Fruitcake

Fruitcakes are my favourite among cakes and my whole purpose of learning to bake is to make fruitcakes and savour them.
I modified my previous cake recipe for banana cake a little and ended up with this delicacy that can be a great tea-time snack.


Ingredients:

1. Maida - 1 cup (125 ml)
2. Oil - 3/4 cup (around 90 ml)
3. Sugar - 1 cup (125 ml or 125 grams)
4. Eggs - 3
5. Pineapple essence - 1 tsp.
6. Baking powder - 1/2 to 3/4 tsp.
7. Tutti Fruiti (Red and green)- 50-75 grams
8. Extra flour and oil for greasing and dusting.

Procedure:

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C.
2. Grease and dust a cake mould (I used olive oil and maida)
3. Sieve the flour and sift it together with baking powder.
4. Take the tutti fruiti in a small bowl, add a little extra flour and toss it to dust the tutti fruiti completely. This is to make sure that the tutti fruiti pieces don't sink to the bottom of the cake while baking.
5. In a mixie, powder the sugar, then add oil to this powdered sugar in the mixie and cream them together to form a runny paste.
6. Add the eggs, one at a time and quickly whisk each time for a few seconds to make sure he eggs are beaten well.
7. Add the pineapple essence and blend it again.
8. Now add the flour to this mixture little by little and fold in using a ladle. You can blend it in the mixie too, but the air trapped into the batter that way will be less.
9. Add the tutti fruiti to this mixture and fold in gently.
10. Pour this batter into the cake mould and bake for around 35-45 minutes, till a knife inserted comes out clean and the crust is slightly browned. (I baked for 45 minutes)
11. Cool it for around half an hour, cut it into slices and store in a container.

Top view

Bottom view

Cross section

Brown Sugar Cookies

The butter cookies recipe which I posted earlier (one of my earliest posts in this blog) is a recipe which I follow exactly. But there are times when you do not have all the ingredients and you try to make something worthwhile using the ingredients you have. This is one such experimental recipe. I must confess that the measurements here are just approximate. There was a little brown sugar leftover from the blondies, so used them up.  Also there was no butter available, so used ghee instead. Again, I didn't want to use too much ghee, so I used a little milk for binding the dough together.

Ingredients:

1. Flour - Atta or Maida - 1 cup ( 200 ml)
2. Brown sugar - 1/3 cup ( More brown sugar will make the cookies gooey)
3. Powdered sugar - 1/3 cup
4. Ghee/melted butter - 1/3 cup
5. Milk - 2-3 tsp.
6. Baking soda - 1/4 tsp.
7. Vanilla essence - 1/2 tsp.

Procedure:

1. Sieve together flour and baking soda.
2. In a bowl mix the flour,  brown sugar, powdered sugar, ghee, vanilla essence and mix well.
3. The dough will be coarse and will not bind together. Add very little milk, just enough to bind together the flour. The dough should not be pasty and should not stick to fingers when rolled. If it is pasty, add a little more flour and knead.
4. Preheat the oven at 200 degrees C.
5. Make small balls (like for chapatis) out of the dough and flatten them lightly like patties (around 1&1/2 inch diameter).
6. Place them on a baking tray with space for expansion (cookies can double in diameter and flatten out a little) and bake for 12-15 minutes at 200 degrees C. till the edges turn brown.
7. Cool the cookies in open air. Once they cool, they will become crisp (unless of course the amount of brown sugar is high, in which case they can be enjoyed as gooey cookies).

This measurement made around 25 cookies and took 3 batches of baking.

