Caramel Cake - an old favourite

This one was a favourite during the days of my first pregnancy and I was bored and had too much time on hand. I can't imagine how jobless I used to be back then! I found the recipe at the back of a baking powder can (no internet back in those days) and I thought I could try it out. Making the caramel was always a tricky process back then and I would inevitably burn it but the cake was always appreciated because it had this warm stickiness that is always associated with home baked goods.

On impulse I decided to make it last night. Got Saboor to help me beat the butter. It was merely an excuse to make sure he wouldn't nod off to sleep before I made dinner and it worked. My leftie son gets awkward with handling these things but for once I was not a monster mom last night and encouraged him to beat it in one direction only. The recipe is very simple and we finished the batter in fifteen minutes, right in time for Masterchef Australia to start on TV.

As an aside, everyone at home watches Masterchef Australia, including my MIL and the kids. MIL thinks that one of the judges, George, constantly bounces on the balls of his feet enthusiastically and she's nicknamed him 'uchal-billa' in Urdu. Ha ha! It merely means someone who is fidgety and constantly jumping around in excitement. I think.

Anyways, without further delays, here's the recipe. Every time I think I should take a picture, I think I'll do it later and by then there's nothing left.

Ingredients

200 gms white butter
2 cups maida
3 eggs
1 tsp baking powder
1 and 1/4 cup sugar (granulated will do)
1/4 cup sugar for caramel
1 tsp vanilla essence
1/2 cup water

Beat the butter and sugar until creamy. Add eggs and beat well. Add the essence. Sieve maida with baking powder and fold into the mixture gently. To make caramel, melt sugar over medium heat until it's a shade darker than golden brown. Immediately pour in the water (it makes a big crackling noise) and swirl the pan quickly before caramel sets at the bottom and pour into the cake batter. Mix evenly and the batter acquires a beautiful toffee brown colour. Bake in a preheated oven at 180 degrees for 30 to 35 minutes.

Look ma, a perfect cake!

I've had a long history with making bad cakes. Jokes used to abound in the house about how my mother would have to hunt out the hammer in order to break the cake and how we'd all end up cracking a molar or two while eating it. But I started early I think. I was just 11. So I could possibly be forgiven for thinking that a double boiler simply meant a pan double the size of a regular pan. Or that one cup flour didn't mean I had to pile the cup with flour till it resembled a mini mountain. Also, my father had just bought a microwave. Back then it was an absolute novelty. Which meant that I didn't know we shouldn't leave cake batter in it for 30 minutes at Medium because it felt right.

Anyhow, I was determined to learn how to bake a cake properly and even attended classes (yes!) to learn more about cakes and baking etc. One course that I did in 2003 was pretty good. It was conducted by the Institute of Cake Baking and Cake Art (that's the name I think) and we got a one hour lesson on the science of baking, something that pretty much boggled me considering that I still think that cooking is an art. So I learnt baking and I was finally able to bake proper cakes for the first time in my life, a fact that amazed me as much as it astounded my mother (who had to do most of the cleaning up after my cake adventures when I was small.)

Now, I'm considered something of an expert at home. Ahem. Yes.

See? See??? I told ya!!!

Yes, I made it. Not now though. Umm, a couple of years back and I can make it again if I wanted to. Really.

And I'm being very nice and giving you the recipe as well which I adapted from a book called the McCall Book of Cakes and Pies.

Ingredients for Cake (make 2 of these)

3 eggs
1 cup granulated sugar

1/2 cup hot milk
3/4 cup maida + 1/4 cup cocoa sifted together with 1 tsp baking powder
vanilla essence

• Break the eggs into a clean bowl and beat them using an electric egg beater until they're foamy and acquire a light lemony colour.
• Add the sugar and continue beating on high for about 5 minutes until the mixture is thick.
• Add essence and slowly fold in flour+cocoa mixture and beat on low for a little while.
• Add the hot milk and mix properly.
• Bake at 200 degrees centigrade for about thirty minutes
• When cake is done, cool and invert on a plate

Icing

Fresh Cream

Sugar

Ice cubes

Beat the fresh cream with sugar over ice cubes until thick. Keep aside.

Decoration

1 tin cherries

grated choclate

Assembling

Moisten each cake with the sweetened sugar syrup present in the cherry tin can. Spread haf the cream over one cake, arrange the cherries and sprinkle grated chocolate over it.

Place the other cake on top. Spread the whipped cream all over the cake, and sides, decorate with cherries and grated chocolate.

I get these huge complexes when I watch shows like Masterchef Australia where they come up with such fabulous looking desserts but I just have to go back and see these pictures and it helps me feel tons better. While I would never survive even one episode of a Masterchef episode, forget winning anything, it's nice to know that for those who don't know any better (like my family and friends), I'm pretty much a master at what I do. I think.

