Sweet Lime Yogurt Cake

I have a toddler whose favourite phrase is "i don't want food", translated into the vernacular, of course. His entire diet consists of milk and three different semi-solid foods which he eats day in and day out, with no change in the menu. When people wonder why the mom who dabbles in a food blog cannot get her kid to try a sliver of anything new, without said toddler throwing up his entire last meal; the irony is not lost on me either. As realization keeps creeping in on how unnatural it is for my 2 and 1/2 year old to have never eaten cake, or chocolate, or ice cream (or almost every other food that toddlers take for granted) in his whole life, my enthusiasm for new foods keeps ebbing away. 
But then, in life, new doors open from unexpected quarters. My sister's son turned a year old last week, and thankfully, he was a normal kid not averse to trying out new foods. It was the perfect opportunity to wake up the hibernating baker inside me. So i plunged into the opportunity with much abandon. It felt great to get back into action and accomplish a little something. And the best evidence of the cake's success came when it was polished off by the little one's parents and grandparents within minutes after the birthday boy had his first taste. Delighted me!

Baked Samosas - a party snack

While i am idly browsing through food blogs, songs from the movie 'Baazigar' reach my ear from far. Suddenly i feel nostalgic for a Shahrukh movie. I feel an urge to write, sudden inspiration from an unexpected source. I used to be a big fan, used to enjoy the silliness; i have become indifferent. I can't claim to be a fan anymore when the last movie i watched on the big screen was some five years ago and that too in a movie theater in London. There it seemed important that 'Billu' be given his due. Back in India i don't care; I can't make time. I should go watch his next release, just for old times sake. Anybody wanna go watch with me? And sponsor the popcorn ? Or some samosa?

Garlic dough balls

Turns out i am a very sensitive person. I will ask you to give me your honest opinion about something and if you honestly agree with my point of view, all is well. If instead you were to tell me you don't like what i did, i can get cross with you and pretty upset too. This state of being may not last for a long time, but that is the first state i get into. Of course i know better than to let you know i was upset. Because you see, after everything's said and done, i still want only your honest opinion. If you found out i got upset, and you really have a regard for my feelings, i can never trust your honesty again the next time you agree with me. The lesson to be drawn from this is that sensitive people have no business asking for honesty. And if honesty is really your thing, you have no right being sensitive. Unless you are me and you are stuck with both, you just gotta learn to live with one honest opinion at a time.

Mom's favourite Banana Oats Wholewheat Bread

Let me come straight out and say it. My mom is a health nut. I know i am supposed to value half my audience when there are only 2 people reading this whole thing, but hey its true. And she doesn't look like she is going to get cured of it anytime soon. I mean i 've been waiting for what thirty odd years now. I 've learnt to pick my battles when discussing what food is good for you. That is, not pick any when the person on the other end is mom. It's then easier to change sides and quickly jump over to the winning side.

So while my bakes have been commended by one and all, mom has, at best, been quiet about them or gently chided me on why these sugar laden goods with white flour are not really the best for me or anybody. Consequently, when picking a recipe to bake for mom, i hesitantly picked one that i thought had a fighting chance. Little did i know that it was going to be a huge triumph. That this simple bread would be raved about and second helpings would be asked for. And i would finally get unequivocal praise on my bakes from highly health-conscious mom. Of course, she did suggest that i could have done completely without the sugar in this recipe. So there :-)

Fresh Strawberry Cake for my wonderful neighbours

I have wonderful neighbours. They love my cake. This one woman especially, who has a big sweet tooth, always sends me a message telling me how much she likes my cake after every new experiment. And then praises it again when she sees me in the balcony. She's half my inspiration for trying out new cakes, including this. So i 've made friends with this set of women who live in the apartment block next door and they were planning a potluck to celebrate New Year's Eve. I was told about it, invited, then reminded and persuaded to also attend. While i declined giving all sorts of excuses that included the in-laws, the husband and the little one; i still could not throw away an opportunity to share my 'apparently famous' cake baking skills.

Fresh Pineapple Upside Down Cake

It's not that all i do is bake cakes. Its just that baking cakes gets me excited enough to come here and leave a record of it. And so a couple of months after my last post i come back here to talk about another new cake i baked and how good it turned out. This was my first attempt at baking the much famed pineapple upside down cake, my first attempt at making caramel and i had absolutely no expectations about this whole attempt resulting in an actual cake. I had lots of hopes of course, but no real expectations. I was prepared for a gooey mess that would fall apart when taken out of the cake mould and was then delighted with the perfect colour and shape of the entity that proudly stood in front of me at the end of 45 minutes in the oven.