Walnut Blondie

My baking dreams started right from my school days and I should say that all my past experiments with baking have been disastrous! That was a time when we did not have an oven at home and tried to bake cakes in the cooker, or even in the sandwich toaster. Moreover we did not have supermarkets that sold baking ingredients like today, so we would substitute ingredients with readily available stuff. And the biggest limitation was that we tried to do all the baking without egg. Eggless cakes are possible, but we need to substitute egg with skill, not just milkmaid or sprite.
I'm not a regular baker or a good baker or an intuitive baker, but I hope to master the art in due course of time. For the past couple of trials, I have been baking cakes with eggs, and they turn out quite good, although not perfect. Since I do not the understand the chemistry of baking, I do not experiment with the recipes, but follow someone's tried and tested recipe to the T. That works out best when you want to avoid disasters.
I baked a walnut blondie for G's birthday yesterday. A blondie is a brownie without chocolate or so I understand. I'm not a chocolate fan and hence was impressed with the blondie concept. G does not have any preferences when it comes to cakes, so I let myself reign over the choice. Moreover, a blondie/brownie is a safe choice, because the consistency of the core can turn out any way and still meet expectations. If it is fluffy, good. If it is dense and cakey, good. If it is fudgy, better. If it is gooey and chewy, even better. What makes the difference is the ratio of flour to sugar to butter to egg.
With the following measurements, mine turned out dark brown and fudgy inside and a thin layer of light brown crust on the outside.

Ingredients:

1. Maida - 1 cup ( cup here measures 200ml)
2. Brown sugar - 1 cup
3. Baking soda - 1/8 tsp.
4. Baking powder - 1/2 tsp.
5. Egg - 1
6. Butter - 75 g
7. Chopped walnuts - 1/4 cup
8. Vanilla essence - 1 tsp.

Procedure:

1. Preheat the oven to 170 degrees C.
2. Sift maida, baking powder and baking soda together thrice. 
3. Mix in the chopped walnuts with the flour.
4. In a bowl , melt butter and stir in the brown sugar. Add the egg and vanilla essence to this and beat well. 
5. Add the flour to this little by little and stir in gently.The resultant batter will be much thicker than usual cake batter and will not flow at all, but it will be more moist and sticky than cookie dough.
6. Grease and dust the baking pan ( preferably a square one so that it is easy to cute the slices; i used a heart shaped one because G wanted it for his birthday) and scoop out the cake batter into it to form a one-inch or slightly  thicker layer.
7. Bake for around 30 - 35 minutes or until a knife comes out clean. It is possible that the inside is still mushy after 35 minutes. That is because of he brown sugar and not a problem as long as it does not stick to the knife.  
8. Cool the cake for around half an hour.The cake will rise to double its height while baking, but will flatten as you cool. It will be dense and not fluffy 

I wish I had got some vanilla ice-cream  and maple syrup to go with this, but had to serve it plain and simple. It tasted good though.

Oatmeal Cookies

Ingredients:

1. Oats - 1 cup
2. Wheat flour - 1 cup
3. Butter - 100 g.
4. Sugar - 1/2 cup
5. Baking soda - 1/2 tsp.

Procedure:

1. Melt the butter to room temperature.
2. Sieve the wheat flour and baking soda together.
3. Mix in the wheat flour, oats and sugar into butter and mix to make a crumbly cookie dough (pic 1)
4. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C.
5. Make small balls out of the cookie dough and flatten them on a baking tray (pic 2). Make sure there is space in between in case the cookies expand while being baked.
6. Bake at 200 degrees C for 25 minutes and cool to room temperature. (pic 3).

pic 1

pic 2

pic 3

Butter Cookies

I really don't remember when I learnt this recipe and from whom.All I remember is that I eagerly tried this out as soon as we bought an OTG and it was a big hit.

Ingredients:

1. Wheat flour or Maida - 2 cups
2. Powdered Sugar - 2 cups
3. Melted butter ( or soft butter at room temperature) -  2 cups
4. Powdered Cardamom seeds - 1/2 tsp
5. Baking soda - 1/2 tsp.

Procedure:

1. Sift the flour with sugar powder and baking soda in a bowl through a sieve.
2. Add Cardamom powder to melted butter and pour this slowly into the flour and gently mix. Add enough butter to make a soft dough. The dough will not be elastic, instead it will be slightly coarse and slippery.
3. Roll out small balls of around 2 cm diameter and flatten them like patties. Let the patties be around 1 cm thick. You may wish to use a cutter to shape them. Arrange 5-6 of them in a baking tray. Place them slightly far apart as the cookies will increase a little in size while baking.
4. Preheat the oven and bake for 15-20 minutes at 200 degrees C.