Moroccan orange cake

I think I have been blowing my own trumpet too much about my baking abilities. Sis (who is not in my city and hence not one of the frequent recipients of my culinary output) is so impressed that she asked me to bake a cake and send it to her. So this cake is traveling all the way to Hong Kong now!

Sis picked orange cake and I Googled and got this recipe:

http://moroccanfood.about.com/od/dessertsandcookies/r/orange_cake.htm

The cake has simple ingredients and is easy to put together. However, contrary to what the comments in the link say, I could not detect any orangey flavor while baking. The cake did came out looking spongy.

I followed the recipe as is with the following modifications:

1. Halved the recipe - correspondingly the baking time was about 25 minutes.
2. I do not own a bundt pan, so used a regular round cake tin.
3. Sprinkled sliced almonds (or whatever version of sliced I could get using a knife, a chopping board and almonds) on top of the cake before baking.
4 . After cooling the cake for about 10 minutes, I dusted powdered sugar on top. You can skip this if you prefer milder sweetness.

Orange cake cooling on an improvised rack.

I have not tasted the cake. Will update the result of the taste test once I hear back from sis!

Update:
Verdict from sis: The cake is totally yummy. It is so spongy and soft.

Yeah, this recipe is a keeper!

Malabar parotta

Here is a great recipe and detailed steps for making the fluffy and layered Malabar parottas:

http://deepann.wordpress.com/2006/02/20/kerala-porotta/

Yes, it is easier to heat and eat the frozen parotta from the store, but this recipe lets you control the amount of oil going into the parotta and also has a delicious end-result!

How to fry fish with minimal oil

Craving fried fish but not craving the extra calories? Here's how to fry the fish with minimal oil as learnt from my mom and aunts. This takes longer than simply dunking the fish in hot oil but the extra time is worth it.

Tawa fish fry

 You'll need:
Marinated fish pieces
A tawa
A lid to cover the entire tawa
Oil

Method:
1. Coat the entire tawa with a thin film of oil.
2. Place it on a stove at medium-high heat and heat it.
3. Place the fish slices without overlap on the tawa.
4. Cover the tawa with the lid and cook till the fish starts changing color (meaning it has gotten cooked). This will take 3-4 minutes. Medium high heat should not be burning the fish, but if it is, reduce the heat to medium. If the fish seems too dry, add a few drops of oil around the sides.
5. Flip the fish over and repeat step 4.
6. Now reduce the heat further to simmer and flip the fish again. This time cook without the lid for about 2-3 minutes.
7. Flip the fish and repeat step 6.

At this point, fish will be done. Serve hot!

Remember to heat up the tawa on medium-high heat and coat it with a thin film of oil before frying every batch of fish.

Fish Marinade:
Can be any combo of the following
Red chilli powder
Dhania seeds
Turmeric powder
Cumin seeds
Saunf seeds
Fenugreek seeds (only a little, say 5-7, too much will add a bitter taste)
A few fresh garlic cloves
A little tamarind

Grind all of the above with enough salt for the quantity of fish you have got and a little water to make a fine paste. Apply on all sides of the fish and marinate for a couple of hours outside or overnight in the refrigerator. Bring down to room temperature before cooking if you had placed the fish in the fridge.

No quantities are mentioned for the ingredients above on purpose. It varies depending on the quantity of fish and your palate.  In general, the chilli powder and dhania would form the base for the marinade while the rest of the ingredients act as accents.

Beetroot Cabbage Soup

I could eat different kinds of bread everyday for the rest of my life and still die happy (provided you feed me chicken biryani from time to time). I love bread! As a side effect, I like eating salads, sandwiches and soup too - since bread makes an awesome accompaniment to these dishes.

Today is one of those "I don't feel like cooking for lunch" days. While just eating bread would have been okay with me, with my new resolution to eat more healthy, I decided I should include some veggies for lunch. The quick and easy option was to concoct a soup using ingredients in the pantry. Thus was born this healthy cabbage-beetroot soup.

