Eggless Baking: Custard powder Cherry Cake

One more attempt at baking a cake and this time too I picked up a recipe for trial from Divya Kudua's Easy Cooking blog. Please follow the link - Eggless custard powder snack cake for the original recipe.

I made some modifications to the recipe in the above link and I am glad these changes I made did not let me down. Without further ado, below is the list of ingredients I used and the method.

Ingredients

All Purpose flour - 1 1/2 cups
Vanilla flavoured Custard Powder - 3/4 cup (I used Brown and Polson brand) 
Baking powder - 2 1/4 tsp
Sugar - 1 cup 
Vanilla essence - 1/2 tsp
Oil - 1/2 cup 
Milk - 1 cup
Cherries (sweetened) - 50 g (cut into halves) 
The recipe I followed by Divya Kudua uses butter 150 g instead of oil and 3/4 cup sugar. 


Method


1.In a bowl, take milk, sugar and beat well using an electrical hand mixer at low speed for a minute. To this add, the baking powder and beat again, let the mixture rest for a while and ensure bubbles appear at the top. 


2.Add oil too to this mixture and beat well, again for a whole minute. 


3.Add vanilla essence and beat for a few seconds. 


4. Prior to performing steps 1-3, sift custard powder and flour together and keep aside. 


5. Prepare the tin for baking. I used an eight inch ring mould/bundt cake tin. I lined bottom and sides with oil, after greasing, placed cherries onto the bottom of the tin, sprinkled little flour on the sides and bottom. 


6.Preheat the oven to 180'C 


7. Fold in the flour and custard powder mixture to the wet ingredients in the bowl of step 3 , fold smoothly ensuring there are no lumps. 


8. Pour the cake batter prepared into the ring mould slowly. Bake at 180'C for 45 minutes, check for the knife coming out clean. 


9. Cool the cake on rack and invert, if baked well, the cake will come out as a whole with cherries engraved on top. 


I used oil instead of butter, used little extra sugar and the results were right for me. The cake was nice yellow in color due to addition of custard powder. The cherries on top added little richness to the otherwise simple, snack cake. 


Below are some pictures - 

Cake in the tin, waiting for it to cool - the apple perched on top of the tin is just for a minor special effect

Tin inverted, cake comes out clean, cherries seen on top of the cake

Eggless Baking: Chocolate Walnut Cake

My Microwave Convection oven is back after some repair work and I have been earnestly trying to make up for time lost not baking. The baking spree is also on to test if my oven has really got back to good working condition.... stress testing it :) 

This recipe is from Divya Kudua's Easy Cooking - Eggless Chocolate Walnut cake. I am writing down the ingredients and procedure down here for any direct reference. There is a difference in temperature setting I used from the blog I referred to. 

Ingredients

Flour - 1 cup

Cocoa powder - 1/2 cup (I used Cadbury's Cocoa powder) 

Instant coffee powder - 1 tsp (used BRU instant coffee powder) 

Thick curd(homemade) - 1 cup

Sugar - 3/4 cup (this quantity yields sufficiently sweet cake, just perfect)

Baking powder - 1 1/4 tsp

Baking soda - 1/2 tsp

Oil - 1/2 cup

Vanilla essence - 1/2 tsp

Chopped Walnuts - 1/2 cup (tossed them in sugar)

Chocolate vermicelli - 2 tbsp (these are also like choco chips, but slender and rod shaped) 

Method

1. In a mixing bowl,beat together - sugar and curd till creamy. Mix in baking powder,baking soda and vanilla essence,beat well at low speed in electrical hand mixer. Let it rest for a couple of minutes till bubbles appear. 

2. Beat in oil into this at the same speed for a minute. 

3. Sift together flour,cocoa powder and coffee powder and keep aside. 

If the coffee powder is not powdery (happens that Bru gets sticky and solid quite fast), then beat it along with the other ingredients in step 1. 

