Parsi Mawa Cake

I was travelling the day before my husband's birthday this year, and at Mumbai airport, decided to pick up a Mawa cake from Theobroma as a birthday morning surprise. We had first come across Mawa cake at Sodabottleopenerwala which one year became our favourite restaurant - we went there 8 times in that year, a record for people who don't even eat out at restaurants that often! The warm Mawa cake was a real revelation - soft, moist and delicious without being super sweet.

It reminded me of the first time I had eaten pound cake, as a teenager back in Singapore. It was a Sara Lee frozen pound cake, eaten straight from the freezer, but managed to be so succulently soft and moist that I simply could not get enough. There was something so comfortably familiar and loving in the taste of it that I feel I've been looking at recreating that taste my whole life.

The Mawa cake at Sodabottle and at Theobroma are exactly like that taste of childhood nostalgia - moist, dense, familiar, sweet and untainted by any form of decorativeness that takes cake from being a comfortable friend to a formal acquaintance. It's quite like a pound cake, in its soft and moist taste - nothing sticks to the tongue or the palate in a claggy way, but just eases its way so smoothly down the gullet, you're left looking to the next bite and the next.

I was hit by a powerful urge to bake that from scratch today, having bought some mawa (khoya) from the neighbourhood market recently. I've got to say, I understand a phrase by one of my favourite authors - a cut-and-come-again-cake, after eating this one today. The kids piled on to it like they'd never had cake before, the elder ones putting away a cool three slices apiece. Having just baked it this evening, there is barely a fifth of it left! I'm not sure if I feel delighted everyone loved it or dismayed that it whooshed by so fast!!!

Oh well, at least it's not too complicated or time consuming to make!

Ingredients:
1 cup plain flour
1.5 cups sugar
1/3 cup softened unsalted butter
200 gms mawa
1 tsp vanilla
3 eggs, room temperature
1 tsp baking powder

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees c.

Mix the dry ingredients and then all the wet, except the eggs. Beat together, then add the eggs one by one and beat to a smooth mixture. If it's clumpy, add a small portion of plain milk and beat until the mixture is smooth and dropping consistency.

Pour into an 8 inch greased and floured baking pan and bake for 45 minutes - if a knife comes out clean, it's done. It should have a lovely honey-gold colour.

If you insist on tarting it up - and I wouldn't - you can dredge some icing sugar in nice patterns over the smooth honey gold top. I did get a hankering for a smidgen of salted caramel icecream on the side - not the oversweet kind, but the kind that's genuinely a little salty.

It would probably be a great coffee time treat as well.

Burnt Butter Cake with Salted Caramel Sauce

I have been wanting to make a Burnt butter cake ever since I watched the last season of Masterchef Australia in which a contestant baked it. To me, burnt butter means only one thing - ghee - and as a true-blue Kannadiga, ghee is one of my favourite things to eat. Anything to eat can only improve if a dash of ghee is added, in my opinion.

Salted caramel is another flavour that I have begun loving, and during out vacation in Italy, we gorged on salted caramel gelato. At Diva a couple of weeks ago, I spied a new dessert with toffee and salted caramel and had to order it, so making salted caramel from scratch has been on my mind. Especially since I managed to create a Choco-ba-fee cake a couple of weeks ago which was a big hit - chocolate-banana-toffee, a new take on good old Banoffee. So I decided to experiment with it yesterday and let's just say the result far outdid my expectations. The cake is light and oh-so-moist, and the brown demerara sugar I used for the caramel topping was just mildly bitter, cutting through the sweetness of caramel. Yum and a must-repeat!

Ingredients (Cake):
2.5 cups plain flour
1 cup sugar
4 eggs
300 grams butter
4 tsp baking powder
2 tsp vanilla
1 cup milk

Heat the butter on a low flame until it melts, stirring occasionally, and then continue to heat till it turns golden brown. Take off the heat and put the entire thing, including the brown bits,
to cool in the fridge - it needs to be solidified but not hard.

Preheat the oven at 180 degrees C. Combine the flour and baking powder in a vessel and keep aside. Combine the vanilla and milk and keep aside.

When the burnt butter is solid but not hardened, take it out of the fridge and beat it together with the sugar until pale and creamy. Add the eggs one by one, continuing to beat at a medium speed.

