Applesauce cake

I used to like apples once upon a time. Then, I went to grad school. Apple was the cheapest fruit and as a poor Indian grad student, I ate one as my daily fruit quota religiously for close to 3 years. Then, not surprisingly, I got sick of it. Now, while I can tolerate fresh apples occasionally (read, once in 6 months or so), I cannot eat it on a regular basis. Thus, all apples lovingly brought by visitors took up more and more space on the refrigerator shelf.

So, when sis asked me to bake a cake, I immediately decided that apples would be the base. I first picked a recipe from Good Housekeeping magazine but was unsure of some of the ingredients. Besides, nowadays, unless a recipe has good reviews, I do not try it out (unless, of course, it looks too good even on paper).

Then, I luckily stumbled upon this recipe for applesauce cake. This blog usually features great recipes and this cake did not disappoint either. It was easy to make and the end result was moist, fluffy and delicious.

I adapted the recipe a little. Here it is:

Applesauce Cake

Ingredients
2 cups flour
1 tsp cinnamon powder
1/4 tsp nutmeg powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
3 eggs
1/2 cup butter (I used 1/4 cup butter and a little less than 1/4 cup oil - use non-flavorful oils like vegetable, canola or sunflower oil)
3/4 cup sugar
1 cup applesauce (recipe below)
1/4 cup yogurt (diluted with a little water and mixed well)
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 tbsp slivered almonds


Method
1. Pre-heat oven to 180C. Grease a baking pan and lightly flour it
2. Sift the flour, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and baking soda together a couple of times. Keep aside.
3. Beat the sugar with butter/oil till light and fluffy.
4. Add the eggs one by one, mixing well after adding each egg.
5. Add in the applesauce and the vanilla essence and mix well.
6. Add in half of the dry mixture from step 1 and mix till almost blended.
7. Now add in the yogurt and the rest of the dry mix and stir till just mixed.
8. Pour in the mixture into the prepared pan.
9. Sprinkle the slivered almonds over the top of the cake.
10. Bake immediately for 30 minutes or till a toothpick inserted in various parts of the cake comes out clean.
11. Cool completely on a wire-rack.

Recipe for apple sauce:
Ingredients (makes about a cup)
2 apples, peeled, cored and chopped into medium pieces
1 tsp lemon juice
Water

Method
1. Place apple pieces in a pan and pour enough water to cover.
2. Bring the mixture to a boil and add lemon juice.
3. Cover pan and cook on medium-low heat for about 25-30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
4. Applesauce is done when apples can be easily mashed with the back of a spoon. Water remaining in the pan is okay.
5. Mash the apples with a big spoon or masher till it forms a mixture with little lumps.
6. Applesauce is ready. Cool before using in the above recipe.

Notes
1. You can add sugar/cinnamon powder to the apple-sauce as per your taste. I did not add any for the applesauce I used for the cake.

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!

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.

Kulfi

Who would have thought kulfi could be this easy to make?

http://onehotstove.blogspot.com/2010/02/i-dream-of-summer-pistachio-kulfi.html

I did not read through the ingredient list carefully and thus forgot to buy the cream. But the kulfi still came out great. Seriously, what's there to not like in the rest of the ingredients?

BTW, make sure you like the flavor of rose water if you plan to use it instead of saffron. I tried rose water the second time I tried this recipe, and did not care for it too much.

I used popsicle molds to set the kulfi and each one made a delicious after-dinner treat.

Banana bread

When Focaccia bread is here, can banana bread be far behind? This is a very forgiving recipe - so if you have more or less bananas, it still turns out yummy. But the more bananas you have, the more moist and tasty it is. Also overripe bananas (what a delicious way to not let them go to waste!) work best though ripe bananas would do too:

http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/banana_bread/

Remember not to stir the mixture too much after adding the flour.  You only need to mix in the flour enough so that all of it gets moist.

I usually toss in some walnuts (broken into smaller pieces) into the batter and mix it before adding the flour. I also sprinkle a light layer of chopped walnuts over the banana bread before baking - banana and walnuts make such a yummy combo!

Don't fret if you don't have a loaf-tin. I always bake it in a cake pan and banana bread in any shape is just as delicious

Hot milk sponge cake

Who would have thought making yummy-tasting sponge cake would be so easy? I used to think all along that McRennett made the best sponge cake in the world. I only now realize that this could be because I have only tasted sponge cakes from McRennet. Haha!

Not to take anything from McRennett (seriously, I really love their sponge cakes) but the following recipe made sponge cake which was pretty close in taste and texture to the McRennett stuff. I got the recipe from an old recipe book no longer available (General Foods Kitchen, All About Baking) bought at the library's used book sale. So, no online link. Instead here is the entire recipe:

Slices of sponge cake

Ingredients

2 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 eggs unbeaten
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla (or 1 tablespoon grated orange rind)
1 cup milk
2 tablespoons butter or margarine

Method

Sift flour, baking powder and salt together. Beat eggs in a large deep bowl until very thick and light (about 5 minutes). Gradually beat in sugar. Add vanilla. add flour to egg mixture, a small amount at a time, blending by hand or at low speed of electric mixer. Bring milk and butter just to a boil. Very quickly stir into the flour mixture, blending thoroughly (batter will be thin). Pour quickly into a baking pan which has been greased and floured on the bottom only. Bake at once in a moderate oven (350 F) for 30 to 35 minutes. Serve warm.
 

I reduced the sugar (I like milder sweetness) plus had to bake for longer than specified - use the toothpick comes out clean when inserted through the center method of testing for done-ness. Other than that, the only other problem with this recipe is, you will have to halve or quarter it and bake. Because, once you start eating, you will not be able to stop and I don't want to be responsible for you feeling guilty about meeting the calorie requirements for a week on a single day :-D.