First Birthday Food

My youngest, Bojjandi, turned one yesterday. It was bitter-sweet - on the one hand I was happy I had managed to keep him alive given two siblings under six with a habit of strewing tiny toys around the house and not knowing their own strength. on the other hand, my littlest baby was also getting ready to move into toddler-hood, baby no more. I almost thought it was time for baby # 4 but the prospect of divorce and/ or working until the age of 95 made me decide 3 was enough to be going on with.

For his first birthday party, the food had to be something that he could eat. Moreover, I had had pest control done just two days before and the kitchen was lying strewn all over the dining room, so it had to be an easy menu. Finally I decided simplicity was going to be key and fixed the menu: Idlis with huli and coconut chutney, rice flavoured with vegetables and menthedittu, and carrot cake.

The Carrot Cake was a new one on me but I had been wanting to make one for quite a while, and when I saw the recipe in one of my favourite recipe books, I found it was healthy too - wholewheat flour, carrots, orange juice and vegetable oil. It turned out really well, though it was flatter than I expected, as I had baked it in a wide cake pan. I frosted it simply with cream cheese flavoured with honey and orange juice - something which didn't tax my cake-decorating skills of which, to say they are meagre would be high praise. And proof of the deliciousness of the said cake was Bojji gobbling it up and wailing loudly for seconds :)

Carrot Cake recipe

Ingredients:

2 cups wholemeal self-raising flour, or with 2.5 tsps of baking powder added

3-4 carrots, grated and squeezed dry

1 cup vegetable oil

1 cup caster sugar

1 tsp nutmeg powder

1 tsp cinnamon powder

3 eggs

1 cup walnuts, powdered (optional)

Zest of 1 orange and its juice

Beat together the orange zest, OJ, sugar and eggs until light and frothy. Add the vegetable oil, flour and spices and mix well. Add in the carrots and walnuts and mix together. Pour the cake batter into a greased and lined 8" baking pan and bake at 180 degrees for 1 hour - decide n baking time and temperature based on your oven's idiosyncrasies. Mine required baking at 160 for 35 minutes and the crust was close to burnt.

For the frosting, beat together 225 gms cream cheese with 2-3 tbsp honey and 1 tbsp OJ. You can also use this to sandwich the cake together and then top with Royal or Marzipan icing. Decorate as wished...

Back again

Have been off blogging for a long while thanks to not having a laptop...Now I've finally got one so here I come. Lots and lots of posts have been revolving in my head for ages...

One of the first things a resourceful and experimentative cook needs to learn is the fine art of 'jugaad'. Jugaad is an Indian term signifying street smarts - the art of using what resources you have at your disposal and accomplishing what you need to accomplish, without waiting for the perfect solution to present itself.

Recently A's birthday came up and I had had no time to preplan what I was going to do that day. A is not a chocolate cake fan, unless it's a special recipe, like my Chocolate Chestnut bombe, or the Chocolate fondant cake, so I racked my brains to come up with something he would like that would be interesting to make too. I had also been pondering my stash of frozen raspberries for a while, wanting to find something evocative to do with them.

As it turned out, I found a wonderful recipe for Almond Cake in Nigella Lawson's How to be a domestic goddess. It uses a cup of almonds, blitzed into powder, with eggs and sugar. It's typically made in a bundt pan, so the shape itself looks festive.

Simple: Beat together 4 egg yolks with 1 cup caster sugar. Add vanilla and the powdered almonds. Beat the whites until stiff and fold in. Bake in a nonstick bundt pan for one hour at 160 degrees centigrade (keep an eye on the cake while it's baking as each oven is a little different).

Well, at least that's what I thought. So I beat the yolks and whipped the whites and folded away and set it to bake. About 50 minutes later the cake was done, so I set it out to cool. Only to find that once cool, the cake simply would not emerge from the pan in one piece. Of course, I hadn't happened to have had a nonstick bundt pan so I had used an ordinary round pan copiously lined with wax paper, but given the moist and sticky nature of this cake, that didn't work. I might add, I had substituted powdered ordinary sugar as I was out of caster sugar - I am not one of nature's planners...

So here I was with great hunks of a sticky cake - not festive looking! Now what to do? The the thought of the raspberries jumped into my head and I decided to make a jugaad version of English trifle, with cream and raspberry sauce.

I took out my Spanish red and gold glass bowl and tossed a few hunks of almond cake into the bottom. Then I topped it with lightly sweetened beaten light cream and topped it with raspberry sauce, made by whipping defrosted raspberries with a little sugar, as the rasps were a little sour. I carried on layering until all the cake, cream and rasps were used up and chilled it until the rasp sauce was well set.

It turned out to be a fabulous concoction, with the sour-sweet raspberry sauce cooled by the whipped cream providing a lovely contrast to the sweet and moist cake. What do you think?