Then alternately add flour and the milk mixture, while continuing to beat at a medium speed until both are used up - begin and end with flour.

Pour the cake mix into a 9 inch lined baking tin and bake for about 45-50 minutes. It's done when the knife comes out clean. Put aside to cool.

Salted Caramel Sauce:
1 cup brown demerara sugar
100 gms salted butter
1/3 cup cream
Sea salt to taste

While you're waiting for the burnt butter to cool, you can be getting on with the sauce-making.

Heat the brown sugar in a thick-bottomed pan or kadhai, whisking constantly, on a slow flame until the sugar is completely melted. It may clump a little but that's ok.

Once the sugar has melted, stop whisking and continue heating the sugar mix, swirling the pan occasionally, to ensure the sugar on the bottom doesn't burn up. When it starts turning a slightly darker brown, add the butter in and start whisking again until the butter and sugar are well mixed together. Then pour in the cream and whisk again until the mixture is completely smooth.

Take off the stove and wait for it to cool for a few minutes, then add sea salt to taste. Set aside in the fridge or otherwise to cool down.

To serve:
Take the cake out of the pan onto the serving dish. Ensure the salted caramel sauce is at room temperature and then pour over the cake. The sauce will drip down the sides of the cake, but that's part of its inherent gooey, indulgent charm. If you want to be stylish, you can add a dollop of whipped cream but it's unnecessary to the taste of this decadent dessert.

Recipe adapted from:
http://www.raspberricupcakes.com

Healthy desserts

Watching Masterchef Australia seems to have released some of my suppressed-due-to-laziness urges to cook and create. So I came up with this sunshine dessert over the weekend, which had the added benefits of being healthy, pretty, simple and liked by the kids!

Ingredients:
Hung Curd ( yogurt) - 1 liter
Powdered sugar - 2 tbsp
Peach slices - fresh or tinned ( if tinned in syrup, wash them else they can be sickly sweet)
Frozen raspberries/ blueberries - 1 cup
Pine nuts- handful, peeled and toasted

Tie up 1 liter of fresh curd/ yogurt in a thin linen cloth and leave out for about an hour, until most of the liquid is drained out. Add the powdered sugar to the hung curd and mix well. In wine glasses - because it looks so pretty and is easy to serve - put in a good dollop of the hung curd. Top with two peach slices. Add a spoonful of the rasps/ blueberries. Add another dollop of the hung curd. Sprinkle on the pine nuts. Serve!

This makes enough for 6 people. (Pic will be posted sometime soon)

In The Bag

I'm a huge fan of chocolate and chocolate desserts, especially those that preserve the decadent qualities of chocolate - melting, oozy, molten brown. Chocolate mousse doesn't do it for me - the chocolate dessert has to be warm to bring out the essence of the intense chocolate experience. Of course, that doesn't mean I didn't try to make chocolate mousse - that was one of the first desserts I tried making from scratch after we moved into our home. We were entertaining some close friends and I wanted to show off my newfound cooking skills. That, naturally, would be the day the refrigerator chose to conk off, so by the time they came, the mousse was chocolate sludge!

I found lots of yummy chocolatey recipes in Nigella Lawson's books. I really enjoy Nigella Lawson's food writing - it's more sensual than a lot of romantic literature out there! I love the way she describes food and the pleasure that she evokes in the entire process of selecting, preparing and cooking the food, and then eating it, of course. The first book I ever bought of hers was called How to be a Domestic Goddess - and I swear to you I almost inhaled it. If only the desserts could come to life, without my having to put any effort into it...One of the most interesting and exotic-sounding, for me at least, was the Chocolate Chestnut Pudding. I did try roasted chestnuts in Switzerland once, after having read so many lyrical descriptions of them by British authors writing about France, and was quite disappointed. Nope, not my bag. But in a cake? Hmm...

