Cranberry Cobbler Dump Cake

Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, 

and behold, 

everything is softer and more beautiful. 

                        

                                     -Norman Vincent Peale

Dump it all together - there you have a dessert on your table!

Cranberry sauce, topped with cake mix and butter drizzled on top - that is the name of the dish deconstructed for you!

This is my first guest post and I am happy I got to do it with thebigsweettooth . Rafeeda of The Big Sweet Tooth is one of first bloggers I got introduced to through blogging. Her blog is a repository of recipes - a go to website for all your recipe needs. I am so glad I could add to her repository. Head over to her blog to check out my recipe for Cranberry Cobbler Dump Cake.

Marble Cake

It is the best time of the year again. I may be a little too early.  Nevertheless,the weather is too tempting and the carols playing are just so joyful that I cannot let it go unnoticed. That is how I came to bake today after a long day at work. The aroma from the hot oven is tickling palates around here.

Shibin ( that is my husband) and I love Christmas. Perhaps that is what drew us close - our love for Christmas. I remember how endlessly we could chat about Christmas and the holiday season earnestly before we were married. This is our second Christmas together and we vow to make this Christmas even more beautiful than our first one together. Carols to wake us up in the morning and Christmas movies that make our evenings! I would be doing a grave injustice, if I forget to mention CBN radio - an American radio station that plays carols round the year. That is what is playing right now, giving me the Christmas spirit. For those who love Christmas as much as I do, google up CBN radio soon and enjoy the season.

Marble Cake on my blog to kick start the Christmas celebrations. Probably one of the easiest cake recipes for all beginners. I got this recipe on our recent visit to Cyprus, from the Mr. Xenios' wife who was the owner of the Cottage where we stayed. 

So here it is - 

Ingredients

1. Egg - 2 no.s
2. Flour - 2 and 1/4 cup
3. Oil - 1 cup
4. Sugar - 1 cup
5. Baking powder - 2 tsp
6. Lime juice - 1/2 lime
7. Cocoa powder - 2 tbsp
8. Milk - 3/4 cup

Method

Sift together the flour and baking powder.

Separate the egg whites and yolk. Whisk the egg whites till it is completely frothy.

In a bowl bring together the oil, sugar, egg yolk and 1/2 a cup of milk. Fold in together and slowly add in parts of the sifted flour combining it well.

Add the whisked egg white and lime juice. Fold the mixture together till they are combined. Avoid overdoing as you may end up with air bubbles.

In a separate bowl mix the cocoa powder in 1/4 cup of warm milk and dilute the powder. Add 5-6 tbsp of the cake batter to this and mix it well. This mixture gives the marble designs on the cake.

Grease a baking dish and layer the batter alternatively with the two batter. Add the white batter first and pour tablespoon full of chocolate batter randomly over. Keep repeating this until done.

Pre-heat the oven for about 20 minutes. Place the dish in the oven initially at high temperature of 220 degree and lower it to 160 after 10 minutes. The cake may need about 50 minutes to bake.

Once done, move this to a cooling rack. Slice and serve it.

You may also note

• Make sure to keep the consistency of both the batter the same, else both  may separate and may not bake at the same time.
• The batter should be a little thick . Making it runny would result in both the batters mixing.

Dates and Walnut Loaf

It is Ramadan season.
Festive display of dates and sweets made of dates fills the supermarkets in Dubai.

So why not something made from dates for Iftar this season.

This is my first attempt at making dates loaf and it was a colleague who suggested to add in the walnuts as well for the crunch.  Dates by itself is quite sweet and I wanted to make sure that the loaf does not become extra sweet by regulating the sugar content.

Again, like my most recipes it is simple and quick.

Here you are -

Ingredients

1. Dates - 3/4 cup de-seeded and chopped
2. Milk - 3/4 cup
3. All purpose flour - 1 and 1/2 cup
4. Sugar - 4 tbsp
5. Egg - 2 no.s
6. Cinnamon powder - 1 tsp
7. Baking powder - 1 tsp
8. Salt - 1/2 tsp
9. Vanilla essence - 1 tsp
10. Walnuts - 1/2 cup
11. Vegetable Oil - 1/2 cup 
12. Honey - 2 tbsp

Method

Heat the milk with the chopped dates on medium flame for 5 minutes and let it rest.

Sieve together the flour, baking powder,cinnamon powder, salt and keep aside.

Break open the eggs and whisk well. Add sugar and vanilla essence and mix it well.

Fold the dry ingredients into this and add dates, milk and oil. Whisk together the ingredients.

Pre- heat the oven for 10 minutes at 180 degree and grease a loaf tin.  Add  crushed walnuts into the loaf mix and just swirl around with a spoon. 

Transfer the mix into the loaf tin and spread some walnuts on top.