Breaking down the pavlova

When I was a child, I'd seen these laidback videos of food shows that my father had taped when he was in Hong Kong. As there was no cable TV then my brother and I used to alternate in watching cartoon tapes, old movies( either Amitabh Bachchan's or Shammi Kapoor's) and sometimes these food shows.

Every episode featured the popular dishes of some country. We'd watch professional chefs preparing sushi or baked trout or bean curd packets filled with rice and it was probably the production values of those days, just a slightly sardonic narrator and no glib chefs that made it seem as though we could actually taste what they were making.

One of these videos featured Pavlova. I was enthralled each time I saw it. That beautiful white mound topped with strawberries and kiwis which were pretty much a dream back in those days seemed like something too difficult to accomplish. I could never contemplate making it myself because although I was around 10 or 11 I'd already subjected my family to rock hard cakes and plenty of burnt biscuits.

Years later I discovered Joy of Baking and pretty much tried out quite a few of the recipes there with huge success. When I came across Pavlova, I remembered thinking that maybe I could take it up now. How difficult could it possibly be to bake a meringue and fill it with whipped cream?

And on one eid I decided that's what I would do. I got everything ready, spooned the meringue on the parchment paper and started baking it as in the recipe. So far so good. But every time I checked it was still not done. And I had to do another one as well.

Around an hour later I realised that making a pavlova with a single small oven like I had wasn't such a great idea. Also the meringue wasn't getting cooked properly and I was getting a distinct egg smell.

About two hours later I stared at the meringues which refused to peel off from the paper easily. I got frustrated and when that happens I get angry as well. So without thinking clearly (like what would I tell everyone as I had shooed them away from the kitchen while I baked the dessert), I broke off the meringue in pieces and then, inspiration struck.

No one needed to know what a Pavlova looked like. The only people who had seen those videos were my mother and brother. I could possibly hoodwink my mother and my brother wasn't in town. So I arranged the meringue in small cups and layered it with sweetened whipped cream and fruits and voila, my dessert was ready!

[caption id="attachment_98" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Mini Pavlovas"][/caption]

Although everyone loved it, I haven't been quite inspired to try it again. The recipe for pavlova can be found here. I pretty much followed the instructions in the recipe although the video hadn't been there when I made this the last time around.

It wasn't fun making this and unless you're sure of how your oven works and unless you're really, really positive and confident, you shouldn't really try it out. But then who am I to stop you? If it doesn't quite work out the way it's supposed to, you can always break it down. Like I did.

Ice cream cake

 

Someone has gone and switched on the 'Go experiment' button inside me and I've gone a little crazy trying out a new recipe for each birthday that comes. Oh and sorry, Sidra and mom, I couldn't get to try a new one on their birthdays however.

For Azzu's 4th birthday, I decided to make an ice cream cake. Don't ask me why. Beats me too. It's not like we're in the thick of summer or anything. Or maybe I was just plain lazy and I didn't feel like baking anything. Which doesn't explain the batch of chocolate brownies I made on the morning of his birthday. Hmm.

Anyway, this is one of the easiest things to make, although of course, it didn't come out like expected. I googled for the recipe and came up with one I liked (read, one I found ingredients for without travelling too far).

All you need is

• about 3 to 4 packets of either Pure Magic biscuits, or Sunfeast Dark Fantasy or Oreos, whichever is available to you.


• 1.5 litre of your favourite flavour of ice cream


• Whipped cream


• Chocolate for garnishing


• 1/4 cup melted butter

Oh and don't bother making this if you don't have a springform tin.I, luckily, happen to have one thanks to my bro who had brought it back from Hong Kong some years ago.

Method - Reserve a few biscuits for garnishing and crush the remaining using a rolling pin. Mix with melted butter and spread on the bottom of the springform pan. Keep in freezer for ten minutes. Keep the ice cream in the fridge for a while so it softens. Spoon it out into a bowl and make sure it's spreadable. Add a few nuts or crushed biscuits to the ice cream for added taste. Spread the ice cream over the biscuit base and then refreeze for a few hours until hard. When it hardens completely, top with whipped cream, freeze for a little more while and then remove the latches on the sides of the tin so you can lift it up. Decorate with remaining biscuits and chocolate curls.

