It's been a while I know. But over the last few months, I kind of became occupied with stuff and then made myself unoccupied and then all over again. Life has been transitional for a while and it shall be for a while more. The more I take cognizance of that fact and accept it, the easier it will be for me I guess. Besides, gobbling my way through Gochujang noodles on a regular basis does not make good blog features.

Meanwhile, Aebleskivers have been on my list of things to do for a while now. In October, when I pitched initially to contribute to a site, I actually wrote down Aebleskivers. It never saw the light of day till now though. Aebleskivers are traditional Danish Pancake Balls. (I'm still silly enough to giggle every time I write balls.. heeheee) Apparently made during Christmas and supposed to have apple in them I think? I butchered a recipe from Nordic Food & Living and kind of made it this Sunday morning for the kids. Not that the kids I know really appreciate anything their aunt slaves over the stove for them. They always and always go back to their Ammachi's pineapple jam & toast. Spoilsports!

The adults loved it though. Wait! before the adults came in, quite a few of these balls (heehee..) ended up in my tummy as well. Oh! who am I kidding? I tend to forget I belong to the adult category. Having the mental/emotional capability of an under-aged teen in an over-sized body doesn't really help anyone. Meh! on that.




Makes approximately 24 teeny weeny balls

Ingredients

2  eggs separated
11/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup buttermilk
60g butter melted and cooled
1 tbsp sugar
pinch salt

1/4 cup chocolate chips (optional)
1/8 cup jam (optional)
2 tbsp icing sugar


Method

1. Whisk egg whites till stiff peaks form and set aside
2. in a different bowl, dry whisk flour, soda, sugar and salt.
3. Add yolks & buttermilk and mix till thoroughly combined. Used hand mixer if required
4. Pour melted & cooled butter to the batter and mix it in.
5. Using a wooden spoon/spatula fold in egg whites gently to the mix in three parts till you do not see white streaks. (Do not whack the shit out of it, you want the air from the egg whites to remain in the batter)
6. Heat the aebleskiver pan, add butter to each of those indentations.
7. Gently drop enough batter to fill 3/4 of the indent if making plain balls, else fill 1/4 of the indentation, add the topping and then cover till it reaches 3/4 of the indent.
8. Flip the balls using a skewer when they are firm on one side.
9. You're ready when both sides are golden and firm.
10. Serve onto plate. Sprinkle with icing sugar. You're good to go!

I am of the firm belief you need one solid basic cake recipe. If you have that sorted, everything else is a permutation & combination. I've been baking since before I started boiling water, so it's fair to say baking comes more naturally to me than other things. But there is this one standard cake recipe I use, which I then play around with. A dash of lemon, some orange zest, a spot of cocoa, fruit slices, anything really works with this recipe.


Today, I decided to add this fruit known locally as 'Bore'. Sounds funny right? It's also called 'Ber' or Indian Jujube apparently. It's only the last couple of years I've been having it, and it's caught my fancy. I try and get some of these when they are in season cos they are so fresh and crunchy and more sweet than sour. It tastes like a fruit we call 'Sabarjil' in Malayalam. Perhaps it's the same. Also, I had a new baking dish I've been eager to try out. So I decided to make an Upside Down Cake with this fruit.


Making Upside Down Cakes is a no brainer. Caramelize sugar till it reaches an amber gold colour, quickly coat the base of the baking tray. Pour batter on top. Bake. Invert the cake out of the dish almost as soon as it's out of the oven, or else the sugar caramel cools down and sticks to the baking dish. For this cake, I topped the caramel with slices of fruit in a nice pattern and then poured cake batter on top. On top of the batter, I added a crumble base, which are those white specks at the bottom of the cake you see in this picture. So I had oozy, almost bitter caramel on top of the cake, soft cooked fruit, an even softer cake and then a nice crunchy crumble base. Just so you have a fair idea of how me mind works. I like textures and this one gives me quite a few.

