Valentines' Day Choc Coffee Fudge Cake

This cake was introduced to me by a classmate of mine, back in the day. She hated me, I hated her, but together, we shared the love for baked goods.
So as a farewell present to me, in class 10, she handed me the recipe.
This cake went on to become the reason Aarushi and Rudraksh would come over. This was also Shibangi's 17th birthday cake, and her dad's birthday cake too. This is what I used to cheer my friends up, and everytime Suhina was sad, she'd ask for this.
It's delicious to say the least, and surprisingly easy.

I bake several versions of this cake, but those versions I will keep for later. This is a cake I'm proud to say that I have perfected. It's brilliant and no fail. No amount of screwing up will screw this cake up. It's like the boyfriend you never had but always wanted. The kind of boyfriend who forgives you even if you fuck up and treats you well, you know? It's really sad that I have to equate food to people, but that's what it's come to so what to do.

The recipe [ makes 2 8 inch cakes] [ half the recipe, if needed, that's what i usually do]
2 cups maida
2 cups sugar
1 cup cocoa
1 tsp baking powder
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp coffee powder
a pinch of salt
1 cup milk
1 cup water
3/4 cup oil
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 eggs

The process is simple and routine. Dry ingredients in one bowl. Wet in another. Mix both. And voilaaa, there you have it. Yum cake batter.
Grease and flour the tin, add batter to tin.
Bake at 150 for 30 mins.

And whooop.

I had cream cheese frosting left over from yesterday, so I was very generous with it today and smeared it all over this beautiful cake. And because I have a bottle of sprinkles, I was generous with that too :D I still can't get over how good it tastes. PAT ON YOUR BACK DISHARI!

Valentines' Day Red Velvet!

Valentines' Day is just around the corner. Can't have Valentines' without Red Velvet. I'm not in Delhi anymore, so I can't cajole somebody to take me to Elma's and buy me a slice of their signature Red Velvet, so I decided to make one of my own and settle for a homemade version instead.
And I wasn't disappointed, not one bit.

I followed the recipe Anmol's put up on her blog.
The recipe can be found - here


Even the frosting is her recipe, but instead of using 2 cups of sugar, I used one cup, and I used a little more butter, about 80 grams. Instead of sprinkling the top with crumbs, I used fancy sprinkles that were given to me yesterday. LOTS of it. If you don't have sprinkles, don't fret. This cake is amazing just by itself without any decoration.

The recipe calls for one 8 inch cake, I baked 2 4 inch square cakes.

If like me, you've overcooked the top and the top is brown. DON'T WORRY. The knife shall come to your rescue. Just scrape the brown bits off to reveal a luscious red and there, your cake shall look perfect.

This cake tastes better when served cold. It tastes really good not cold also, when I think about it.

The frosting tastes brilliant, and goes with absolutely everything. I ate left over frosting with cookies, and put some on bread and then when there was no bread left, i just took big spoonfuls of frosting and stuffed my face. Yum.


This cake reinforces my faith in Red Velvet. It tastes SO GOOD. The cake is moist and yummy, and the frosting compliments it perfectly. The perfect Valentines' Day snack, if you ask me. I wouldn't mind lying in bed all day with my significant other [ haaa!] and eating this. No, really. That sounds like heaven right about now.

Apple Crumble!

Apple Crumble is my favorite dessert from Big Chill. And all the recipes I found online had oats in them. I hate oats. So I used my head and tried to replicate the wonder that Big Chill created.
It tasted pretty okay, I got the nice crumbly brown color on top that I wanted, so that made me pretty happy.

The apples were soft and smelled and tasted slightly of cinnamon. The crumble was doughy from the bottom, and crumbly from the top.




Really simple also, as always.

Ingredients -
2 apples
Cinnamon Powder, lots of it. Or not. Depending on how much you love cinnamon. [ i LOVE cinnamon]
Sugar - 1/2 cup granulated, 1/2 cup castor
2 tsp Lemon Juice
1/2 cup maida.
1/2 cup butter [ at room temperature]

Peel the apples and slice them as thin as you can. Mix 1/2 cup castor sugar + cinnamon powder + lemon juice to apples. Let it sit for 2 mins.
For the crumble - Mix the granulated sugar, maida and butter with your hands. Till it becomes crumbly. This is not a dough, which is why we use butter at room temperature and not melted butter.