Place the tin in oven and heat at 180 degree for around 30 - 40 minutes. After 25 minutes, take out the loaf tray and glaze the top of the loaf with honey using a brush and place it back inside.

Cook till a pin inserted comes out clean. Transfer it to another surface for cooling. Serve with topping of your choice.

You may also note - 

1. You can increase either the dates quantity or sugar to make it sweeter. We chose to make it less sweeter.

Crepes - Brunch the English way

The English version of our very own Indian Dosa is what I would want to call it -Crepes.

A good way to begin your day, an easy brunch for those lazy days, an evening snack or even a relishing dinner - the way you like with the filling of your choice. 

We chose to have it as our Saturday Brunch!

The first time I heard of crepes..hmm..Of course from my husband!!

Heard, may the wrong word. He 'made' it for me on our second Valentines day together!!

What fascinates me about crepes is the choice of filling you possibly can have. While we chose Jam, you may opt for anything from Honey to Nutella if you want it sweet. As a savory dish, you can choose any fillings of veggies or meat and roll it up. Also, this could turn into a perfect snack for your kids tiffin box:) Get innovative with crepes - roll it up and slice it or stack it and serve with fresh fruits and glimmer of honey. I am sure kids and adults will enjoy every bite of it.

So here we go - 

Ingredients

1. Self raising flour/maida - 1 cup
2. Salt - 1 tsp
3. Sugar - 3 tsp ( you can increase the quantity if you want it sweeter)
4. Eggs - 2
5. Vanilla essence - 3 drops
6. Milk - 1 1/2 cups
7. Butter - 2 tbsp - melted

Method

Sift the flour to prevent formation of lumps. Add sugar and salt and keep aside.

Break the eggs into a cup and whisk it well using a hand blender. To this, add vanilla essence and milk. Make sure your eggs and milk are at room temperature before the preparation. Whisk the wet ingredients together.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients slowly, whisking it constantly. Make sure that no lumps are formed. To be on safer side , you can strain the batter once you are done whisking..

Finally add the melted butter and mix the batter well.

Meanwhile heat a pan and brush it with butter. Take the pan off the heat, pour a ladle full of batter onto the center of the pan and rotate the pan for the batter to spread and create perfect circle. The crepes have to be thin and uniformly spread. Let it cook on medium flame for about a minute and a half and then flip it over. Once flipped over just cook it for half a minute and transfer it to a plate.

We had a lovely brunch of crepes with jam and a serving of pan fried plantains.
Fresh home made jam goes best - here is the recipe - http://kitchenspells.blogspot.ae/2015/05/strawberry-apple-jam.html.

Go truly the English way with a serving of scrambled eggs or sausages and coffee.

This is definitely a must try recipe! Coz it is simple and yummy!

Swiss Roll/Jam Roll

Jam roll always reminds me of the summer vacations while we were still at school -a long two month hiatus in Kerala along with my cousins. There was a routine established for the four of us and the most important of it all being the 5 pm wait on our balcony for my aunt to get back from work - for pouncing on the goodies in her bag. She never failed us. 

Jam Roll was my favorite, it always intrigued me. Sometimes I would just bite into it hungrily and sometimes I took the time to unroll it lick away the delicious mixed fruit jam and then dig on the cake. The 'little me' never would have imagined that she would actually be making jam roll one day.

The idea of trying out something like this popped up when we brought orange marmalade. I was tasting it for the very first time and it did not fascinate me much. I had a bottle full of it and did not absolutely want it to rot away. That is when my hubby told me why not try a Swiss roll? I was clueless how this was done. Yet, I decided to try out on a weekend as we were expecting a few guests. I baked the cake for the roll but it was adamant and refused to roll, cracking up when I tried to roll it.  I could not let it go waste. So I decided to sandwich the marmalade between two slices of cake cut into circles and dust it with powdered sugar. It tasted good but the cake had turned out a little harder making the rolling difficult. I decided to research on this a bit more and this time it turned out the way just I had wanted it to.

Honestly, making a jam roll is not complicated as it looks. Just a little bit of patience and there you are.

Ingredients

For the sponge cake-

Self raising flour/Maida - 1 cup

Powdered sugar - 1 cup (3/4 goes into the cake and the rest for dusting)

Eggs - 4 separated

Vegetable oil or butter - 2 tbsp

Vanilla essence - 1 tsp

Baking powder - 1/2 tsp

Marmalade/ Jam/ Cream - flavor of your choice

Preparation

1. Sift the flour and baking sugar and keep aside.
2. Separate the egg yolk and white. Whisk the egg white along with a little sugar using a hand blender or electric blender for 7-8 minutes so that it becomes thick.
3. Add the vanilla essence into the egg yolk and mix it well. 
4. Into this, add 3/4 cup of the powdered sugar and the egg white. Fold in gently using a spoon or spatula in order to avoid air bubbles.
5.  Add the sifter flour, fold in the mixture well and finish off with the vegetable oil.
6. The cake mix is now ready to go into your oven.
7. Make sure that you pre - heat your oven at 180 degree for 15 minutes. Grease a square baking tray, in case you do not have that, you can use your roasting tray as well. Pour the mix into this and make sure it is evenly spread across.
8. Place in the oven for 10 - 15 minutes. Keep checking to avoid overcooking or browning of the cake.  

