Author: shambhavi vats

Red is the colour I’m looking for!

Red is the colour of passion. One sees red when they’re angry and one picks up a red heart to show that they love someone. Love and hatred, two sides of the same coin, can be expressed by a single colour – red. So when it’s someone’s birthday and you want to show your love for them by baking, why go with the classic chocolate cake? Maybe it’s time to get a little more creative. Show your love with the colour red. Bake a red-velvet cake!

Even though it sounds like a complicated thing to make, a red velvet cake is perhaps one of the easiest cakes to make apart from the classic chocolate or vanilla cake . A red velvet cake is basically a light chocolate cake with red colouring in it. A red velvet cakes speaks out and shows that it’s a special occasion cake because if you bake regularly, then you need a special recipe to mark a special occasion. A red and fluffy cake is perhaps one of the easiest and also one of the prettiest way to mark a special occasion. However, there are no rules against baking and indulging in this cake without a special occasion. The melt-in-the-mouth buttercream frosting used in this recipe is one of the most amazing comfort food that you can ask for.

so to celebrate or to indulge with style, here’s what you will need:

ingredients :

1 cup all purpose flour

1 cup sugar

¾ cup vegetable oil

2 large eggs

¼ cup milk

1 teaspoon cocoa powder

1 teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon red food colour

Once you have everything, mix the flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder and the food colour in a bowl.

In a separate bowl, mix the eggs, milk and the oil.

Once done, mix both of them together.

If the batter is too thick, add some warm milk.

Make sure the batter is not too dark in colour because the cake gets darker after it’s baked.

Grease and flour a pan and bake the cake at 350°F for 30-35 minutes or until wooden pick inserted comes out clean and dry.

Let the cake cool for around ten minutes before taking it out of the pan. While it’s cooling, pour yourself a drink and sip at it, Nigella Lawson style. Or you can catch up on wrapping up those gifts or putting up finishing touches to the birthday decorations. If you’re not doing any of these, you could make the frosting for the cake. The perfect frosting for a red velvet cake, in my opinion, is butter-cream frosting.

To make the butter-cream frosting, you will need:

100 gm butter

1 cup icing sugar

2 tablespoons all purpose flour

1 cup cold milk

(if the butter is unsalted, you will also need a pinch of salt)

Soften the butter by either leaving it out for a while or by heating it up in the microwave for ten seconds.

Add the salt, if you’re using unsalted butter.

Add the icing sugar and beat until it’s light and fluffy.

Mix the flour in the cold milk. Heat it on a low flame while stirring constantly. If the mixture is not being stirred constantly, it will form lumps.

Once the mixture is thick and cooked, let it cool. Cover it while it is getting cooled so that it does not form a crust.

Once it has cooled, add it to the butter and sugar and beat. This mixture will provide the extra volume and fluffiness without the extra butter.

Before applying the frosting on the cake, make sure that the cake is cold or else the frosting will melt off. Dip a knife in warm water and use it to smooth-en the surface of the cake.

Cover the cake with the frosting. If you’re making a layered cake, apply some frosting between the layers as well. Sprinkle some brown sugar or nuts for decorations. Pop it in the fridge for an hour to make sure the frosting sets well. Take it out, put it on a plate and you’re ready to celebrate!

When you come to think of it, a red velvet cake is just a chocolate cake which is red in colour. But when you present it to someone you love, it says a lot more than a chocolate cake. Unless that person is a chocoholic, in which case, you should just go with the chocolate cake because the warm brown of chocolates is what will really please that person. Otherwise, nothing can express your love more that a red velvet cake simply because it is the universally known colour for love, for passion. It also brings a little variety and adds a little difference to the regular cakes which are either brown or white. It is also the perfect cake for kids because for a little child, it is fascinating to be able to eat something red and delicious because, let’s face it, most of the kids out there don’t really like tomatoes.

Everyone loves a little colour in their lives and perhaps the colour you’re looking for this time is red. Try it out and let us know if it worked for you!

Bon appetit!

June 11, 2014
Every Plate of Food has a Story to Tell

Everyone knows that there are two types of people in the world when it comes to food – those who eat to live and those who live to eat. If you’re the type that lives to eat, then you would know that nothing in the world sounds better than the “ping” announcing that your food is ready. That ping can be the ping of your oven or the ping at a fast food joint, it doesn’t matter. You would know that those clichés where people say that their favorite thing to do is to curl up in the bed with some chocolate pudding and a book or a movie are all true. You would know that if there’s one thing in this world that has the power to make you smile, it’s food.

The biggest dilemma in the life of a foodie who knows to how cook is whether to go out to eat or to stay at home and cook. I’m a foodie. I love cooking. I made my first chapatis when I was six and I woke up in the middle of the night with my stomach rumbling. I didn’t want to wake my mother up so I went into the kitchen and found some left overs, but there were no chapatis. So my six year old self decided that she really wanted to have warm, soft, chapatis and she made them. Of course they were hard and crisp and slightly burnt but that was when I realized that cooking was exciting. After that, I often used to wait for my mother to go take her afternoon nap so that I could go into the kitchen and cook something for myself. I thought one day I would surprise my mother by cooking a meal for her all by myself. That never happened because the first time I cut my finger, I ran to her crying. Nonetheless, almost everyone who is passionate about food and about cooking remembers the first time they made something and how amazing and excited they felt.