For the cake, I used my standard standard cake recipe which I'm going to share right here. All you have to remember is that a standard Indian egg weighs 50g. In most cases, we get a medium sized egg which falls in this category. If they are the smaller kinds, they will weigh ~40g, and if they are fairly large, they will come close to 60g. But for ease of representation, let's consider standard eggs as 50g.

The rest of the ingredients work in multiples of the egg quantity. So if you have one egg which weighs 50g, use 50g of butter, 50g of sugar, 50g of flour and 1/2 tsp of baking powder. If you have 2 eggs multiply the ingredients by 2 (100g butter, 100g sugar, 100g flour, 1 tsp baking powder) and so on. Of course, you'd have to adjust the size of the baking tins depending on the quantity. I always add a tablespoon of liquid to adjust the batter consistency and this I think gives me a softer cake. Normally it's milk, but occasionally, like in this case, when I want to be frivolous and give a different flavour to the cake, I add a splash of liqueur. So basically this is a pound cake which I've kind of worked around for my convenience.

Generally all recipes ask for a drop of vanilla extract/essence/lemon zest to eliminate the eggy flavour. In reality, I almost never have vanilla at hand and unless the cake specifically calls for lemon/lime, I don't zest it in. Maybe because I'm not so averse to the flavour of eggs, but I almost always feel that if you beat in the egg really well after each addition, it removes any egginess.


Ingredients

150g - Butter
150g - Sugar
3 - Eggs
150g - All Purpose Flour/Maida
1+1/4 tsp - Baking Powder
3 tbsp - Liquid (Milk, Liqueur,Yogurt)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 180C. Grease and line an 8" round cake tin
2. Cream Butter and sugar till light and fluffy. Don't try and save time on this. Cream till it becomes light in colour and you cant feel the sugar grains
3. Add the eggs in one by one. Beat well after each addition, till finally the eggs are completely mixed in and the mix is light and fluffy
4. Sift the flour and baking powder together. Fold it into the batter in batches. You needn't be too gentle about this. Go ahead and fold
5. Add in the liquid and stir till its uniformly mixed in.
6. Pour into cake tin and bake for 45-50 mins (my oven takes this long. Check your oven timing the first time around)
7. When a toothpick comes out clean/cake springs back on touch, you're good to go.

The best part about this recipe is, you can bake it in a round tin, a loaf tin or as I did this time, in a curved tin. It really doesn't affect the cake too much. Like I said earlier, depending on the size of the cake I want, I play around and make it for 1 or 2 eggs occasionally. I use the one with 2 eggs quite often cos thats the easiest when it comes to using butter. 100g butter is how we get it here and it's an ideal measurement when it comes to pouring into cupcake liners and baking a quick batch.

When my sister asked me for a Chocolate Fondant recipe, I told her, "it should be simple right? After all, you and I have been baking since forever. And it doesn't seem to difficult."
Wrong. I've been sadly proven wrong. Somehow I've got this bee in my bonnet I'd make anything but a fruit cake this year and hence a lot of other things make their way out of my oven. Chocolate fondant has been going on the past couple of days. My colleagues at work have been quite pleased that I'm so keen on fondant cos I take all my disappointments boxed up to work.

Some days, some weeks, some months, you space out. You worry about your place in life, in this world, in this universe. Nothing seems to make much sense for a while. A little chocolate, a few berries, toasty bread soaked in a custard base seems to just hit the spot for those moments of just forgetting everything. Forget the extra inches, the jiggle that never lets go, the jeans that's become a tad too stretchy. Embrace the butter, the sugar, the egg and just let go.

When my closest friends moved countries, I was the recipient of a lot of goodwill, a lot of love, a lot of memories and a lot of stuff from their pantry. Upali passed on these limes and I very happily accepted them as Kaffir Limes despite them not having the ridgy exterior that kaffir limes have. I kept calling them kaffir limes till after a point even I  realized the distinctive kaffir lime aroma was missing. Something, my brother kept mentioning over and over again... 'But it doesn't have thaaaattt... like you know the last time you made it...'

Update from Upali: These limes are called Gondho Lebu in Bengali and they travelled all the way from Calcutta to my cake. Thanks so much Upli!