4. Add the flour mix to beaten wet ingredients and fold in using a spatula to form a smooth batter  without any lumps. 
5. Prepare a tin, I used a 6 inch square tin, first rub on its sides and bottom little unsalted butter (softened) and once the greasing is done, dust little flour on sides and bottom. 

6. Pour the cake batter into the tin and top it with chopped walnuts and give a generous dash of chocolate vermicelli. 

7. Preheat the oven to 180'C and then bake the cake for 45 minutes (use a knife, check if it comes out clean to confirm end of baking) 

8. Cool the cake completely after baking, if baked well, you can invert it intact and I was lucky to get a perfect, well baked cake. The cake is one awesome thing to eat and relish and will surely vanish in a jiffy. 

A closer look at the cake 

Step 1 is very important for a fluffy cake, beat sugar and curd well along with baking powder and baking soda (I used my NOVA electric hand mixer at low speed for a minute) and let is rest for a while till bubbles appear. Step 4 is also important, take care to fold in the flour slowly using a spatula and check there are no lumps.



Not that I intended to bake this cake for any special reason, but Chennai Super Kings clinched a marvelous win that evening against Royal Challengers Bangalore, chasing the second highest total ever in IPL. Many thanks to Divya Kudua of Easy Cooking blog for sharing the recipe for such a delectable cake. 

Baigun Bhaja and Alu Bhaja - Lessons from East

The Khichadi prepared (please follow my blog post Khichadi) goes well with Baigun Bhaja (Brinjal fry) and Alu Bhaja (potato fry). Khichadi being little bland, blends perfectly well with these spicy, tawa fried vegetables. Khichadi along with these bhajas make a favorite dish for Bengalis.  

For Baigun Bhaja


Ingredients
1 big brinjal 
Turmeric powder
Salt to taste 
Pinch of sugar 
Red chilli powder
Oil for shallow frying 


Procedure
1. Cut the top and bottom portions of the big brinjal and discard. Make round slices (about 1 cm in thickness) from the rest of brinjal. 
2. On a plate, add about 2 tsp of turmeric, salt to taste, a pinch of sugar, 1 tsp red chilli powder (you can add one more tsp of this if you like the bhaja to be more spicy) and mix all these dry powders well. 
3. Coat the brinjal slices on both sides evenly with this mixture prepared in step 2. Take a brinjal slice and dab it on the mixture in plate. Keep these coated brinjal slices aside for 5 minutes. 
4. Take a fry pan and add about 2-3 tbsp of oil, heat the pan lightly so that the oil spreads to cover the surface of the pan. 
5. Place these brinjal slices on the heated oil, cover with lid and cook on medium flame. Open at times to ensure that the slices do not get charred. Turn over to cook the other side as well after one side becomes soft and mushy. 
6. There is no need to add more oil to cook the other side of brinjal slices, just sprinkle little water and ensure that there is enough moisture. The brinjal slices will cook well. 
7. The Baigun Bhaja is ready when both sides become soft, press the center of the slice with a ladle and ensure it is soft. Remove the Bhaja onto a plate. 

Brinjal to be used for Baigun Bhaja

Slices of Brinjal, ready to be coated with masalas

Masala coated brinjal slices getting shallow fried in tawa

How to make Alu Bhaja?

Ingredients

1/4 kg small alu (potatoes) 

Oil for frying 

Turmeric 

Chilli powder

Hing

Salt to taste

Rice flour

Procedure

1. Pressure cook the small potatoes for 3 whistles. Upon cooling, peel them and keep them aside. 

2. Prepare a masala mixture combining about 2 tsp of turmeric powder, 3 tsp chilli powder (if you like the alu spicy), salt to taste, generous shower of hing and 2 tsp rice flour. The last two ingredients of the mixture are additions from my side. I always like the flavor of hing and rice flour addition makes the alu crispy. 