Grease a cake tin. Or any tin. I used a tart tin with a detachable bottom. Line the bottom of the tin with your apples, and then put an even layer of the crumble over the apples.

Pop into the oven at 170 for 20 mins.

When the top starts to brown, turn the temperature down to 100 and cook for another 15 minutes.



Take out.
Serve with fresh cream. Serve hot.

My version of a break up cake.

So, break ups are difficult. And the best thing to do is to distract yourself and eat lots of chocolate and it does wonders. Believe me. I ate half the batter of the cake myself. And I feel so much better now. Chocolate induces happy hormones!

This cake has two components.
The cake + the frosting.
Now, to be honest with you, this is the first time I've tried a cooked frosting and in my opinion, it doesn't go too well with this cake. Although, it tastes great, I think it's more of a cookie icing than a cake icing. I think a simple buttercream icing would go better with this cake. I just wanted to experiment a little today, and I wanted to bake something new, and I wasn't disappointed with the results.

The cake - [ recipe makes two 9 inch cakes]

the cake is ABSOLUTELY delicious. My first time baking it and I was very impressed! It's yummy and moist and chocolaty. Yum.

2 eggs
1 3/4 cup maida
2 cups sugar
3/4 cup cocoa
1 cup buttermilk [ one cup milk + 1 tbsp vinegar, left for 5 mins]
1/2 cup melted butter
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt
1 cup coffee [ 1 tbsp instant coffee powder in one cup boiling water]
1 tsp vanilla

mix the dry ingredients in one bowl. and then, add the buttermilk, eggs, butter, vanilla and beat until smooth.
add the coffee. the batter is supposed to be very runny.
grease and flour a cake tin, and pour half the batter.
shove in to the oven at 170, till the knife you insert comes out with a few crumbs stuck to it.
repeat.


frosting- [ enough to ice the entire cake]
the original recipe calls for cream of tartar, and i have no idea what that is, so i looked it up and found that vinegar is a substitute for it.

1 cup sugar
1/3 cup water
1/2 tsp vinegar
2 egg whites
1 tsp vanilla

put sugar, water, and vinegar in a pan, and bring to a boil, stirring continuously till the sugar dissolves.
mix this sugar syrup with 2 unbeaten egg whites and beat for about 7-10 mins till the frosting thickens and begins to form soft peaks.
add in vanilla.

voila.

put one cake. ice the top. and then out the second cake on top of the icing. and then ice the top of the second cake and the sides.
add whatever you want to decorate. i ran out of sprinkles, so i used gems.

very important : always wait for the cakes to cool completely before icing.

boyfrand cookies [ and abhinandan shortbread!]

my boyfriend loves biscuits. i've baked for him before, but i don't think those cookies were too nice. i'm going to see him this weekend and i wanted to do something nice for him, so i thought i'd bake him a box of cookies and pray to humanity that he likes them and abhinandan loves shortbread, like me! and he's going through some stuff, so i'm going to parcel him a batch of these in a desperate attempt to cheer him up.
also, i used to hate HATE baking cookies, until i discovered this brilliant recipe.

this makes about 12 average sized cookies.
fucking easy. fucking yum.

2 cups maida
1/2 cup sugar
1 slab + a little more [ depending on the consistency of your dough] melted butter
1 tsp vanilla.

preheat oven to 180.

mix sugar and butter till nice and creamy. add vanilla and maida. mix.
then make into a nice ball with your hands.
cover this ball with cling film.
put in freezer for 10 mins.
take out.
roll out the ball with a rolling pin. if your dough is flaky, worry not, shortbread is supposed to be. if it's too flaky and you don't like how it looks, add more butter. problem solved.
cut out cookies in any shape that you want. [ i like gingerbread men and circles]
put on butter paper [ if you don't have butter paper, you know the paper that the butter is wrapped in when you buy it? just use that. works the same!]

bake for 10 minutes. take out. if it's soft, don't panic. keep them out for 5 minutes, they should harden by then. if they haven't, then put them back in the oven at about 100 for 5 minutes. that should do it.
and listen. don't be sad if the edges of your cookies are brown, it doesn't matter just as long as they taste good :)

PS -if you're baking for your boyfriend like me, and your cookies fail, then taking your shirt off is a good alternative.