9. 

   Roll the sponge cake while hot along with the parchment paper

   Remove it from the oven once done and invert on top of a parchment paper which has been sprinkled with powdered sugar.( In case, the cake is too thick and you want your rolls to be thinner, you may just slice through the center)             Sprinkling of sugar is important else your cake may stick to the paper.
10. While still hot, roll the cake along with the parchment paper till the fag end. Tie up the ends to retain the shape and leave it to cool.

11. Once it has cooled down, unroll it spread the jam or marmalade evenly over the entire length and a little thinner towards the sides as the excess may pop out as we roll. Dust the roll with powdered sugar.Roll it back and cut out the rolls into thickness of your choice

Cut off the ends of the roll where the excess jam has spilled over

Your Jam Roll is ready to be served. Once a while instead of just making a sponge cake, you can layer it with jam and roll it - impressing everyone around you.

Carrot Cake

It all started for Christmas in 2012 when a colleague gave me a cake recipe. The very same day I purchased all the ingredients and made my very first cake. I did not have an oven and resorted to baking the cake in a cooker. ( you need to be careful, you don't use water and gasket and the cooker gets mighty hot). Since then, I have tried a lot of cakes in the cooker. It did turn out tasty but often a little too hard with the bottom and the edges burnt,

I have also tried the traditional method of baking where the cake tray is inserted into a vessel with hot sand generally kept over the traditional chullah. The vessel is then covered with a lid with burning coal on top as well so that the cake gets evenly baked. I was too scared to handle that and it was my mother who was a master in that and me just a by stander.

It was only post marriage in 2014 that I learnt to use an oven to bake cakes. I had no idea about the right temperature nor the timings .After a few burnt and also sometimes under cooked cakes, I do have an approximate idea now.

Initially cake baking was a tedious and tasking job for me - sometimes the cake does not rise, I have too many bubbles in the cake, I have the nuts and fruits settling at the bottom and the top of the cake is not cooked enough where as the bottom is burnt. My husband is a wonderful 'analyser' and I would say 'get it right person'. He often googled up and found solutions to most of my problems.

I have not yet mastered the art of baking and I hope to some day. As of now, I am still learning and correcting as I go along.

Your cakes can turn out right if you learn to love your ingredients and handle them as instructed in the recipes you find across in different sites. For instance - make sure all your ingredients are at room temperature and stick to the measurements provided. Once you have a knack of it, you may try variations.

So let me move on to my carrot cake.

A wonderful evening with Tea, Cake and a Perfect book.

Ingredients

All purpose flour/Maida - 2 cups
Powdered sugar - 1 cup ( you may raise it to 1 and a half cup - neither of us have sweet tooth so I generally add lesser sugar)
Egg - 2( if the egg is really small you may add 3)
Buttermilk - 1/2 cup
Oil - 1/4 cup
Cinnamon powder - 2 tsp
Baking powder - 1 tsp
Vanilla extract - 1 tsp
Carrot - 2 grated
Raisins
Cashew nuts
Salt

Preparation

1. Mix together the dry ingredients in a bowl - flour, powdered sugar, baking powder, salt and cinnamon powder. Sieve it in order to prevent formation of lumps.
2. Beat the eggs well along with vanilla essence and add in the buttermilk and oil. Combine it well.
3. Slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients mixing it well as you add. Do not beat it further, just enough for the ingredients to mix else it may lead to formation of air bubbles.
4. Add the grated carrot into the cake mix and fold in gently.
5. Roll in the cashews and raisins in a little flour  and keep aside.
6. Preheat your oven at 180 degrees for about 10-15 minutes. 
7. Grease your cake tray with a little oil and dust flour on top of it. Turn the tray upside down and pat away the excess flour.
8.  Pour your cake mix into the pan and add the nuts and raisins evenly . Just run your spoon across once and cover the cake tray with an aluminium foil. Gently fold in the sides of the foil- no free ends should be sticking out touching the corners of your oven. Covering your cake with foil allows the top of the cake to be uniformly heated and baked.
9. Place your tray in the oven at temperature of 180 degree. Check your cake after 20 minutes. Insert a tooth pick or pin and if it comes out clean your cake is ready. Else keep it for 10-15 more minutes. The cooking time may vary depending on the tray you use and the consistency of your mixture. The ideal time would be somewhere between 20 to 35 minutes. My carrot cake took about 25 minutes.
10. Once baked , remove the cake from the cake and let it cool before your slice and have your first bite.