3. Coat the boiled and peeled potatoes evenly using the mixture prepared in step 2. 

4. Take a fry pan, add little oil - about 2 tbsp and heat well so that oil spreads to cover the surface of the pan. Add the coated potatoes to this oil, cover and cook. Open the lid at times to check the potatoes do not get charred, shake the pan to ensure the potatoes are cooked on all sides. Sprinkle very little water and cover again with lid and cook, if there is any doubt. 

Alu bhaja

I have chosen small potatoes as shown in the picture above to prepare alu bhaja.You can use normal, medium sized potatoes for alu bhaja in which case, there is no need to pressure cook them. Peel the big potatoes, cut them into thick slices, coat the slices in masala mixture in step 2 and carry on with the frying process in the tawa. 

Khichadi - Lessons from East

A perfect blend of proteins and carbohydrates make this perfect dish - Khichadi. And the recipe below is of the Bengali style, coming from the East Indian heartland. Khichadi (as made using procedure stated below) can serve two people. It comprises of equal proportions of moong dal (yellow) and rice. The rice used in Bengal is a certain variety called Gobindobhog Chal. This rice has a characteristic aroma and softens so well, becomes mushy with moong dal to yield an easy to swallow and easy to digest khichadi. This rice variety is not available in South India, however one can substitute it with Ghee rice (a small grained variety), normally available in any general grocery stores in Bangalore.

How to prepare Khichadi


Ingredients
1/2 cup rice 
1/2 cup yellow moong dal
2 inch long ginger piece (cut into thin slices) 
3 green chillies (chopped finely)
1 medium sized tomato (chopped finely) 
2 tsp jeera
2 tsp black pepper
Water to cook well
3 tbsp Ghee for tadka 
1 tsp turmeric 
Salt to taste


Procedure


1. Dry roast rice in a thick kadai (no need for it change color), just to the extent that the rice becomes a little crisp in appearance. 
2. Dry roast moong dal with a pinch of turmeric in the same kadai. 
3. Add both to a thick bottomed pan/cooker vessel. You can even transfer it to a vessel and cook it in pressure cooker with 2 glasses full of water for 3 whistles. 
4. If cooking in an open pan, then this process will be slow and more glasses of water will be required to ensure that the rice is softly cooked and mashes completely well with the dal. 
5. When the rice dal mixture becomes soft and mushy, grind pepper and jeera (dry) in a mixer and add this to the khichadi. 
6. In the kadai, take ghee, heat it well, add cut pieces of ginger, tomato and green chillies and ensure that they are cooked well. Add required salt to this and transfer it all to the container with khicadi. 

This last step adds a little tanginess and spice to the otherwise bland khichadi. If you do not prefer this for any reason, then one can stop with addition of required salt and with step 5 itself. 


I cooked rice and dal with 2 glasses full of water in a vessel in my pressure cooker for 3 whistles. Then, upon cooling, I transferred the contents from pressure cooker to electric rice cooker (National Panasonic). In here, I added more water and kept cooking the khichadi, I added pepper-jeera ground mixture. Salt to taste and chillies/ginger/tomato fried in ghee were also added after few minutes to the khichadi in electric rice cooker.

You can prepare khichadi wholly in electric rice cooker itself without using a pressure cooker, just that the process will be slower and definitely it consumes power which comes so dear in Bangalore nowadays.


I would like to add that I learnt this recipe from my mother-in-law who spent about 26 years of her life in Calcutta, so the authenticity of the recipe is guaranteed :) Khichadi can be had along with Baigun Bhaja and Alu Bhaja, the recipes of which I am sharing on my blog at Baigun-bhaja-and-alu-bhaja

Paris Bakery-Mumbai

I always wanted to write about this place, a bakery, I visited in Mumbai and it has taken me over an year to do the needful. The address of this bakery is as below - Paris Bakery, 278, Dr.C.H. Street, Our Lady of Dolours Church Lane, Dhobi Talao, Mumbai - 400 002. Phone 2208 6619, 6423 3678 (Time: 9 am to 8 pm with lunch break from 2 to 5 pm, Mon - Sat). I visited this bakery in June 2011 and I must admit, though it is a small outlet with no facilities to sit and dine, the shopkeeper exhibited some of the top notch marketing strategies and impressed me. 