Healthy Carrot Cake for a birthday

I have been MIA (been so eager to use that word) and will stop trying to justify my absence. You are used to my apologies by now, aren't you? Its just that i have been lazy and uninspired. You know, that realisation that i am adding nothing to this blog by talking about what i eat. Then again i read recently in another blog's comments that the purpose of a blog is to write and not about others reading it, that's what inspired me to finally make a comeback and put my thoughts out here.

What i would like to remind myself today is that i have started out on this mission of trying out new foods and documenting the results here a year ago and it has been a fulfilling experience, especially when not much else was happening in life. Not only have i cooked up new foods that i would otherwise not have, but i would like to think that i brought happiness to people along the way with my baking experiments. So in keeping with the tradition, i baked a healthy carrot cake for my mother-in-law's birthday last week.

Purple Grape Jam with White Bread Loaf

I had been eyeing this jam for a couple of months now and i had been sceptical of baking bread for even longer. Then i saw my friend bake bagels from scratch and knew it was time for me to draw some inspiration. I had been telling her that i would bake a bread from her blog because she was doing it all too easily and all too frequently.  I may have been postponing it because nobody was asking me to do these. If i did make both bread and jam from scratch, it would be solely for me. The husband won't touch bread especially when it has jam in it (will eat Subway breads only!). And is not much of a breakfast person either. I decided i should do it for my own satisfaction. Boy was i happy. I finished making jam at 5 in the evening, then made these for the husband to snack on and finally pushed my bread into the oven. Fresh bread came out at 8 pm. And i didn't have the patience to wait till breakfast to try these out. So my dinner came in the form of purple jam lathered over freshly baked and sliced bread. I have no complaints. Making something from scratch going slightly out of your comfort zone gives tremendous satisfaction. And for me, i have not done anything so elaborate just myself after getting married. Usually when the husband is out and i have to cook only for myself, i have only ever made Maggi noodles or eaten left over rice from the morning or convinced him to bring me takeaway. So to go out to such lengths to prepare something only for myself wasn't bad at all. I should try it again sometime.

Eggless Potato Chip Cookies

Last week i crashed my computer and then proceeded to do the same to my husband's laptop, all because i was searching for a curry recipe to make lunch that afternoon. One minute i was looking at curries using spinach as gravy and the next minute there were dozens of small boxes filling up the screen asking me to say OK to whatever they were doing. I promptly shut my computer down, wishing that whatever was wrong would go away when i restart. (Isn't that how computers are supposed to work?) I then borrowed the husband's work laptop and continued my search there. A small part of my brain was telling me that one particular blog might have been the culprit, still i shushed the little talk in my head and opened the same virus spitting blog. Immediately little yellow boxes were invading the screen. When i sensed what i had done, i promptly handed over the laptop to my husband and told him to fix it. And when he finished reinstalling everything on his computer, i slowly persuaded him to do the same to mine and to save all my food pictures. He was kind enough to do the re-installing on my computer too. But now that i know he can fix it, i don't have to listen to the little warnings from my brain while browsing anymore, do i?

Red and Green Peppers Pizza

For the first time since i started blogging, i got inspired to cook for a blogging event. The event is "Lets cook for Christmas - Red and Green". I didn't even read the blog rules that apply for participation, i simply wanted to cook something using red and green ingredients and with a finished product that looks red and green. I was so very happy when the pizza came out of the oven the day after Christmas, and not just because during the previous week i had baked my first inedible pizza (I really don't want to talk about that disaster. It happened because i decided i didn't have to knead the dough, at all! Yeah, after baking about two dozen pizzas, i baked one that went straight to the trash can). This one though was miles ahead of the last one, the thin crust with whole wheat flour included was not only healthier, it was delicious too. And staying with sauteed bell peppers, without overloading with all sorts of toppings, brought out those delicate sweet flavours absolutely perfectly. When the soft mozzarella was bubbling away without burning during the last two minutes of baking, the house smelled amazing too. One of the best pizzas i have eaten in a long time.

Honey Baked Figs with Cinnamon and Almonds

I didn't realise how big a sweet tooth i have until quite recently, i guess until i started blogging and started talking to you so much. Truth is i do have a huge sweet tooth. While I love my chocolate desserts very much, i am not picky at all. I don't think i would ever refuse any kind of sweet you want to offer me. Unless i am on a self imposed sweets ban that is, like i was for two months in 2008 when i found out i had gained too many kilos in too few preceding months. (so many in fact that unsuspecting colleagues with whom i only made polite conversation were telling me i look fat!) And as far as i recall, it was a while ago, that restriction was only that i should not buy any more sweets for myself. Which means i gladly ate a piece of cake at work, one that was brought to celebrate my boss' 50th birthday - it would have been rude not to, right? After all the man rarely spoke in office and had just confessed that he had spent more than half his life in that same company. One had to raise a toast (i mean eat cake) to this man's commitment i say, whether you were on a self-imposed sweets ban or not.

