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…
Fudge Brownies
There are always recipes that thrill us to the core, that we can’t wait to post them. 🙂 I guess there is no better time that post it during this Bakeathon! The Easy Fudge Brownies have always been a hit with many who have tried, but those brownies don’t have chocolate and butter melted, which I always feel is the essence of a brownie. Most of us have our own brownie preferences, and I have loved every brownie recipe I have tried. My most favorite one is this fat-free brownies – if you haven’t tried them, I urge you to try them as they are really fudge like and melt in the mouth… But this recipe also deserves its own place… I have always wanted to have a fudge brownie recipe on the blog. But the amount of recipes on the internet is quite scary. I went…
Malted Nutella Bread Pudding
With due permission from Valli, I decided to move yesterday’s Bakeathon post to today, since I didn’t want it to clash with the MFB post. I somehow don’t like the idea of having more than one post a day, though I have done that a few times in the past, but not with a full heart. This time, I made sure I asked Valli and as soon as I got the OK, I just went ahead with scheduling the post on the next day. 🙂 The recipe today is an amalgamation of a lot of factors – leftover bread getting stale, wanting to finish a bottle of Nutella nearing expiry date and then not liking the bottle of chocolate flavored Horlicks that I had bought. Horlicks is actually my cheat meal. Especially with nights getting quite chilled now, I always wish for a warm drink before going off…
Salad Shirazi ~ Persian Cucumber Tomato Salad
The tenth of the month means it is time for the Muslim Food Blogger challenge. This month, the theme was something of so much interest to me. I had put up the theme with so much excitement, but somehow my mood slid and I struggled to put this post together. I can’t express how sad it makes me feel… 🙁 This month, we chose to cook from an Islamic nation and the country in question is Iran/ Persia. I love Iranian food and I have mentioned it in a few of the posts covering some of the recipes in that cuisine. I had planned to cook a few recipe, bookmarked them, printed them, bought the stocks… alas, somehow my mood just didn’t work and I had to settle for a simple recipe. At least I am happy that I am able to participate… Iran or Persia has…
Chocolate Labneh Cake with Chocolate Ganache
I believe there is no dearth to recipes of chocolate cakes, definitely no. 🙂 So today, I go ahead and post my current favorite. I mention “current”, since my preferred chocolate cake keeps changing whenever I bake a new recipe and fall for it. 😀 I first loved the Steamed Chocolate Cake, till I made the One Bowl Chocolate Cake, and then the vegan one and the eggless one are constantly in the competition. The final cake I fell in love was with buttermilk, and now, it has got replaced by this… 😉 To make the story short, I love chocolate cake. I only have one condition – they need to be soft, fluffy and moist. Somehow the dense cakes like the devil’s food does not appeal to me much, even though I love brownies. But I guess, slowly I am slowly warming up to those type of…
Chocolate Hazelnut Biscotti
Hazelnuts are pretty expensive nuts, just like pecans and pine nuts. That’s why it is something I never buy. The only times I have bought some pecans were to bake these cookies and these ones too and I treated it like gold. I buy pine nuts only when I know I have to be using it for some recipe, and that too, I buy so little that I invite a stupid look from the fellow at the counter. 😀 It so happened that I was walking towards the vegetable aisle when a box of hazelnuts stared at me. I looked at it, wishing I could buy it and then looked at the price. I re-looked at it again. And again. And again. I couldn’t really believe my eyes. The next thing that happened was that the box landed up straight into the trolley. Once the box reached home, since…
Self Saucing Jaffa Pudding | Chocolate Orange Pudding Cake
Last year in December, I had participated in the Bake-a-thon, just because I had a lot of drafts to cover and it was perfect to participate. But this time, I didn’t have much. I had to bake to cover the 13 posts for this season. But I really wanted to participate. Baking is love for me. It is a literal stress buster. Whether it is a recipe that involves numerous bowls and gadgets to ones with just a bowl and whisk, I have loved each and every recipe that I have baked and posted on this blog, irrespective of whether they are sweet or savory. But it takes no points to know that I admire the sweet ones more! 😉 After targeting weight loss this year, the first thing that went out of the window was baking. The reasons are obvious. I have time and again mentioned that…
Biryani Dejaaj ~ Emirati Chicken Biriyani
If you see, starting from the Khabeesa, I have made it a point to post close to or on the UAE National Day, something that I don’t even do for the Indian Independence Day. 😀 That doesn’t make me any less patriotic, it is just that I belong to a generation of Indians who own an Indian passport, who love every vacation trip planned to India, but since they have been born and/or brought up in some part of the UAE, a part of them is in them. I am sure many of them who are in the same boat of mine can get how I feel. 🙂 This year has been celebrated by the entire country as the “Year of Zayed” as it is his 100th birth anniversary, commemorating the great father of the nation’s visionary outlook for this country. His vision for the country is very…
Roundup: Sweets without Refined Ingredients