I tried this out last year as a special dessert for A's 40th birthday. I thought my usual cakes - Black as midnight or Crazy Cake - were a bit too regular for this, and I wanted a recipe rich in taste as well as experience. I went down to INA market specially to buy chestnuts - that's one market where you will get the most esoteric of ingredients ( esoteric from the Indian PoV) - wasabi paste, walnut oil, fresh truffles, Boursin and what not. The cake itself...it's not really a cake, it's more like a Bomb, so devastating is the experience of devouring it. Its fragrance is deeply redolent of the best things about chocolate. The texture is crumbly and yet moist. And the flavour is so densely chocolatey, that if you're a chocoholic, you will finish the entire thing before offering so much as a smidgen of it to other people. We served it to some close friends who came by on A's birthday - they literally picked each and every crumb off their plates and begged for seconds!

I went down to INA market some time back and got about a kilo of chestnuts that I pureed and put away in anticipation of this cake. I had been waiting for an occasion special enough to make this - A's birthday again seemed like a cliche. Finally, we have a couple of friends from the US who're visiting us on Friday, and they are major chocoholics, so that serves as the occasion.

A word about these two - they are such chocoholics that when they went grocery shopping in France, they typically bought about half a kilo of chocolate to last them through the week! Not only that, but on the fifteen minute walk home from the store, they would have demolished half their stock!!! PK - the female half of the pair - and I finally decided at one time that we had to lose weight, so we went on the GM diet. PK's husband, MK, is of the infuriating never-put-on-weight persuasion. We were hanging around at her house, sadly eyeing our cabbage soup, when MK disappears into the next room. "Don't come in for the next few minutes", he calls out. Well, saying that is like putting a match to gunpowder so PK couldn't resist. She tiptoed up to the room and put her eye to the keyhole. Guess what? MK was busy polishing off a tub of chocolate mousse, which had apparently been calling him from the fridge for quite a while. Being a gentleman, he didn't want to tempt PK off her diet!

Last night, I set to and made the cake. It's sitting there in a tin, eyeing me evilly and saying, "So...you think you won't finish me off before Friday? We haf vays to make you eat..." Lord give me strength!

Chocolate Chestnut Bomb

Ingredients:

435 grams chestnut puree

125 gms unsalted butter, softened

6 eggs, separated

250 gms best dark ( but sweetened) chocolate (softened)

50 gms caster sugar

20 gms light muscovado sugar

1 tsp vanilla

1 tbsp dark rum

Pinch salt

As always, didn't have all the ingredients, so went along and improvised. Also, have done the best in terms of photography, what with my meagre camera skills and the morning light which is harsh as opposed to lambent - but do, please, do try making this cake. You'll never regret it!

In a deep bowl, mix together the butter and the chestnut puree until well mixed. Then add the vanilla, rum, the egg yolks and the chocolate and blend until well mixed.

In a separate bowl, beat the whites of the eggs with the salt until foamy. Add the caster sugar gradually, and continue beating until the peaks are stiff and glossy. Scatter the muscovado sugar on top and fold in until well mixed.

Working confidently, fold the egg whites into the chocolate-chestnut batter, one third at a time.

Pour the batter into a 22 cm Springform greased and lined tin. Bake at 180 degrees C for 45 minutes ( or thereabouts). The top of the cake will have cracks in it, but who cares - it's meant to look that way. Cool on the rack for 20 minutes. Before serving, dust icing sugar on top and make sure whoever you're sharing this with is already in the room. Otherwise, all you'll have to show for your efforts is a pile of crumbs and a tiny brown smear on your chin!

I improvised with:
Kahlua instead of dark rum
2 tsp vanilla
Brown sugar instead of Muscovado which I don't know what it is and can't find easily here

Soften the chocolate by blitzing it in a microwave for 2 minutes - works like a charm. Ditto the butter, but for 1.5 minutes only. I use an electric beater for all the beating and folding - my biceps can't take the manual experience. Also, for novices - folding means to move the beater through the batter in a figure 8. It allows more air to come in or some such.

Also - am all thumbs when it comes to wrapping anything - I always claim the gifts we give at birthday parties and so on are wrapped by my 4 year old. So lining a round tin with a sheet of rectangular wax paper - well!!!But since it was a Springform ( again, for novices, a cake pan in which the bottom is detachable so its easier to pop the cake out. Just push upwards from below the pan and...whoops, the cake is on the floor and the rest of the pan is hanging off my arm like a giant's bracelet! Ok just kidding but it could happen.), I wrapped the bottom plate in wax paper. I put two pieces of wax paper into the cake pan so they overlapped at the edges, curled over the top like pie crust, and hung out of the hole at the bottom. Then I stomped the bottom plate into the pan and hey presto, the wax paper was stuck in place!