The shopkeeper at the bakery had a smiling face, was willing to answer our questions with just the right details, there were no curt replies like Indane/Bharat Gas agencies and no over mollycoddling like McDonalds and Pizza Hut, some examples that starkly hit my head. Paris bakery is famous for its Butter Khari (many layers of maida, thin and wafery, baked to precision, basically a mini puff sans filling) and when I browsed about Mumbai before my visit, I learnt people traveled far and wide to fetch a stock of their kharis.

At the shop, my husband and I would casually ask the shop keeper, pointing to a bottle of bread sticks - What is this? He would reply - Garlic Sticks, draw few of them out and make us taste them. He would then show more varieties of these garlic sticks, the ones that use less butter, ones with a lavish dose of butter, ones that go well with tea, ones prepared with a liberal dose of cheese. He would not only stop at that but ensure we tasted a small sample of each variety. We were little embarrassed by this shower of affection and decided not to ask any more questions in the fear we would finish quite a substantial portion of his shop in the name of tasting. But he would not relent. 

If we quizzed mutely over the biscuits in trays, he would politely point out the facts behind them all, again provide a small sample of each to taste. This treatment was not only meted out to us given that he figured we came from outside Mumbai but to every customer who visited his shop, regular or irregular or a first timer. There were superbly delicious shrewsberry biscuits, buttery and divine short bread biscuits, nutty and sugary kaju macroons, jam biscuits and fan biscuits. 

We were lucky for two reasons -

1) We visited the shop before they closed for lunch. We went to this bakery on our last day of Mumbai visit to take back some goodies to Bangalore. We would have missed out some excellent tasting baked goodies and such refreshing hospitality had we hit the place a little late in the afternoon. 

2) We reached the bakery at 1 pm and were planning to break for lunch thereafter, but our meal plan was almost taken care of by the shower of affection from the shop keeper. 

We left the shop with a sizable purchase - 3 packets of garlic sticks, 2 packets of cheese sticks, 1 each of shrewsberry and short Bread biscuits, 3 of kaju macroons. The supreme friendliness of the shopkeeper and his excellent marketing strategies of answering our questions patiently, providing us with required information of his bakery's products and more than enough goodies to taste and make a decision, bowled us over completely. Prima facie, it may appear the shop keeper will turn a pauper if he exhausted his supplies in name of providing the right to taste to his customer. But the warmth in his business dealings and the fine quality and taste of his products will sure win anyone's heart. None in my opinion will leave the shop without his/her share of bounty. A customer from Thane, alongside us, was in tears when he came to know that the shop exhausted its morning stock of kharis. He promised to return at 5 pm and get fresh evening stock before he headed back home that day. 

Other products that Paris bakery offers are - butter batasha, cheese batasha, cheese papri, nankhatai, mawa cake, fruit cake, sponge cake, buns, milk toast, melba toast, garlic toast and soya toast. I will always pay a visit to this bakery every time I am in Mumbai.

Some more information:  

We stayed in Gurgaon and traveled by the Western Line of Mumbai sub urban railway. We got down at Marine Lines station and from here any one can guide you to Paris Bakery or Lady of Dolours church. 

Paris Bakery is barely 10 minutes walk from the station. On the way to Paris bakery, there is a likelihood that you hit the Parsi Dairy branch in Dhobi Talao. Do not miss out the Malai Khaja and Mawa Khaja sweets here, they are truly out of the world. On all days of our stay in Mumbai, we commuted by the Mumbai western line trains which serve innumerable commuters at an unparalleled frequency. As a tourist, if you resort to road travel, then you will only kill time and all your energy; hissing and sighing in traffic.

