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.

Peanut butter brownies… to welcome the holiday season…

 

I always get excited during October. Festive season. All the shopping. Happy moods all over.

After all, it is the closest to being our holiday season, something equivalent to the Christmas-New Year holidays. Everyone is in a celebratory mood right from Navratri to Diwali, so much so that , on some days there is no one in the entire wing in the office buildings. Its just contagious, this happy happy mood… and I love this mood.

So while the husband is planning to open up his 21-yr old Jack Daniels whiskey (gifted by a work colleague to him, comes in a super-sexy bottle which has all my attention – to serve as a home to one of my indoor plants :-)), I decided to bake something.

A lunch plan with a couple of friends at Prego is on the cards for tomorrow , (that is, if this whole Telangana bandh doesn’t spoil everyone’s plans!!! :-( ). Another reason to bake.

Some rummaging in my OneNote notebook in the Must-Trys section showed me some links for brownies. Something with peanut butter is what I wanted make for a while now. I clubbed both the words and Googled a bit, for some peanut butter brownie recipes. Instead of being swarmed with recipes, surprisingly I got just a couple. I mixed and matched them, and arrived at this recipe.

Ingredients

1/2 C peanut butter
1/3 C butter
1/2 C packed brown sugar
2/3 C sugar
4 tbsps thick cream (I used Amul cream)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1 C flour (all-purpose)
1/4 tsp. salt
1 tsp baking powder
1/3 C chocolate chips

Procedure

Beat the peanut butter and butter together with a fork for atleast 3 minutes till they both are blended well, and are smooth. Add the sugars to this and beat again, till the whole mixture is smooth.

Now add the cream and mix into the butter mixture. At the end, add the vanilla extract.

Now add the sifted flour, baking powder and salt mixture into this wet ingredient mix, and mix just enough.

Fold in the chocolate chips, and bake it in a preheated oven at 185 C for 25 minutes or when it passes the toothpick test. (Prescribed baking time is 35 minutes)

This batch yielded 20 pieces of brownies.

I took them out of the oven 10 mins before the prescribed baking time to let them be goo-ey and fudgy at the centre, and cut them after they cooled down. And man… what god-awesome they tasted! :-) With a rich peanut butter taste, and the crunch from the sugars, and the slight chocolate-y taste in them, I loved these brownies.

They had the almost-flaky finish on top, little dry in the next layer and gooey at the bottom, texture being just perfect.

After the Pound cake of this week and this brownie experiment, looks like I am on a self-claimed roll… This sure is a good baking week… :)

Hummus Pasta, an instant mood-lifter!

I love hummus. I love pasta. Well, that’s not news for the readers of this blog, right?
I also love garlic and cherry tomatoes. Sometimes I wonder if I am really born in a community which abhors garlic, and if I was really lifted off someone else’s hospital bed like Mom always claimed. Yeah, the things I love to eat are not what Mom would generally make at home or dream of it. And I don’t even cook or eat meat!
The flavours, the ingredients , the cuisines. All of them. This just strengthens Mom’s case, right? Sigh.
So before I drifted off to talk about my confused origin, I was talking about the flavours I love. I was known to have the biggest sweet tooth on the dining table. Any dining table. But off late, I have discovered quite joyously that the sweet tooth was just an implication of a medical condition which required me to stock on sugars, and that I really do not enjoy desserts as much I thought I do. But yes, the love for pasta and anything Italian , well that’s not changed over time. Thankfully. For me, and for the husband who, once in a while relishes non-Indian food, pasta being one of them.
Yesterday, when I was passing by Q-Mart (In case you don’t know what it is, which means you are not a Hyderabadi, this is an overtly pish-posh grocery store where prices of everything is atleast thrice of what you would get in a regular grocery store. Slight exaggeration aside, this is not a place I go to everyday, in case you were thinking ;-) ), I got reminded that I had to buy one particular species of Dancing Bamboos to add to my Bamboo collection. But Providence has different plans for me (sigh. I’ll never stop being the drama queen, right? :-)) The minute I entered the store, I was drawn to the vegetable section. This place always stocks the freshest of the veggies and greens and I laid eyes on a fresh bunch of basil leaves, which I picked up almost immediately. And then there were a basket of cherry tomatoes there. Needless to say, I picked them too.
Once back home, I made some basil hummus and was wondering what I should make next to use the cherry tomatoes and fresh basil leaves whose smell was wafting appetizingly in my kitchen. Aglio Olio with spaghetti was the first thing that I thought of , its easy to make. Making this with dried basil leaves is good, but there is nothing better than this pasta with fresh basil leaves. Moreover, I can use all the garlic and basil I want, and its a house-favourite.
But then, I also wanted to use up the hummus as the sauce. I remembered reading this recipe by The Cilantropist , one of my favourite food-bloggers and decided to get inspired by it.


Hummus pasta it was, then! With generous amounts of basil thrown in. I generally add a variety of herbs to any pasta I make, but I wanted to just retain the smell, flavour and taste of Hummus and the tomatoes for this one. The thought appealed to my almost-hungry stomach so much that it started rumbling instantly! :)

Ingredients
Basil Hummus - 1 cup, slightly thinned but not pouring consistency
Whole wheat Spaghetti – a fistful
Cherry Tomatoes – 250 gms
Fresh basil leaves – a handful. Chopped.
Garlic cloves – 10-15. (You can change the quantity per your taste)
Olive oil – 2 tbsp. Just enough to roast the Hummus and Garlic
Black pepper – to taste
Salt – to taste
Olives – pitted or sliced, quantity as you desire , completely optional
Red chilli flakes – One tbsp

Instructions
Cook the pasta per the instructions on its cover.

Meanwhile, pour the oil in a pan, and char the tomatoes for about 5 mins with pepper and salt on it. Once its slightly charred, add the garlic and roast a bit. Now add the basil leaves to this and let it be roasted along with the garlic and tomatoes.
Add the hummus to this and let it be on heat for a minute. Now add the olives and pasta and toss well.
Serve hot. And tell me how you like it. :-)