My recommendations - Avoid the biscuit base because mine got fully stuck to the bottom of the pan. Also, the original recipe asked for us to remove the springform tin before adding whipped cream. I did the same and my ice cream started collapsing in front of my eyes. Also, a better idea would be to use a different flavour of ice cream on top instead of using whipped cream. My whipped cream also refused to peak and frozen whipped cream is not that great either. So if you're not having the biscuit base and not having the whipped cream on top...you might as well eat the ice cream straight from the carton. :|

Uh, no. The next time I make this one, I'm going to look for a recipe which uses cake at the bottom. I'd originally dreamt of having a cake base, ice cream in the middle and cake layer on top, making it an ice cream sandwich kinda thing. I should have been more adventurous and gone ahead and tried that. Nevertheless, the messy cake was fun for everyone except Azhaan who couldn't figure out why the cake was melting.

In the picture, I've decorated the sides with biscuits and topped it off with moulded chocolate that I made on my own.

 

Old fashioned pound cake

Apparently, in the pound cake, you're supposed to have a pound of butter and a pound of flour and a pound of eggs. Which is where the name originated. But it also sounds unbelievably rich and fattening. So, I found this other recipe which uses 5 eggs as opposed to the 9 in the original. Whew! NINE eggs...

So, I made this cake sometime ago and it passed my disappearance test with flying colours!

Credit for the recipe goes to Mc Calls Book of Cakes and Pies

3 1/2 cups sifted flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

200 gms butter

2 cups sugar

5 eggs

2 tsp grated lemon peel

3/4 cup milk

Preheat oven to 180 degrees centigrade. Sift flour with baking powder and salt. You know the rest of the drill right? No?

:D

Ok, here goes:

Beat butter and sugar using an electric mixer until it's light and fluffy. Add eggs and lemon peel. Beat in flour mixture alternately with milk, ending with the flour mixture. Beat until just combined.

Pour into greased baking tray ( I used a bread tin for which I had to divide the cake batter into three) and bake for at least forty minutes. If you're using a bread tin, then you have to bake it a little longer or the cake won't be cooked through and you'll end up with a sticky mess (it happened with one of the batches).

Beginning the year on a smelly note

I didn't mean to.  I had assumed that these days, the great spirit of the kitchen resides in my hands and the wonderful and benevolent oven will not do anything underhanded. They didn't. In fact they performed beautifully. It was the icing that decided to act up.

This is what happened:

My son Saboor's birthday falls on 2nd January and this time (also) I decided to bake a cake for him. Funny how I didn't bother to post any blog about what happened last year. But that was so hilarious, I will have to dedicate an entire post to that.

This time I decided to bake a different cake for him. I didn't want the usual chocolate cake topped with chocolate icing and filled with chocolate filling. I must be growing old. I mean, who in their right minds would decide not to make a chocolate cake.

I looked up the recipe from this book called Mc Calls Best Cakes and Pies, and chose to make Mc Calls Best White Cake. Following the instructions was easy and using just one round pan, I made three layers of the cake. I couldn't resist adding cocoa to one of the layers. Then, I wrapped them up in parchment paper, tossed it in the freezer for sometime and wondered what kind of icing I should do.

I was always happy with a ganache type of icing because it is the easiest and always delivered good results. But recently, I was also doing a pretty good job of whipped cream icing. Still, I wanted to try something new and I decided to opt for the White Mountain icing from the same book.

We decided to celebrate Saboor's birthday at my moms place this time so we took the cakes and went there. I started preparing the icing for which we needed to make a thick sugar syrup. Then, this had to be added in a thin stream to whipped egg whites. What you get is a fluffy and sweet icing that is spreadable but hardens really fast.

I sandwiched the three cakes with the icing, and covered the top also. It was already starting to harden and I was having a difficult time but I managed somehow. The end result was this:

[caption id="attachment_10" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="S for Saboor"][/caption]

Which is not bad at all. I mean, it looked pretty decent enough. There was still some icing left which had become hard, so I tried to fashion a mouse out of it, then a cat and I think it ended up looking like an owl. Take a look:



Ok so it won't win any prizes but I was still quite pleased about it. After all, I had done everything myself! No shortcuts at all.

Then the time came to cut the cake. Half of it soon disappeared as soon as it was cut. The general consensus was that the cake was not moist enough. It was a little dry. I agreed although I felt defensive about it.

[caption id="attachment_12" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Birthday cake"][/caption]

You might be wondering what is wrong here. I mean, so far everything seemed to have worked out pretty well. Yes, like I said the icing acted up. You did note that I made it with egg whites. I knew those had a propensity for smelling a little but while we ate the cake, there was nothing wrong. No eggy smell. As yet.

A little while later when I was looking around for something to store the cake, I realised that the inevitable will happen. You put raw egg in something, it's bound to throw up a stink.

So, the cake failed my 'disappearance' test. If a cake didn't disappear soon enough from the table, it wasn't good. Not good enough.