This blog post is a cut short version of post on my other blog - Furore Scribendi - please follow link Paris Bakery in Mumbai. The original post provides some travel tips in Mumbai in addition to the content written above.

Weekend Ecstasy : Fruit n Nut cake, Rotis with Shahi Paneer

My microwave convection oven is back after minimal repair work. Heavy voltage fluctuations and whimsical power cuts took its toll on it. I am immensely happy that the oven is back at its place on my kitchen slab and Yippeee .. I can bake again!

I baked a fruit and nut cake using mashed ripe banana, some black currant and broken cashews. The recipe for this cake can be seen from my earlier blog post- Fruit n Nut Cake.

The pictures of this cake might appear different from that in the link above. This cake (shown below) is less dense in terms of fruit and nut content in that it is baked sans the lavish dose of seedless dates and chopped walnuts. Quantities of ingredients have also been adjusted  (for the cake in pic below) to yield a smaller cake.

Shahi Paneer with soft rotis made a perfect dinner for Sunday. I followed the recipe (no modifications) for Shahi Paneer from Divya Kudua's Shahi Paneer. The Shahi Paneer recipe followed as is yielded very yummy gravy and it was very simple, with minimal chopping and grinding work.

I am writing down the ingredients and the recipe here again (referring to the link above) for any direct references-


Ingredients Required (from Divya Kudua's Easy Cooking Blog) Paneer - 200 gms
Cashewnuts - 12
Tomatoes - 2,chopped
Green chilly - 2,chopped
Ginger - 1/2 inch piece
Oil - 3 tbsp
Jeera - 1 tsp
Asafoetida/Hing - a pinch
Bay leaf - 1
Coriander powder - 1 tsp
Red chilly powder - 1/2 tsp
Turmeric powder/haldi - 1/4 tsp
Curd - 1/2 cup,beaten well
Sugar - 1 tsp
Salt to taste
Garam masala - pinch
Coriander leaves - 2 tbsps, finely chopped
Kasoori Methi - 1 tsp,crushed


Method
1. Slice paneer into small cubes and shallow fry in a sauce pan with 1 tbsp oil till it starts turning golden brown. Turn them over and cook other side too.Keep aside.
2. Grind cashews to a fine powder, keep aside.
3. Grind chopped tomatoes,green chillies and ginger to a smooth paste, keep aside.
4. In the same pan,add remaining oil and when it turns hot,splutter jeera. Mix in hing and bay leaf and saute for a minute.
5. Add the tomato paste,coriander powder,red chilly powder and turmeric powder and mix well.Cook the mixture,stirring occasionally till it reduces in volume. This will take about 5-6 minutes on medium flame. 
6. Mix in sugar,cashew powder and curd.Cook for two minutes.
7. Add the fried paneer pieces, little water (maintaining gravy consistency) and salt to taste and let it boil.
8. Cover the pan and simmer for a few minutes till the gravy starts turning thick.
9. Add garam masala,chopped coriander leaves and kasoori methi and turn off the heat. Mix gently and keep it covered for a few minutes. Serve hot with phulkas/rotis. 

The last picture is taken using my mobile phone camera and the rest using Nikon digital camera.
I am still fiddling with different modes and menu features of Nikon DSC to grab better pictures, especially in poor light conditions and may be more presentable and cleaner pictures.

Neer Dosa, a quick favorite

It's been really long since I left a post on this blog. My microwave convection oven went for a complete toss and failed to operate despite heavy cajoling or intense reprimanding. A brief but quite a spirit dampening hiatus was forced and silence on this blog space followed. 

Weekends in Bangalore, especially this year, come bundled with power cuts that seem to go on for eternity. Last weekend, I ensured boredom due to long power cut was kept at bay by preparing my favorite in the range of dosas - Neer Dosa. 

There are many reasons why Neer Dosa gets multiple votes from me - 

1. Comes in handy when the stock of idli/dosa rice gets exhausted, all you need for this recipe is raw rice which we usually use for meals. I use Sona Masuri rice variety. 

