this recipe by Nags.

Just a cup of yogurt, and half a cup of oil, and this cake is magic. Its moist, tasty and heavy, and yet with a slight crumb. Just how I like my cakes. And yet, so incredibly easy to make.

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.

Nutmeg Cranberry Cake

The original recipe for this cake is Arundati’s, and I’ve even replicated the cake couple of months back. But this time when I began to make it, I added some modifications. I reduced the liquid content because I felt the batter would be too runny. I added some berries, and I made the entire cake with AP flour.

These ingredients make a decent 8” cake , and can feed a dinner party easily. You can add some rum glaze to this to spice it up, or have it as it is.

Ingredients

1 C AP flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp finely powdered dry ginger
1/2 tsp powdered nutmeg
1/2 cup sugar
1/3 C honey
1/2 C yogurt
1/3 C thick cream
A pinch salt
1/2 C dried cranberries

Instructions

Butter a 8” round cake tin or line it with parchment paper. Preheat the oven to 185C.
Sift all the dry ingredients together.
Mix all the wet ingredients together.
Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour the wet ingredients in it. Gently fold and then fold in the dried cranberries.
Pour into the cake tin and bake for 30 mins, or till the tester comes out clean.

Banana Blueberry Cake

By now, I guess its no secret that bananas are my favourite fruit-to-bake, right? Well… turns out they are indeed my favourite, its a pleasant surprise. I have begun treat it like a comfort bake. Anytime I want to bake something and I can’t think what , I go over to Banana. Muffin, Marble bread or cake . With chocolate chips, milk chocolate or melted chocolate. With cinnamon, vanilla, brandy or rum. I feel I’ve baked them all. And yet I go back to searching for more banana based recipes. I went through all the sites I bookmarked to find this one by The Singing Chef. I wanted to use up the blueberries I got from my US trip, and that leftover small batch of rum-soaked raisins, also the cream and condensed milk from the Bailey’s experiment were in the fridge asking to be used.

And yes, it had to be eggless. So I adapted the recipe to suit the ingredients I had at hand.

So after The Great Kitchen Shopping Escapade I had at Agro Mech over the weekend, I wanted to use my new stuff. Those mini Bundt's and that one big Bundt pan, to be precise. I decided to make a Bundt cake – Banana Blueberry Bundt Cake with rum soaked raisins , it is!

Recipe Courtesy – The Singing Chef

Ingredients
1 3/4 cup Flour
2 tsp Baking Powder
¼ tsp Baking Soda
1 tsp Salt
3/4 cup Brown Sugar
1/4 cup Raisins (soaked overnight in dark rum)
1/4 cup Blueberries
2 Bananas (overripe), peeled and mashed
3 tbsp Milkmaid/condensed milk
1/3 cup Oil
2 tbsp Yogurt
2 tbsp thick cream

2 tbsp Rum (optional, better if it is the rum from the rum-soaked raisins)

Instructions
Preheat the oven to 185C and sift the dry ingredients together.
Oil and dust the pan with flour.
Beat together the mashed bananas, cream, yogurt, condensed milk, sugar, and oil.
Pour this mixture into the dry ingredients and fold in the raisins.
Gently mix in the rum, if using.
Bake for 45-50 mins or till a skewer comes out clean.

This being my first time baking in a Bundt pan, and me not being sure how to use butter paper for a Bundt pan, I was very worried about the cake coming out clean. Surprisingly, all I had to do was cut through the edges of the pan gently with a knife, invert the pan to a plate and beat the bottom of the pan. And the cake was sitting pretty on the plate. I loved the flavours in this, the rum soaked raisins, the blueberries and the faint taste of bananas. Next time I make this, I am going to add in a few drops of Brandy flavour also. Or increase the rum content. And think of a nice topping/icing for this cake, may be rum-chocolate-based.

