When life throws you sour mangoes…

Make mango loaf cake 😛

Now it’s a known fact for those who know me well that I hate, absolutely hate summers.
Ideally, i should have warmed up to the weather, you know. I grew up in a city where each year the weather was as scorching as the previous. And by some twist of fate I have been living for the past 13 years in a region where it marks its presence even more ferociously! So you see I have been abundantly blessed with hot weather all my life. Despite that it’s one season I have never looked forward to.  There’s not been a single day when I have not cribbed about it.
But but but. there’s one thing that this weather brings in which cools me down.

Yes, mangoes!

I love them from the bottom of my heart. I can slurp on them till eternity! Ok..ok..not eternity. But I can have them till my tummy can possibly take them without bursting!

This year too when summer has already reared its blazing head, the juicy, sweet, melt-in-the-mouth, supremely delicious fruit is what my eyes look out for every time I head to a supermarket.
But last week I got misled by their beautiful yellow skin only to realize that one of them was sour and unripe. Since I didn’t  have the heart to throw it away, I decided to turn it into a cake. And thus got made the loaf cake.

Now to the recipe. Smita, specially for you, sakhi….

This recipe is from Divya’s Cookbook

Ingredients:

All purpose flour – 1 ½ cups
Baking powder – 2 tsp
Salt – ¼ tsp
Eggs – 2
Sugar – 1 cup
Fresh Mango chopped – ½ cup
Yogurt – ½ cup
Vanilla extract – 2 tsp
Oil – ½ cup
Almond slivers for garnish

Method:

Preheat the oven to 350ºF /175 C. Butter a loaf-pan.
In a bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt.
Blend together mango cubes and yogurt to a smooth paste.
Whisk the eggs, sugar,yogurt-mango puree, and vanilla together until well blended.
Add the dry ingredients and stir until smooth.
Finally, pour in the oil and use the whisk to gently but thoroughly fold it into the batter.
Put the batter in the loaf pan,sprinkle almond slivers on top and bake for 50 to 55 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean.
Cool on a rack for 5 minutes, then unmold and cool to room temperature right-side up.

The only variation I made while baking is that I added a tea spoon of cinnamon powder, since I love its flavour. So if you are someone who love the aroma of cinnamon, go ahead and add a teaspoon or two to the recipe and make magic!
Enjoy

Number 8 B’day Cake for my 8 Year Old..

Namnam turned 8 last week. And I had planned to bake a special cake for her. So, like a good mom, I asked her what kind of cake she would like on her bday and pat came the reply- A ‘Thea Stilton’ cake, based on her favourite book!

Now the thought of having to design a figurine cake with its whiskers and ears and nose and lashes perfectly in place, among other things, was enough to petrify the lazy, utterly uncreative, unartistic, not to forget, awfully messy mom in me! 😯

Sooooo, the good mom brought out the meanie mom from within and moulded her child into getting excited about another cake that was relatively easy to bake, and also stayed true to the occasion :twisted:.

And when I told her that she could assist me in decorating the cake, the excitement level shot a few notches up 🙂

Here’s what we made for the 8 year old and her friends who had come over to celebrate the day with us 🙂

In case any of you is wondering how I made this, here’s how..

I baked 2 round chocolate cakes using a 9 inch baking dish. Once the cakes were completely cooled, I cut a hole with a 2cm round mouthed glass in the middle of each.

Then I cut off a bit from the edge of both the cakes in equal measure, applied some chocolate frosting (recipe to follow as the post progresses) on the edges..

And joined the cakes..

Then applied some more frosting, around the cakes.

And some more, liberally!

The last step was the decorating with m&m gems for which I got able help from the b’day girl herself.

And that is how we pulled off the number 8 cake.

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Now to the recipes.

Chocolate cake:

Any chocolate cake would work well. I normally use a very simple recipe which I have shared with IMC for their Book Week special as well here.

However, this time I baked my cakes using this recipe from Add a Pinch, which turned out supremely moist and delicious!

Frosting:

For frosting, well, all I can say is that it’s a blessing if you have baker-friends you can turn to :). They can be absolute life-savers! I had scouted around various websites in search of a good frosting recipe but in vain, until Monika came to my rescue. She shared this easy-peasy, super-yum recipe of hers which worked like a charm!

Thank you so much, Mon 🙂

And here goes the recipe, as given by her, verbatim..

