Birthdays are fun!

Skanda's (my nephew) 6th birthday was approaching, and there was a function organized for that. So I took that as an opportunity to bake a cake for him. Since he loves chocolate, I decided on a marble cake (vanilla and chocolate) with chocolate butter cream frosting. Sounds fancy right? :D

This time ditched my oven and used one of Amma's good old reliable griller/cake maker. (forgot the name). The cake came out pretty good and I spent almost an entire evening preparing the icing on the cake! Creaming butter and sugar with a spoon was tiresome! Anyways, the effort was worth it as the kiddo loved it! Even mom, who does not appreciate baked stuff, liked it! Don't have a pic of the cake when it came out of the oven. But there is one with the icing on. It does look amateurish, but hey that's my first attempt ok! Be nice! :-D

And oh! Don't remind me that an 'A' is missing!!

Tic tic tic..ting!

That's the sound of my new OTG ringing to tell me that the pre-heating is done! :-D Oh yes, I now have a new hobby - baking! With Sid occupying my every thought, I needed a diversion. Not that I mind having him fill my entire world, but I started to worry about him to an annoying level - annoying, that is, to others.! :) So I started to think what I could do with the 'spare' time I had. I narrowed down to 2 options - gardening and baking. Ultimately, baking won as I don't think I could do due justice to pots and plants.

So I bought a small Oven-toaster-griller and started my experiments with cookie baking. First, I tried the benne biscuit. FIL and Josh were reluctant guinea pigs. :) Got some positive feedback too. The taste of ghee was overwhelming and I decided never to use it again, instead, should try out recipes using butter/oil.

Fresh out of the oven!

Then I decided to go to the opposite end of the spectrum and decided on making masala crackers. (Took the recipe from here.There are some very nice recipes in that site, take a look if you are interested) I replaced the sesame seeds in the recipe with cumin seeds though. They came out nice, to my great surprise! :) It tasted almost like nippattu and they were an instant hit! :-D

Crackers!

So taking some courage, I again tried my hands at sweet cookies. This time I tried almond cookies (recipe from Manjula's kitchen - google it) as this recipe used wheat and not maida.

I did hit problems with the temperature and heat control, as there were 2 heating elements, one up and one down, and no recipe mentions what level they need to be. WIth both elements turned on, the bottom of the cookie turned black, where as the top didn't even cook.! So Josh suggested I reduce the temperature (from 180C as mentioned in the recipe to 150C) and chose only the top heating element.This worked like a charm! The cookies baked perfectly in 10 minutes and it was such a relief! :)

Now, I need to try out other recipes, and will def keep this blog posted, success or not!! But that can happen only when Sid is sleeping or playing with his grandparents/father, which gives me roughly 1.5-2 hrs in all!!! That is also the main reason I just have lousy photos taken from my phone.

And now its back to Sid. Cheerio!