Strawberry Cheesecake [ not really, just cheesecake with strawberries on top]

I've tried about 7 different cheesecake recipes. And after a lot of trial and error [ emphasis on the error], I have come up with a recipe that works brilliantly.

So let's tackle this step by step. The first step is to not be scared or intimidated. It's a fucking cheesecake. It's simple. And fancy. But not the kind of fancy which is a pain in the ass. You fuck it up, and it's still edible. Cream cheese is yum. So don't worry. Nothing to worry about.

The best part of any cheesecake is the crust. Which is as easy as 1-2-3. Literally 3 steps to it.
Take a box of digestive biscuits, put them in a plastic bag, take a rolling pin and take out all your frustration on the plastic bag, with the pin. This will cause the biscuits to become biscuit crumbs.
Melt butter. Add butter to the crumbs and mix. There. Done. How much butter you add is up to you. But the butter and the crumbs need to stick together in order to form a nice solid crust.

Line the base of your tin with this mixture and that's your crust. See, normally, I'm not too particular about what tin I use. But this recipe calls for an 8 inch REMOVABLE BOTTOM tin. Believe me, normal tins are a pain when baking a cheesecake. You need a tin where the bottom is detachable. If you don't have it, then just line the inside of a normal tin with clingfilm so that you can take out the cake in one go.


The cheese bit of the cheesecake - fucking simple this is also.

1 pack of Philadelphia Cream Cheese [ weighs roughly about 225 gm] [ you can use Britannia, I'm just too fancy sometimes]
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
One tsp Vanilla essence.

Mix all these ingredients till it forms a nice LIQUID mixture. Should be smooth with no lumps. If you're too lazy to get rid of the lumps, just strain the entire thing and that should do it.

Add this to the tin with the base.

Bake at 180 for about 45 minutes.
The cake should be wobbly when you take it out. It should not be stiff. And the top should be completely white. No brown heat spots, nothing. Ideally.
But hey. That's where the strawberries come in.

If you have brown ugly spots on your cheesecake, cover it. Simple.
With anything you want. Strawberries, chocolate, gems, sprinkles. Literally anything you want, depending on how weird your taste buds are.

Refrigerate for an hour. This allows the cake to settle and become cut-able.

And if you've done everything right, your cheesecake is going to end up looking like this.

brownie + frosting + strawberry.

what it looked like

what i used to make it 

for the cake

1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup maida [ flour]
1 egg
1 tbs + 1 tsp cocoa powder
1/8 tsp baking powder [ don't worry too much about precise measurement]
1/2 tsp vanilla
a pinch of salt

for the frosting 

3 tbs butter
3 tbs cocoa
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp + 1/2 tsp honey
1/2 tsp vanilla

for making it look pretty

a box of strawberries chopped up really finely.

how i made it 

1. preheat oven to 175 degrees Celsius
2. you start off by melting the butter in a saucepan. then turn the heat off and stir in the sugar and keep stirring till the butter and sugar have mixed to form a satiny yellow mixture. then beat in the egg to this. [ i used an electric hand beater, but if you don't have that, a fork will work just fine also].
in another bowl, mix cocoa + flour + salt + baking powder. now add this mix, and beat it into the egg mixture. SLOWLY. One spoon full at a time.
3. add this mixture to a greased 8 inch square tin. bake for 20-25 minutes.

now, the frosting.
 if you don't have an electric beater at home, i would personally advice you to use melted butter, as this makes the mixing waaay easier

mix all the ingredients in a bowl, and keep beating it till it reaches the consistency you want it to be. if it's too thick, add a little bit of water and keep mixing. if it's too runny, add sugar + cocoa in equal amounts and mix

take the brownies out of the oven and wait for them to cool before you frost them. what happens when you don't do this, is that the heat from the brownies causes the frosting to melt and become runny.

and finally, after you're done frosting, take the strawberries and place them on top of the frosting. however you want. i'm really messy, but i know people who do a lot of pretty patterns and stuff.

refrigerate. or not.
your brownies, you decide.