Ingredients

100 gm dark chocolate

200 gm package cream cheese

4 cups confectioners’ sugar/ Icing sugar( In my case, 3 cups more than sufficed)

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1/8 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons cream if required

Method

Have all ingredients at room temperature. Melt the chocolate in a double boiler or microwave oven.
In a large bowl, beat cream cheese until fluffy. Pour melted chocolate into cream cheese and mix on medium speed until well blended. Add vanilla and pinch of salt. Slowly mix in the confectioners sugar.
Scrape the sides of the bowl and increase the mixer speed to medium-high. Slowly add cream until the frosting is spreading consistency.

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Edited to Add:

Pixie asked me a very relevant question after reading the post. She wanted to know whether we ate the pieces of cake that I cut from the middle and edges. To answer her and anyone who may have had the same doubt- Yessss, we totally did! We gobbled them all up! Namnam even took some pieces to school to have at lunch.

Chocolates of any any kind, size or shape are not to be wasted, you see! That’s the golden rule of my chocoholic household 😛

It took a Choux Pastry to make me want to come back here..

And brush my blog up before it inched towards a near-dormant state!

I baked this today after Smitha tempted a bunch of us yesterday by announcing that she was making Choux pastry.

It was the first time I had heard the term, but when she said that these puffs were used to make profiteroles and eclairs, I found myself drooling even more.

Now, I am a very lazy person, especially when it comes to cooking or baking. So I normally steer clear from complicated cooking unless of course it is absolutely necessary. But the easy way with which Smitha had gone about baking, filling the puffs with creme all so fast while chatting with us, had me thinking that it was something that I could attempt too.
So I got the recipe from her last night. One glance through it and I remember thinking, “Oh wow! This is quite easy!”

I had most of the things needed for the pastries except for whipped cream and nozzle for the filling. Since I was fully charged up to try out the recipe today itself I rushed to the store and bought all that I needed.

The baking process began and everything from the measurements of the flour to butter-water consistency to thickness of the dough was turning out just right! Now the recipe had a simple instruction of using a spoon to put small balls of dough onto the baking paper. But clearly spoon was too amateur for a baker like me who had had it so easy up till now, so I went in for a piping bag to squeeze the dough out to make small balls! And what was the result? Well, the result was blotches of dough splashed across my kitchen-top and baking tray, not to mention the spots on my t shirt, as a result of an enthusiastic squeeze with all my might because of which the nozzle burst off! :eyeroll:

So…simple spoon was back in the game.

These are the Choux pastries in the making.

I had at first planned to keep the puffs simple with just the whipped cream filling and few sprinkles of icing sugar on top. But my eternal craving for chocolates had me looking out for means to make some choco-flavoured topping. I didn’t have to go too far, as I found a jar of chocolate cream, right at home, that we had picked up on a visit to the Lindt Factory in Zurich this year! Slurp!

As it turned out, the profiteroles royally dipped in chocolate were much relished by all the three chocoholics in Deeps’ abode 🙂

Smits, thanks loads for the recipe! 🙂

Edited to Add..

The link to the recipe .

For some strange reason the recipe doesn’t mention the baking part. So let me add that bit the way Smitha explained to me.

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees centigrade.

Spoon 5-6 teaspoonfuls of the dough on to a lined baking tray and bake for 30 minutes or until they are puffed and golden.

Remove the tray from and poke a hole in the bottom of the balls to release the steam and put them back in the oven for about 5 minutes to dry the insides.

Once the buns are done, transfer them to a wire rack and let them cool.

To put the whipped cream filling, cut a bun in half and squeeze the cream onto the lower half, using a piping bag.

Cover by placing the top half of the bun over it.

Sprinkle some icing sugar on top and serve.

Alternately, for chocoholics, the top side of the bun could be dipped in chocolate cream or ganache, which is what I did, before placing it as a cover 🙂

I found this video on Youtube quite helpful too..

Serving y’all an Apple cake…

Before heading into a blog-break!

Wow, that rhymed! 🙂

EDITED TO ADD: The apple cake recipe that I followed..

mom’s apple cake

In my case, though, I halved the measurements of all the ingredients to suit our taste and requirements. And it turned out just fine.

Do let me know when you try it out in your kitchen! 🙂

So till I see you all again, it’s bye-bye!