2. Mixer will do the job and no need to run the grinder - so pretty quick and easier cleaning process. 

3. Neer dosa is extremely soft and makes perfect combination with a spicy chutney, after all it takes two to tango. This dosa melts in mouth, literally and no efforts required in the process of relishing it.
4. I felt the need to add this point and the next one - the batter once prepared is ready for immediate use, it need not be kept aside for fermentation - saves time. 
5. The neer dosa when cooked on the tawa needs very little oil, it is cooked on only one side covered with a lid, with no turning over required - so prep time is cut short as well. 

Now coming to the recipe of Neer Dosa - (prepare for two) 

All you need 

1 cup rice - soaked overnight. More the hours of soaking, easier it is to grind in the mixer and softer gets the batter. 

3 big table spoons of grated coconut. This is the secret ingredient for making the dosas soft, so go easy on it. One spoon reduction may still yield similar results if you are over conscious of taking in coconut. 

Salt to taste 

Procedure

Grind all of the above ingredients in a mixer well adding required water to get a thin, runny batter. Highly watery, runny consistency of the batter is a must for this recipe. 

Heat a dosa tawa and pour a ladle of neer dosa batter. The batter must be added to the tawa much like rava dosa batter, please do not attempt to pour it all onto the center and spread it around like we do for our plain dosa, it will not work with neer dosa. 

Below is a picture of the neer dosa batter on a heated tawa -

If the tawa is heated sufficiently, the neer dosa will have perforations like in the picture above. Cover the tawa with a lid and cook. Fold the dosa and serve on a plate. There is no need to turn the dosa over and cook again. 

Recipe for accompaniment - spicy mint, coriander tomato chutney 

1 medium sized tomato - chopped into chunks 

A handful of mint sprigs 

A handful of coriander sprigs 

1 big table spoon of groundnut (no need to remove the outer peel) 

4 red chillies (I use the salem red chilly variety) 

A small piece of tamarind (about an inch long)

Salt to taste

A pinch of hing  

Place a fry pan on the flame, add two spoons of oil, when heated sufficiently, add red chillies and groundnuts, fry well until aroma fills the kitchen :) Add this to the mixer. 

Now in the same hot pan, toss the sprigs of coriander and mint for a minute and add this to the mixer too. 

Add 1 spoon of oil, if required onto the pan and fry tomato chunks until its raw smell goes away. Add salt required and a pinch of hing. Add the tamarind piece as well and try to soften it a bit in the heat so that it grinds well with the other ingredients. Using tamarind is recommended as it helps neutralize the tangy flavor of tomato. Add this to the mixer and grind all of it well to get a yummy chutney. 

Neer Dosa served with spicy chutney and zuppp....goes power at home, right after I finish all the grinding work.  

Note: Neer dosa, also known as Paan pole in Konkani language, is a major hit in Mangalore. I have used pictures taken on my mobile Nokia 3110C - not too good for a visual appeal. You may also refer to the recipe at - http://cuisineindia.wordpress.com/2010/08/09/neer-dosa/ - this is Prathibha Aunty's The Indian Food Court blog, the link has better illustrations. 

Honey and Cashew Cake

New Year celebrations fell during a weekend and provided the right occasion to bake a cake. I have not been keeping well really and therefore decided to make a simple, no frills cake.

This cake contains honey, cashews broken and ground almonds.

Ingredients -

1+1/2 cup All Purpose Flour

1+1/2 tsp Baking Powder

1 cup Sugar

1 tsp Vanilla essence

1/2 cup broken cashew

1/4 cup ground almonds

3/4 small bottle Dabur Honey (small bottle net wt 50g)

1/4 cup refined oil

1/4 cup milk

2 eggs

In a flat bowl, whisk 2 eggs (full) well till they froth. I used my hand blender for this purpose. To the whisked eggs, add sugar and whisk again. To this, add oil and milk (enables nice browning of cake) and whisk the contents in the bowl well again for few minutes. Add vanilla essence and honey and repeat the whisking process. Sieve the flour and baking powder together well and fold this in without lumps into the wet ingredients in the bowl. Before, the whole process is started, toast a few almonds and powder them in a mixer to a fine powder. Add the almond powder while folding in the flour. Also throw in a few broken cashews at this time.

