I have always written very long posts for almost all my milestone posts on this blog. I have celebrated the blog birthdays, and then each time I achieved a number of posts on the blog, etc. Of late, I stopped celebrating. It started to make no sense to me. Should I say that they started to mean nothing to me? As this post goes live, the blog has completed 6 years old. I should have posted day before yesterday, but I wasn’t in a mood to clog up the posts on the blog. I wanted to give the posts some time, and myself some time too… Last year was a fight of sorts. I fought to keep my spirit of blogging. I fought to keep going. There were so many reasons to it. I started the blog as a diary of recipes for myself, and then it slowly…
Chocolate Persimmon Overnight Oats
I haven’t done overnight oats in a long time. So when I saw Sarah’s information email saying that this month, the theme for the Fantastical Food Fight would be “Overnight Oats”, I just wanted to participate. I love overnight oats and since I have been on a quantified eating of late, swapping my rice with oats was usually not a preferred option, so oats had to take a limited offering at times. I don’t know how better I can explain this. 😀 Anyway, there were this persimmons that I had reserved to try this muffin recipe for the Bakeathon that concluded last month. However it didn’t happen, since I had no mood to bake them whatsoever. Happens, right? I just wanted to eat them rather than cook with them. Hehe… Then I thought, why not I use them in overnight oats? I decided to make a chocolate version,…
Double Bean Sriracha Hummus
I had joined a challenge called “Recipe Swap” sometime back and participated in one challenge. But then, it just fizzled down and didn’t take off. In November, Mir took over the reins of the group and decided to kick-start the challenge. I decided to participate this month and thankfully there was enough time to cook the dish before my parents landed. Hehe… I was assigned Ali’s blog “Fix Me a Little Lunch“. She is a US based food blogger, and as mentioned in her blog, she tries to cook and eat food cooked from organic sources and at home. As is my nature, my first instance was to try a sweet recipe. So I hovered around a few like the Blueberry Peach Coffee Cake, the very intriguing Star Anise Pannacotta and these Mini Strawberry Chocolate Galette. But then I had already baked way too much sweet last month…
Spicy Oven Baked Chicken
If it is the tenth of the month, then it surely has to be the Muslim Food Blogger challenge post. Month after month, it does become a challenge to select a theme and put it forward to the ladies in this small group, but Alhamdulillah, they seem to be enjoying the themes and that is what matters. 🙂 This month as per the usual flow, we were supposed to be cooking from a Muslim blog. The chosen blog for the month was “Afelia’s Kitchen“. Afelia happens to be a Bangladeshi UK citizen and shares some interesting recipes on her blog. I found out the blog when I was searching for the Bangladeshi cooking we did a few months ago, where I cooked the Murgir Korma. I had bookmarked to try a few recipes from her blog during that time and thought it was a lovely blog to explore…
Vazhuthananga Upperi/ Mezhukupuratti ~ Malabar Eggplant Stir Fry
This month, I am joining up with a new challenge. I have joined it up more to push myself to blog. Every time, I feel that my creative juices are getting stuck, so such challenges are good enough to get me thinking out of the box. The posts I am scheduling this month seem to be majorly challenge posts too, hehe… Vidya and Jolly jointly conduct the A-Z Recipe Challenge, where the members cook from an alphabet every alternate month. The beauty of this challenge is you pick up an ingredient which starts with the concerned alphabet and cook with it. I had become a part of the group in October but waited till I would feel fine to join in. When the alphabet “E” was declared for January, I gave my name but I had forgotten that I would have my whole entourage at home and that would…
Paal Vazhakka ~ Malabar Plantain Sago Dessert {Version 2}
Isn’t it such a relief to see a white colored post after an overdose of brown posts in the past month? 😀 At least, I am feeling so much relief to see a change. Hehe… Another year has started, and we inch closer to our end in this world… Does anybody think of it that way? We celebrate each year with so much aplomb, not realizing that every moment that goes by means that we are losing a chance to better ourselves. There is so much that can be written with this regard. But seriously, I am in no mood to write. My head is buzzing with so much that I am feeling tired. I don’t know if it is good or bad… 🙂 I will leave it at that and move on to the post for the day… I have already shared a Paal Vazhakka recipe earlier,…
Chocolate Pumpkin Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Frosting
The last post of the year, and it just happens to be the last post of this year’s Bake-a-thon too! Every last post is meant to be a look back into the year. I really don’t know if I liked 2018. Even though the year started pretty decently, past midway, it came with a lot of stress related to how things are moving. I better not dwell around it – these are things that will happen. We find ways to deal with them and move on. The highlights of this year was surely my weight loss and then B’s wedding. We had a very good time and met up a lot of people I hadn’t seen in a long time, Alhamdulillah. It was a day that went really well and we went off to sleep with such a settled mind… 🙂 And of course the weight loss… I…
Eggless Chocolate Cookie Butter Cake | Chocolate Biscoff Cake