I have a lot of things to be thankful for in this life. One of the main things would be the world wide web. Without that I'd have pored over books and still would never have found out about this delicious Greek dessert. It was an Instagram entry by my Turkish friend Elif which led me to this dessert. It looked and sounded so delicious, I hunted down a recipe for it and decided to make it one Sunday.




A little difficult to make if you don't have phyllo pastry. But totally doable if you're in one of those places where you get them easily in the frozen section of your supermarket. I was really determined to do the whole thing by myself, but my maid Jayashree chipped in and said she could easily make
those paper thin translucent sheets of pastry.

I name it as if all of the Malabar area were eating this kind of bread pudding. No, I name it this way cos flavours of the Malabar are unique and something I've so often repeated in this blog. To me bananas, coconut sugar and a sprinkle of cardamom remind me of home and the food I grew up with.
Perhaps not always the food we made at home, but the food I've come to associate with the region I've spent my childhood years.

They say if you make three significant changes to a recipe it becomes your own. I haven't gone the stretch, but its still significant enough for me to call it my own I think,



For a while there after the 'Liqueured Peach Cake' I stopped baking. In fact I stopped going into the kitchen other than for warming up stuff, opening takeaway Chinese, and whipping up some awesome milk shakes with super tasty milk from Sarda Farms, more on that later.

This is going to be a long post. Not because of a recipe actually. More because now that I've got a platform to say something, I really want to say something I've got on my mind.


It all started with that Indira Nooyi article. I'm sure you've all read it. Well, if you're Indian and you're on Facebook, you have. After all, she's the most famous Indian female in the corporate world. Someone all girls in the country are supposed to look up to. We don't have too many idols besides movie stars and rubbish politicians. Then she comes out with a story how women can't have it all. I guess we're all caught up in Sheryl Sandberg's 'Lean In'. Frankly I don't have the inclination to listen to either of them. I maybe female, I could belong to the working class, but we all have our battles and no two of them are the same. But none of this matters to me. What mattered most to me in Indira Nooyi's article was the milk incident.

Hello Decadence, I'm in love with you.




I'm a big big fan of David L. I don't own a single book of his but follow his blog like a religion. When 'My Paris Kitchen' came out, I read up on all the articles about the book, including the one he'd written in his blog about how he wrote the book. The best part about scouring all those articles online - free recipes from the book!!! I was in 7th heaven when recipes started popping up here and there. This one seemed so simple to make and yet so decadent.

Ever since 'Joy the Baker' put up her 'Tiny Strawberry Cream Scones', I've been wanting to make them. Not just because it seemed super easy, but also, remember the boxes of strawberries I mentioned in my last post? I still got them! And I need to finish them really quick before they start going all mushy on me.


But I didn't want to do exactly what Joy did. It wouldn't be all that fun that way would it? So I went with matcha. I'd been having this green tea powder since my last visit to Singapore and thought this would be the best way to start using it. Strawberry and matcha seemed nice. Atleast in my head. You could also skip the matcha and just do what Joy did. You wouldn't have to do anything but take out the matcha from the recipe. No alterations but that.

I shouldn't be having a blog. People who don't have much to say shouldn't have a blog where they actually have to wax lyrical about everything. Hence, I wont. Going to back to being my normal, practical self where I think, speak and write in bullet points :-)



Roasted Strawberries are amazing
They bring an extra pop to these babies
Not the mention an accentuation of the flavours
En Papillote, in a cover, its even better, cos it cooks in its own steam, in its own juices, mingling, intermingling like... oh I have some funny words I shouldn't use here. Why are food blogs so polite by the way? Why does nobody ever use cuss words? Chefs are not known for their polite language.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm crazy to put up something as simple as a frozen yoghurt. But it doesn't seem so crazy when I remember that I actually went and read up on a lot of frozen yoghurt recipes to finally make one.

If you're like me and haven't invested in an ice-cream maker, please read 'How to Make Ice-Cream without a Machine' by David Lebovitz