I greased a 6' pan, dusted it with flour, poured in the cake batter and let it sit while the oven was preheated to a 180'C. I topped the cake batter in the pan with more broken cashews as a final step before sending it inside the hot oven for 40 minutes. Please check if a knife poked into the cake comes out clean after this time and temperature setting.

I have some black currants, dates and lots of dry fruits and I am itching to bake a fruit and nut cake soon. Hope to come out of a low energy state some time and bake it as well.

Here's the picture of the cake out of the oven (with a fancy lamp by the side)

Happy New Year !! 

Good Buy : GO Mozzarella Cheese

I visited the SPAR Hypermarket located on Inner Ring Road, Koramangala, Bangalore today and grabbed a packet of GO Mozzarella Cheese - shredded and ready to use. This product rated at Rs 70, to be used in a time span of three months, provides really light and stringy cheese, apt as a topping for delectable pizzas. Once opened the cheese in shredded form has to be consumed within 7 days. I picked up the "Pizza Italiano" option (as shown in the picture above) , there are many other varieties too - Mexican style shredded cheese, Italian Pasta style shredded cheese and Natural Shredded variety. The zip pouch packaged cheese comes with a mini recipe booklet. I made Pizza at home using this cheese and I must say this mozzarella cheese was stringy; definitely the best, in my opinion, of all options available in Bangalore. There are many imported varieties of this cheese but they are hefty costly. Also one never knows how old these imported stuff actually are, pretty risky to play with an expired dairy product.

I fetched some parsley, capsicum and wheat pizza base from the stores. At home, I brushed the wheat pizza base with some olive oil, dabbed some tomato sauce on it (no special sauce for this -mixed little oregano into our dear Maggi Tomato sauce and done with it), heaped lots of veggies like sliced onions, tomatoes, capsicums, finely chopped parsley and green chillies (for that extra spice) and sprinkled the "ready to use, shredded" cheese. The quantity of cheese used per pizza might appear tad less, but that's precisely the way I like it. I baked the pizza in Microwave plus Convection mode till the veggies were baked and all of cheese melted well.

Here are some more pics of the work slab in my kitchen and the final dish (after a drizzle of mixed Italian herbs on them when out of the oven) -

Christmas time .. Cake time :)

Ok ... so the year 2011 is coming to a quick end. Days are getting colder and shorter. With the mercury dipping outside, isn't the time perfect to heat the oven inside home to high and higher temperatures and bake something special? 

On Friday evening, I was browsing through updates on blogs I follow and I landed at the recipe of Carrot and Walnut cake - http://www.padhuskitchen.com/2011/12/carrot-cake-recipe-how-to-make-carrot.html 

Very simple recipe, easy to follow and the result is an awesome cake with an even more awesome aroma :) 

I will surely keep baking this many times over. Thanks a lot Padhu :) for sharing this recipe with one and all. 

I halved the ingredients mentioned in the parent recipe as I was planning to bake a smaller cake in a 6' round tin. I omitted salt addition. For the 1/2 cup vegetable oil I was to use (ingredient after halving) - I used 1/4 cup vegetable oil and 1/4 cup milk instead. These are the only revisions I made to the recipe. 

Here are some pictures of this very delectable cake - 

The sweet carrots, nutty walnuts and aromatic cinnamon went in together well and provided this little dense, and tasty cake. The second picture might reveal some grated carrot pieces and nuts on careful observation. 

I had to take the pictures really quick because the digging and devoring process went on too fast. 

I wholeheartedly thank Padhu for providing me this wonderful recipe and making my kitchen smell sweet on Saturday :)