Ingredients (makes enough for two as a starter or for one as a whole meal):
1 medium beetroot, chopped
1/4 of a small cabbage, chopped
5 shallots or 1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic
1 torn bay leaf
1 tsp dried rosemary (or any herb seasoning of your choice)
5 pepper corns
Salt and pepper to taste

Method:
1. Add all the ingredients to a pan and fill with water up to about one inch above the veggies.
2. Bring to a boil. Cover and simmer for about an hour or until a beetroot piece can be mashed with a spoon.
3. Drain the excess water from the boiled mixture and reserve.
4. Fish out and toss the bay leaves from the boiled mixture and then cool the mixture. Grind to a fine paste (make sure the mixture is completely cooled before grinding. Otherwise you will wind up with a very clean kitchen. Because you would have wiped off the splattered mess from the walls, the ceiling, the counter-tops, the various kitchen apparatus and the floor. Trust me on this).
5. Add water from step 3 to the ground veggie mix to dilute the soup to the consistency you like.
6. Heat the soup through on the stove top or with a microwave.
7. Season with salt and pepper to taste. You can add a dollop of butter before serving, if you wish to.

Serve hot with toasted bread on the side.

A variation would be the "sweat" the vegetables before boiling them. Sweating refers to the process of adding butter/oil to a pan to coat, adding the veggies, stirring it a bit and then covering and cooking them on a low flame for about 5 minutes. This will get rid of the raw smell of the veggies. This is the tastier, albeit slightly less healthy variation of making the soup.

Fresh apple cake

As you can see, I am on a baking spree. This very easy apple cake recipe made a very tasty apple cake (3 of us finished 3/4ths of the cake in about 15 minutes):

http://hubpages.com/hub/Fresh_Apple_Cake_Recipe

I followed the original recipe since the cake was for a special occasion and I wasn't sure if using whole wheat flour would taste good. The only changes I made to the recipe were to add some chopped cashews to the batter along with the sugared apple pieces and cutting down the sugar to about 2/3rd of a cup. For some reason (I think it was the baking soda I used), the cake refused to hold together and kept crumbling upon touch. But since the taste was so good, we just called it "Apple crumble" instead and enjoyed it all the same!

I will probably try the healthier version of this cake sometime and update this post.

Fruit cake

http://deepann.wordpress.com/2006/03/30/rich-fruit-plum-cake/

For some reason, this recipe had been calling out to me ever since I first laid eyes upon it. I love "plum cake" loaded with fruits and nuts that we get in bakeries in India and this recipe sounded like a great one for baking my own.

Making this cake to ring in the New Year seemed like a perfect occasion marker. I set out soaking the fruits a week before baking day - it should have been earlier but we did not get the brandy till that day. Though I had mostly bought broken nuts, chopping the cherries, almonds and dates still took quite a while. Seriously, prep work is the most laborious step of most recipes. I soaked the dried fruits and nuts in brandy and put in in the refrigerator. In retrospect, I should have simply left it outside but I was worried that it would go bad given Chennai's humid climate. I ultimately wound up leaving it outside for about 1.5 days and the rest of the days in the fridge.

On D-day, putting the cake together took longer than I expected (so, what's new). Here's what I did, bullet-point style:

1. I assembled all the ingredients first before starting any mixing.
2. The right time to add water to the caramel is when the sugar/water mixture melts completely and then begins to foam/bubble up. The original writer is right, there IS a lot of splashing, so be very careful.
3. I had no powdered spices other than nutmeg. So I simply ground whole cardamom, cloves and cinnamon and sieved it with a tea-strainer before using. Nutmeg is a must for the fruit-cakey taste.
4. I had no dry ginger powder either. So I ground fresh ginger along with the orange juice for the last step and strained and used the ginger-orange juice instead.
5. I don't have an electric mixer and I got a very good arm workout with the hand mixer and plain old hand whisking.
6. One mistake I made was to use fresh lemon peel in the soaked fruit-nut mixture. This peel refused to soften and showed up as weird unchewable bits in the cake. As Mom said, this was the drishti for the otherwise absolutely yummy and professional tasting cake. You could use candied lemon/orange peels if you want to - I think that should be fine.
7. This recipe makes 2 generous-sized cakes (with 8" round pans). The cakes are loaded with fruits and nuts in every bite when made as per the original directions.
8. In case you are wondering, it is impossible to taste/smell the brandy in the finished product. So don't worry if you don't like the alcohol taste.
9. Baking the cake took longer than 45 minutes (closer to an hour perhaps) for me. So keep checking for done-ness every few minutes from the 45 minute-mark.
10. This blog has some more pictures for the same recipe:
http://yummyoyummy.blogspot.com/2010/06/fruit-cake.html

The cake tastes best when cooled. This recipe is a sure keeper. All the effort is totally worth it.