Today’s post for the Bake-a-thon 2018 comes up with a story, but it is a sad one. By the way, can you believe that we are on the second last post for the Bake-a-thon? This time has been super fast. I have totally enjoyed baking, clicking, typing and scheduling the posts for this series with the chocolate theme. I hope all of you loved all the posts that I have done for this series! It has left me drained, literally speaking, but drained in a good way, Alhamdulillah… 🙂 So coming to the story for this cake… I usually bake and take something when I go visit my friends or relatives after a long time. It is like breaking the ice too, right? I always prefer home made goodies instead of buying a box of chocolates. It makes it feel a lot more personalized. I have mentioned before…
Flourless Chocolate Cake for One | Sugar Free
All the recipes that you have seen in the Bakeathon this month have either been made to treat my cousins, give to friends or colleagues, for my girls… In short, it was always for distribution. Don’t you think it is unfair if I don’t treat myself to something chocolaty when I have baked so much for everybody else? 😉 Here comes in the Flourless Chocolate Cake, that will serve only one. Yes, only one person, and that was me. I can’t explain the process of how I had to sneak bake this and eat this in between a weekend cooking mess in the kitchen. Especially, chocolate has this nasty habit of leaving off its aroma as it bakes. So my sniffy Azza kept coming in and peeping into the oven – I didn’t turn the lights on! – “Ummi, is something baking?” And I would just do my…
Sticky Chocolate Brownies
Back to back recipes that I baked for distribution… 🙂 I have a very small circle of best friends. One used to be in Muscat – I have written about her a few times on the blog, and is now back home settled into her life. As this post goes live, she is back in Muscat for a couple of weeks, but I won’t be able to go see her. 🙁 The other one stays 20 minutes drive from my place. Still the hassles of meeting up is real. She struggles with her girls, I with my busy schedule. But once in a while, I do put my hair down and just jump at her place. We both have been together since grade 7, and we are diagonally opposite to each other in every way. I really mean it. We keep getting asked how we have stayed friends all…
Vegan Cocoa Scones
When I had started blogging, I was in a shared kitchen with umma. She wouldn’t allow me to bake as such, since she is diabetic and she would say that my baking would actually not allow her to be strict with herself. I would wait for her and D to go for their walks so that I could do the baking. When they would return back, the smell of the bakes would be wafting in the house and she would give me that look – I guess we all know what that look is, yes, the same thing we use with our children too now! 😀 Life is which goes around, comes around… 🙂 Once D retired and left the country for good, HD found a decent apartment close to where his business is, so we shifted. It’s been four years now in this house, Alhamdulillah. As soon…
Chocolate Coconut Cake | Low Carb, Refined Sugar Free
When I was planning my posts for the Bakeathon, a blessing in disguise came in between. 😉 I was invited to a meet-up session of ladies following keto and paleo lifestyle for their weight loss. Even though I had a very brief stint with keto which wasn’t very encouraging, I decided to just show up with this delicious cake that I had baked specifically for the ladies to enjoy. I had intended to come back as soon as I meet the host but it turned out that the whole get together was so interesting, that I ended up sitting till the end. 🙂 Has that happened to you? It was a little intimidating for me when the hostess requested me to give some motivation to the group as to how to stick to an eating pattern and exercise for weight loss. I am still learning a lot of…
Rocky Road Bites
I could have moved away from the chocolate theme, while doing today’s post for this month’s Fantastical Food Fight challenge. Sarah had messaged us that this month, the theme would be “Candy”. It is obvious because December is considered to be a sweet month and candy is surely a part of it. After a little bit of confusion, she clarified that candy could include fudge, squares, bites, anything that looked like a candy. I was initially planning to sit out of the theme, since I am not much into candy making. The time I had baked the Fudge Brownies for our school meet-up, I wanted to make something else for the kids. My eyes fell on the pack of marshmallows that Azza had finished 80 percent and wouldn’t eat the rest since it didn’t appeal to her anymore. It always happens, isn’t it? They want everything but then…
Easy Chocolate Cinnamon Rolls
Ever since I have started posts this month, I haven’t shared anything much personal. Maybe because there hasn’t been anything interesting… 🙂 One thing I started doing this month is journaling a statement every day. It is basically one question, that needs to be answered in a couple of statements, depending on your state of the day. Even though I haven’t been regular with it, I have stuck to it 80% of the time and can feel how relaxed that jotting down a couple of sentences is making me. I am trying to stick to it and do it on a daily basis from now on. I am seriously thinking of doing a statement and sticking it next to my bed, so that each time I go to bed, I check it and ensure that everything is done. Just trying to emphasis a bit more on my mental health……
Chocolate Flan Cake
Deciding to participate in the Bake-a-thon 2018 actually helped me clean up some of my to-do list. One of them was definitely this flan cake or magic cake, as it has been called in some places. Whoever came up with this fantastic idea needs to be patted at the back. When you want cake and pudding together, but don’t want to make it in several pans, all you do it is bake them together and let the magic happen! The base is a normal chocolate cake, and the top is a creme custard, duly topped with a caramel topping. Now what happens? Here we apply a little bit of our chemistry knowledge. Haven’t you heard of density? Yes… so since the density of the cake batter is heavier than that of the flan batter, in the process of baking, the cake magically moves up and the flan pushes…