Last month as a part of the Blogging Marathon #94, a few us had selected the theme “Sweets without Refined Ingredients”. Since the theme is of particular interest to me, I decided to take up the opportunity of doing the round-up of posts for this theme. As you can see below, there are some amazing recipes from some lovely bloggers of sweets that you can enjoy, without feeling too much guilt. A word of caution though – sweets are sweets, and will be calorie laden, how much ever you try to keep them “healthy”, so enjoy in moderation and exercise caution. 😉 So here is the snapshot of all those lovely bloggers who contributed to this very interesting theme… Gayathri’s Cook Spot: Sathu Maavu/ Multi Grain Flour Cookies Kadalai Parippu Thengai Urundu/ Peanut Coconut Balls Bajra Gur Roti Bhavana of Code 2 Cook: Dates Oats Laddu Gajar…
Batata Vada ~ Maharashtrian Potato Patties
I am usually very prompt with my challenge posts. If something is declared, I like to finish off and be ready at the earliest, so that I don’t feel stressed. Keeping things last minute gets me in a panic attack, and I personally do not enjoy that feeling. Sometimes, I really admire bloggers who are able to do things at the last minute – cooking, clicking and blogging! I simply can’t do it! I like to be more organized so that I have peace of mind. But that wasn’t the case with the post for today. This month, I decided to participate in the Shh Cooking Secretly Challenge and the state from where we are cooking is Maharashtra. Even though I am not very sure of the cuisine, I volunteered in. Only while searching I realized that Amras puri, Shrikand and Piyush were all Maharasthrian specials – so…
Chukku Kaapi | Dry Ginger Coffee
When you end up scheduling posts, the latest happenings just wouldn’t get recorded. 🙂 After almost three years, we had a school friends meetup over the weekend. We actually couldn’t believe that we hadn’t met for so long! Days, months and years seem to pass so fast and then the distance is limited by the use of social media, that you really don’t realize the gap of personal interaction! It would be a cliche to say we had an amazing time, just talking, giggling and discussing various issues. Since we had met up at a friend’s house rather than the mall, we were able to laugh our lungs out. We parted, promising to keep the meetups as frequent as possible. But usually the tide of life just sweeps through and things don’t get done as promises made. 🙂 We also had some amazing rains, that saw the roads…
Wheatgerm Cookies
If there is something that can be baked within 30 minutes, then there is no points for guessing – cookies! Even muffins can be done in that time, but totally dependent on the density of the batter. Cookies also have its condition – that the dough can be used to bake immediately, which is usually not the case for cookies like chocolate chip ones. While wondering what to come up as the third post for the “Meals under 30 minutes” theme for the Blogging Marathon #94, my eyes fell on these delicious cookies that I had baked recently. There was this box of wheatgerm that I had bought and was approaching its best before date. Bloggers and cooking fanatics would definitely appreciate how that feels! Even though I have truncated my purchases so much now unlike before, I still have such issues coming up once in a while….
Paneer Dahi Bhalla
OK, so when you are on a quantified diet and you need to eat as per what is in your list, what do you do to cravings? Twist and tweak them as per your diet! 😀 So today, under my theme “Meals under 30 minutes” for the Blogging Marathon #94, I have to share something that I ate “God knows how many times” of late! The first time I had Dahi Bhallas (or vadas) was at Humi’s place, when I went to meet her the very first time – that was around four years ago. I was never a chaat fan – the first time I had chaat at the insistence of my colleague P, I almost puked out at the combination of sweet and sour – please do not beat me! Gradually, it caught up on my taste buds and now I love it! But still not…
Idiyappam | String Hoppers
When Valli’s mail came for the themes for this month’s Blogging Marathon #94 and my eyes fell on “Meals within 30 minutes”, I really wanted to do it. I am currently building up my “Under 30 Minutes” recipes on the blog and the theme was perfect for adding three more. I have chosen three recipes that fits into different courses, so that it doesn’t feel like you get only drinks within that time. 😀 The first one are Idiyappams or Nool Puttu, as we call it. “Nool” is thread, and definitely these are thread-like rice dumplings, steamed and served. I never realized how much my girls loved this till they literally ate my head asking to make it. I thought it was a really complicated process and would just ignore it. It was one Instagram story of Fami which prompted me to try these. I pulled up my…
Butterscotch Pudding Cake
In UAE, the amount of public holidays is very limited, maybe better than many GCC countries, but when compared to India, it is quite numbered. So we always wait for those holidays. In the past few years, they have been moving the holidays to combine along with weekends, so that we end up having long weekends. Many do short travels, some like us go ahead and explore the country itself, hehe. We had a long weekend due to the Rabiulawwal12 or Milad Nabi as it is called. I wouldn’t like to dwell on it, because the day is quite a debated one in the Islamic world. As much as the evidence of Prophet Muhammed (PBUH)’s exact date of birth is not vivid, mainly due to the fact that there was no Hijri calendar during that time, and also for the fact that he passed away on the same date,…