Wholewheat Oats Raisin Cookies

I can't say which i love better, baking cakes or baking cookies. Cookies are easier to bake, more difficult to get wrong and store for longer. So they are great for gifting. Cakes need a little more attention to pull them off correctly and so would have taken second place, except that i now have the cutest cake mould and i want to try out more varieties of cakes. This battle within me continues, while the winner may ultimately announce itself on the blog based on the number of blog posts dedicated to cookies and cakes. Today makes them even.

Eggless Peanut Butter Cookies

There's a little girl who lives across the street from us and we can see each other when i come out into our balcony and she comes to their kitchen balcony. And every time she sees me, she gives me a cute smile and an excited wave while shouting 'tataaa'. Their family moved into the apartment opposite our house about a year ago, when the kid was about 6 months old and she grew up before my eyes. She now shows off her bangles and her dress and any other accessories pointing at herself and then pointing at me to make me look. Her mother tells me how much the kid loves bangles and wears them for the whole length of the arm if allowed.

Tandoori spiced chicken legs

My go-to chocolate cake is in the oven as i begin to write this. I needed to do some baking so i could coax myself back to cooking. Back from the short holiday, i have become a reluctant cook. Suddenly i want to be served hot food without having to cook it. Not that i had to start cooking as soon as we came back. I wasn't even asked to cook the day we returned. We went out for lunch and the husband generously bought me my favourite biryani even though it wasn't his favourite. Or maybe it was (t)his pampering that turned me into the reluctant cook. To see how much more pampering i could get away with! Didn't have to wait long to find out. I had to cook lunch yesterday and today but we have plans for Sunday. (We finally booked our tickets to watch the Harry Potter finale in 3D on the largest screen in Hyderabad. I can't wait!) So to get me through the rest of today and tomorrow, i am baking. Somehow baking has always felt like fun. Unlike cooking that can sometimes be a chore, especially when cooking the same curries for lunch repeatedly week after week. And it is not the repetition that i am complaining about, because i can bake the same chocolate cake every week and not get tired of it. Any thoughts on why that is?

I was digressing. Anyway, about the whole reluctant cook thing, last night the husband surprisingly understood my predicament and said he would cook the tandoori chicken legs by himself for dinner, the chef didn't even want a helper. And i think for the first time in two years, i accepted the leave granted and sat in the living room watching the new season of Masterchef Australia.

Since i didn't go into the kitchen, i don't have clicks of the husband's masterpiece from last night, though he repeatedly told me what delicious juicy chicken he had prepared. The pictures you see here are from a few weeks ago. And i was so hungry at that time, i could not bring myself to get an extra clean plate for the final pic. Excuse the laziness, please.

Black Olive and Rosemary Focaccia

My initial yeast-bread making experiments were a disaster. I mean if you can’t eat a single bite from a loaf of bread and have to throw away whole loaves, you can call it little else. It was a real humbling experience – baking breads. For most of my life, I could succeed fairly well in anything I took up, while also making it appear effortless to on-lookers. Whether it was studies or sports or stove-top cooking too, to an extent. I had very rarely had criticism from others. So I wasn’t too pessimistic about trying yeast breads, i looked for the easiest recipe and went ahead. There was a banana cardamom loaf that was under-baked inside with a blackened bottom. There were multiple attempts at baking Indian dinner rolls (the pav of pav bhaji fame) which simply refused to rise vertically and would instead spread horizontally, and having puffed up outside the oven, would deflate once inside to become biscuits instead of bread. Oh, the experience scarred me. Pizzas were the saving grace, which brought me back to befriend yeast again. Oh and the beloved orange bread i talked about in a previous post too.

But I still had my eyes on Focaccia for a while now, having bought it from a supermarket a few months ago, one of the very few types of bread the picky eater in our house actually picked up. Most of the focaccia recipes called for a herb called Rosemary. And it needs to be fresh. Welcome to another ingredient that is hard to find in Hyderabad. To my delight, I came across a little bunch of fresh organic Rosemary in this supermarket called Spar in central Hyderabad. I almost squealed and jumped in delight. Then I left it sitting in the fridge for a week or more. When it was almost drying out, I finally decided Sunday night was a good enough time to make my first focaccia at home. 