Enjoy every bite of your cake with steaming tea!!

Fish Molly/Molee - Kerala fish stew

Appam has been my all time favorite. It's appam for Birthday, Christmas, Easter, Anniversary and any occasion you think of. Appam, according to me goes best with stew and hence set out to explore the best and easiest way to make stew.

I have come across various recipes for fish molly but I found my mothers recipe the easiest and the best . I tried out this recipe on my husband - the guinea pig of all my experiments. He seemed to pretty much like it and not to lie - I loved it too. So without much delay I decided to put it up here. This post is for my dearest Mamma from whom I learnt the tricks and trades of cooking. Let me not forget to thank my hubby who willingly tastes all that I cook.

Ingredients

For Marination

King Fish - 1 kg sliced ( Any fish of your choice but I personally feel it tastes the best with King Fish)
Pepper powder - 1 teaspoon
Salt as per taste

For Curry

Onion - 3 medium sized thickly sliced lengthwise
Ginger - 2 tsp finely chopped
Green Chilly - 4 slit
Potato - 2 Medium chopped
Coconut - 1 cup grated
Cinnamon - a small piece
Cloves - 2

Cardamom - 2
Curry leaves
Whole pepper
Cashew nuts
salt to taste
Oil

Preparation 

1. Wash the fish slices and drain off excess water from the fish. Marinate the slices with pepper powder and salt and keep it aside for an hour.
2. In a Kadai, heat a little oil and fry the fish gently on both the sides( Remember not to deep fry it or fry it for long.) Mop off the excess oil from the fish using a tissue paper.
3. Splutter in ingredients 6-8 into the oil and stir them well. Into this ,add the sliced onion and saute for 3 minutes on low flame. Toss in the ginger and green chillies and saute for another 3 mins or till the raw smell of ginger goes away.
4. Add the chopped potatoes and fry for another 5 minutes.( You could also separately fry the potatoes and add in). Pour in 1 cup of water and let it boil on low flame.
5. Meanwhile let us get the coconut milk ready. Ideally, you need to blend the coconut three times in the mixer to get milk 3 times. The milk that you take first time is the thickest, followed by the medium one and then the thin.
6. Pour in the thin milk into the kadai and let it boil for 2 minutes before pouring in the medium one. Let this boil well. Make sure the potato that you tossed in earlier is cooked well by now. Once you have poured in the milk, refrain from using high flame. Add the fried fish slices and salt as per taste. Have the lid of the kadai on for sometime. Finally pour in the thick coconut milk and switch off the flame just when the gravy just starts to boil. Do not let the gravy boil too long once the thick milk has been poured in.
7. In a mortar and pestle crush 4-5 whole pepper and 2-3 slices of onion. Splutter it into little oil along with curry leaves. Your Fish Molly is now ready withe the final garnish of pepper, Curry leaves and Onion on top which gives it a special aroma.
8. You can also fry the cashew nuts and spread it over the top while serving.

Fish Stew is a perfect side dish for appam and bread. I found this recipe simple and quick!! I hope you like it too!!

If you try it - do not forget to send me the pictures:)

Chicken Lettuce Wraps

My inspiration for blogging is a college friend of mine - Anupa. We first started blogging when we were done with our MBA and were awaiting campus placements. A while after we got job, Anupa moved to USA and restarted blogging. Well, this time it was all about cooking and I was quite impressed with her work. I guess I took the inspiration from her again and started posting recipes here.

Few days back, I was just going through her blog - palaharam.blogspot.in and I came across this recipe of lettuce wraps. I had quite a bit of lettuce in the fridge and the pictures of the wraps Anupa put in looked lovely. Well, I decided to have my own take of the recipe.


Let us take a look at what goes into the recipe -

Ingredients

Fresh Lettuce - cleaned and dried

Chicken - 1/4 kg diced into small pieces

Onion - 1 big diced

Ginger - 1 teaspoon minced

Garlic - 1 teaspoon minced

Soya sauce

Tomato sauce

Roasted Peanuts - 3 tablespoons

Spring Onion - 1/4 cup Chopped

Coriander leaves

Salt

Sugar

Oil

Preparation

1. Heat the oil in a frying pan and toss in the onions, ginger and garlic.Add a little salt to this. Fry it till they are tender and the raw smell vanishes.
2. Now add the diced chicken pieces to this and stir it low flame till the pieces are almost cooked. Add 1 tbsp of tomato sauce and 1 tbsp of soya sauce to this and saute it. 
3. Add the peanuts - make sure the peanuts are already roasted. Saute the mix for about 3-5 minutes on low flame.
4. Add the chopped spring onion and 1 tsp sugar and saute it for about 2 minutes. Your filling is now ready.
5. Cut the Lettuce into desired shape and serve the filling with this! Garnish with coriander leaf.