You can have slices of this cake for chai. You can also eat it with jam, for breakfast, may be. Or team it with the chocolate peanut butter and eat. I am going to do all of these with this cake. :-)

Pound Cake–An awesome recipe

 

Oh well, there is no story behind this trial. None at all. Oh wait, does a craving to eat something extremely sugary and fatty count as a story? Yes? Great, that’s it then! :-)

I hadn’t baked a pound cake in all these days of claiming to “bake good cakes and brownies”, and the other day I got said craving. I just had to make this cake, coz I knew this would ensure the maximum butter intake. Some recipe searching and asking for suggestions for Twitter lead to a friend giving me this link, instructions which I followed to the T (no, I don’t have the patience to see the videos, I didn’t, and trust me, it wasn’t needed), and got the softest, tastiest cake I ever baked.

I, of course, replaced the egg with other fats to ensure that there was a soft finish to the cake. Also, the first time I baked this cake with the said measurements of the ingredients, I found it too sweet, and too soft. I reduced the sugar content from 1 C to 3/4 C, and also added a little less than 1/2 C of butter.

Ingredients:

½ Cup of Unsalted Butter at room temperature
6 tbsps thick yogurt
½ Cup of Cream (I used Amul cream)
1 ½ Cups of All Purpose Flour
¼ tsp of Baking Powder
1/8 tsp of Baking Soda
¼ tsp of Salt
3/4 Cup of Sugar
½ tsp of Vanilla Extract

1/2 C Tutti-Fruity (optional)

Instructions:

Line a 9x5 tin with parchment paper, and butter. Also, pre-heat the oven to 185 C.

Beat the butter and sugar together till they form a smooth mixture. Now add the yogurt and cream and beat well till this is a smooth mixture. Add the vanilla extract to this mixture.

Sift the flour with the baking powder, soda and salt.

Mix the wet and dry ingredients together, just enough. Fold in the Tutti-Fruity into this batter and pour into the baking tin. Bake for 50 mins to 1 hour or till a toothpick comes out clean.

Cool it and serve.

 

This is a basic pound cake recipe. I believe you can glaze it with some fruit based glaze, or pour Chocolate ganache on it , or eat it in a trifle pudding. Just about anything you can imagine to eat.

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

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! :)

Chocolate Apple cake

 

Mother-in-law was visiting and I wanted to bake something nice and special for her. Okay, that’s just a pretence. I had been dying to bake a cake for a while, after all those successful attempts at muffins and the wows I got for them. I was thinking cakes wouldn’t be much different from muffins, and I would do great at them too. Also, at the Landmark book sale, I picked up this nice little book on Home Baking which had some great recipes for muffins and savoury bakes.

I opened the book and the baked the first recipe I bumped into. Well, not exactly the first, coz the first one turned out to be yet another muffin, albeit a very interesting one. But remember, I wanted to bake a cake, no more muffins, since I had graduated the Muffin class :)

I closed the book and when I reopened it, I saw a very beautiful pic of Individual Chocolate apple cakes. Now, this recipe is for individual cakes, but I didnt have the patience to lay the muffin tray, and so baked the whole dough into one cake.

Given above is the original pic given in the recipe book, and the recipe is as below -

Ingredients:

150gm butter

1/4 cup sugar (I used dermerra sugar)

3 eggs (I used 6 tbsps of thick yogurt)

2 cups plain flour(Again, I substituted this for whole wheat flour)

1/4 cup cocoa

3 tsps baking powder

560 gm canned apple pieces (I used one full apple finely chopped)

Procedure:

1. Preheat the oven till 180C

2. Melt butter in a saucepan on low flame, and beat in yogurt(or eggs) and sugar into it.

3. Sift the dry ingredients together and mix in the wet ingredients into this. Do not beat it, but mix it gently

4. Pour one layer into the greased muffin tray , top it with apple pieces and pour more batter into it. Since I decided to make the cake, I poured one layer of dough, one layer of apple pieces and another layer of dough, all in one baking dish

5. Bake for 15-20 mins at 180C or till the tester comes out clean. I had to bake this for 30 mins, may be because of the thickness of the dough and the wattage of my oven

We ate it with vanilla ice-cream, but I bet it would be awesome eaten with Baileys. In spite of everyone liking the taste of this cake, I did not quite enjoy it, may be because of my wearing fascination on chocolate cakes. I had recently baked a bunch of chocolate muffins without checking any recipe book, which turned out awesome too, but I guess I grew out of chocolate based bakes. I secretly took a vow to not try any more chocolate based ones, and move on to other flavored cakes.