Awesome Cocoa Brownies

Brownies are a beloved favourite for all chocolate fanatics. Don't be mistaken that it took me this long to try out some brownies, having started off with a chocolate cake recipe. No, i tried one a few months ago, for which i can't remember the recipe source. What I can remember is that it was not worthy of talking to you about. It looked more like a dense cake that forgot to rise or become fluffy and had cracks all over the surface. The husband had one look at the finished product and pronounced it ready for the trash can. I blamed myself, not the recipe, for the failure and kept away till now. But wait, why i am telling you so much about the wrong brownie. This post is about the one I baked last night, the one that turned out awesome. You don't need 70% dark chocolate for this brownie, just cocoa powder and butter and sugar and eggs will produce this rich, fudgey, chocolaty brownie.

Orange chocolate chunk cake/ Birthday Cake

My blog turned 1 month old on July 6th and i got invited to my nephew's birthday party who turned 8 on the same day. I couldn't have been happier to get this wonderful opportunity to bake a birthday cake! I wanted a cake that could hold its own without icing and was rich enough for a birthday kid. This was one cake where i wasn't going to substitute the usual low fat vegetable oil in place of butter. No, it was going to be rich, creamy butter all the way.

Roasted Bell Pepper and Onion Pizza

It has become a bit of a ritual for us to have pizza for weekend lunch. You see, we still have Pizza cravings when Pizza Hut's 99 rupee three course meal is no longer valid after Friday night. Oh yes, we still eat Pizza not baked in my kitchen. I didn't mislead you into thinking that i cook everything i eat now, did i? Sorry, but a girl can only get so much inspiration from reading food blogs and watching food shows on TV. She's gotta go out and see the variations in the real thing, sometimes.

Let me apologize first for the poor quality pics of the finished Pizza. I was too hungry to click proper pics and as you can see from the above photo, i could not even wait to slice the entire pizza to start eating. There will be better pictures next time. I promise to show more restraint. So please just take my word that this definitely tastes better than it looks, will you?

Well, I don't believe that there is a perfect pizza out there, just waiting to be discovered. I think this is one food where any amount of creativity can't hurt. We might each swear by a particular combination of toppings as our favourite but that wouldn't stop us from trying out the latest variety being zoomed into our computer screens by the endless deals being advertised. 

Orange Bread for Breakfast

This bread has a special place in my heart. It was the first yeast bread, after i started my bread baking experiments, that came out with a satisfactory result. It looked as good as a store bought loaf and tasted delicious! You can taste the orange when you bite into a slice. You can make a healthier version by substituting upto 100% of the all purpose flour with whole wheat flour. It will make a denser bread (i have tried that version too) but i like this bread with the less healthy white flour!

You don't even need two rises for the dough, as called for by most yeast bread recipes and still tastes this good. My taste tester who is not a fan of breads said - "Mmm, its  good, flavourful" and finished a whole big slice. Have i sold this bread enough, already? Then lets get to the recipe, shall we.

Wholewheat chocolate chip cookies

My first chocolate chip cookie was at a Subway. The dark chocolate variety, with little white chocolate chips peeking through a rich, chocolaty, chewy flat cookie. Almost irresistible for chocolate lovers. Its like a dare to  the good minded people who go there to have their low fat sandwiches. Also, anybody ever notice there is always an ice-cream shop next to a Subway? As if the chocolate chip cookie wasn't temptation enough!

Break - had to munch on a chocolate chip cookie. All this writing making me hungry :-)

So every time we went to the Subway, i would opt for the cookies as part of the meal and deny my husband's favorite potato chips. Every time! Now such a proposition is not fair and cannot should not last long. But i had also become addicted to chocolate chip cookies. They are quite a comfort food. And so began my online search for chocolate chip cookies and, believe you me, there's no dearth of them online. I  then took the minimum ingredients listed in most recipes and tweaked it into a healthier version - so the wholewheat flour in the ingredients. You see, i had every intention of eating the whole batch of cookies and hence a small attempt at not feeling guilty at the end of it!

I had just about started my experiments in baking with cakes and breads at this time and what a huge surprise it was for me to find out that cookies were the simplest of all baked goods! Warm cookies are delicious. The only thing you probably have to get to make this recipe NOW is chocolate chips or chunks of chocolate. You can add some nuts into the dough if you want a chewier (is that a word?) cookie. I no more ask for the Subway cookie - i eagerly wait to get back home and have a couple of my home-made ones.