This blog is my entry for In The Bag, hosted this month by A Slice of Cherry Pie

Marrow - petha family

I, like many Indian school children growing up in the '70s, was addicted to Enid Blyton's books. She had the ability to make the most everyday food sound delicious - tomatoes fresh from the garden, e.g. But I was always puzzled by her references to marrow jam, since the only marrow I was familiar with was bone marrow. It was only years later that I realised she was referring to the petha family of veggies. By and large I'm not a huge fan of this variety of vegetables, finding them too tasteless for my liking. But I do love petha halwa, and petha huli ( sambar). Yesterday I discovered that my one and a half year old also likes petha. We had petha huli for dinner and little miss happily fished out piece after piece of the veggie from the spicy huli and gobbled it up, screaming when her portion was finished.

Dumrothe (Petha Halwa) was served at my sister's wedding feast, many years ago. All the guests relished it, including me, and sadly none was left by the time my parents were free to sit down for their meal. I have tried with varying success to make it at home, mostly because it takes a lot of patience, which is one condiment in short supply at our house.

Dumrothe
Ingredients:
1 petha, medium size, grated finely
1 cup ghee ( clarified butter, recipe on one of my blogs)
1 tsp saffron strands
Half as many cups sugar as of grated petha
Cardamon - 4-5 pods with the seeds removed and crushed into fine powder
1/2 cup pistachio halves

Tie the grated petha into a muslin cloth and hang over a sink or place in a colander with a heavy weight placed on top, to ensure that all the water drains out.
Once the petha is almost dry, put it into a non-stick wok on medium heat and roast, stirring occasionally until it is almost dry.
Add the ghee and the saffron strands, and stir to mix, frying for about 3-4 minutes.
Then add the sugar slowly, stirring to mix.
Once all the sugar is melted and the halwa has taken on a pale yellow colour, remove from heat and stir in the cardamom powder.
Garnish with pistachio halves before serving.

Petha Huli
1 cup arhar dal, well cooked
1 lime sized ball of tamarind, soaked in 1/2 cup warm water for half hour
1 lime-sized ball of jaggery ( or brown sugar if Jaggery is not available)
1 petha, cut into 2 inch long and 1 inch wide segments and boiled until well done
Salt to taste
2 cups water
1 handful fresh grated coconut
1-2 tbsp Huli Pudi ( recipe given below)
Tempering ( voggarane)
1 tsp black mustard seeds
1 sprig curry leaves
2 dried red chillies

Squeeze the tamarind juice into the hot water, and strain into a deep steel utensil or saucepan.
Add the cooked lentils and boil for a few minutes to get rid of the 'raw' smell of the tamarind juice.
Meanwhile, blend the fresh coconut along with the Huli Pudi and half cup of water to make a smooth paste.
Add the paste to the lentil-tamarind mix and add the cooked petha, jaggery and salt.
Boil together for 4-5 minutes so the ingredients blend well together.
Add the tempering and serve hot.

Petha huli goes well with rotis and rice.

Huli Pudi Recipe
1 handful coriander seeds
I handful dried red chillies
Half handful chana dal
Half handful urad dal
2 tbsp dessicated ground coconut
1 2 inch piece of cinnamon bark
Pinch asafoetida ( heeng)
1 handful dried curry leaves
1 tsp turmeric
Fry the coriander seeds and red chillies together in a wok with one drop of oil, un til the red chillied turn shiny. Keep aside to cool.
Fry the chana dal and urad dal ( add urad after chana is half done) with a drop of oil, until they turn crunchy and light brown. Then add the coconut, cinnamon, asafoetida and curry leaves and fry until the coconut turns slightly brown and gives off a nice, toasty aroma.
Keep aside to cool.
In a dry grinder, powder the coriander seeds and the red chillies together into a fine powder. Add the rest of the fried ingredients and powder until you get a dark brown-gold powder. Then add the turmeric, which helps the keeping power of the powder.
Remove, mix with a spoon and store in a tightly closed clean container.
This powder can keep for up to a month in a dark cupboard, and longer in cold weather.