Food brings happiness to us in many ways. It’s not just the eating part that makes people happy; it’s also the cooking part. Having a chocolate cake that you baked yourself sure feels amazing. But it feels even better when you’re eating it with a bunch of people who love it and they tell you so.

So when you know how to cook amazing food, which isn’t a difficult thing to do, and you enjoy it, why would you want to go out and eat? I’ll tell you. When you go out and you order something new and you eat it, it gives you a rush because you can’t wait to get home and try making it. Often, you might fail to reproduce that dish. After a point, you even give up. So you go out and back to that place to eat the same thing again and again because that place makes that one particular dish perfectly. And this way, over time, you label places with particular dishes that they make and if someone wants to eat that thing, you know the perfect place to take them to.

A foodie knows that there should be no discrimination between a roadside vendor and fancy restaurant. A nice little dhaba tucked away in some corner has the potential to serve as good food as that fancy place near the fancy mall. The only thing that should matter is hygiene. Not all dhabas are unhygienic and not all restaurants are hygienic. Also, if you’re a student and you keep dining at pricey places, your parents will soon realize that the extra pocket money you’re asking for, is not for ”research material” and that, my friend, is not a good thing. It’s not difficult to get addicted to good food so you need to keep in mind that those pricey places with the orgasmic food are a luxury. They should be treated like the occasional cigarette. You plan on ahead and save up for weeks to eat there. Or you spend the money you were given to buy shoes to eat there and walk around with your toes poking out of your shoes as a punishment. (If, in case, that does happen, you have my sympathies.)

Another golden rule when it comes to food – never waste food. You have a little too much food and none of it can go in the fridge? There are plenty of men, women and children out there who need it. Take a walk after your meal, a healthy habit too, and give it to someone who needs it. Can’t find someone? Put it out with a bowl of milk and the Dog Fairy will make sure it vanishes by the time morning rolls around.

Food, books, pets – to each, their own. Or some people prefer to have a combination of any two or even all three in their lives to be able to call it a perfect and happy life. Whatever the combination be, you need food in there to be happy – or even to simply survive. If you eat to live, slow down once and think about the taste of the food you’re eating, think about the texture, the feel of it and think about the story behind that plate of food because be it the burnt chapatis I made when I was six or be it the chef’s signature dish at a restaurant every plate of food has a story to tell.

May 23, 2014
It’s Choco-Orange Season!

When Adriano Zumbo’s lolly-bag cake made an appearance on Masterchef, I was intrigued. It was colorful and it boasted of a variety of flavors. It was also one of the trickiest and most complicated recipes I have ever come across. Naturally, the little chef in me was excited to try it out. However, after spending two weeks hunting for the ingredients in the city, I had to give up. Not everything was available and I could only handle so much disappointment.

To lift up my mood, I decided to bake something else but something unique. I decided I needed an ice-cream to tickle my creativity. I picked up a choco-orange bar from a stall and that is when inspiration hit me. I loved the choco-orange ice-cream and I loved chocolates with orange essence in it. It is an interesting and emerging trend and it’s delicious. Why not try a cake which had those same flavors?

Coming up with a good way to mix those two flavors was difficult. I wanted something eccentric but something that tasted good. After a lot of failures, I realized that eccentric wasn’t going to work and I had to settle for classic. So I went ahead and baked a triple layered choco-orange-choco cake with dark chocolate ganache.

If you like to bake and you like the new and trendy choco-orange flavor then this is something that you really should try because it tastes really good and is fun to make. It has two layers of chocolate with the layer of orange flavored cake in the middle.

For the chocolate layers of the cake, you will need:

1 ¾ cups all-purpose flour
2 cups sugar
¾ cup cocoa powder
1-1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
1-1 ½ teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 cup milk
½ cup vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Once you have all the ingredients, what you need to do is –

Heat the oven to 350°F. Grease and flour two round baking pans. Alternatively, you can bake one huge cake and cut it through the middle into two cakes.

Mix sugar, flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda and salt (dry mixture). Keep it aside.

In a bowl, mix the butter, eggs, vegetable oil, and the vanilla extract. Beat together till it forms a light and fluffy mixture

Add the dry mixture and the milk to it alternating between one part of the mixture and one part of the milk.

Pour the batter into the pans and bake for 30 to 35 minutes or until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean.

Once it’s out of the oven, cool the cakes for ten minutes before removing them from the pans to the wire racks. Set it aside to cool.

For the orange layer of the cake, you will need:

1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 medium eggs
1 teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon vanilla extract
¾ teaspoon orange extract
1 teaspoon orange zest
1 cup flour
½ cup orange juice

After gathering all the ingredients, you need to –

Soften the butter by leaving it out for some time. Whisk the softened butter. Cream butter and sugar together until fluffy. Add the eggs and beat until even lighter and fluffier but make sure not to overdo it.

Add the baking powder, the baking soda, the vanilla extract, the orange extract and the orange zest. Mix well. Add the flour and mix it until the batter is uniform. Add the orange juice and mix it until it’s smooth and well blended.

Flour and grease a pan and line it with parchment paper. Pour the batter into the cake pan.

Bake at 350°F for 30 minutes or until golden and the cake is pulling away from the edges of the pan. Try the toothpick method. Allow the cake to cool in the pan for 10 minutes then transfer it to a cooling rack.

For the ganache, you will need –

200ml Fresh cream
400gm Dark chocolate

Grate or chop the chocolate into pieces and melt it either in a microwave or in a bain-marie (shown in the picture below). Heat the fresh cream until bubbles form on the edges. Pour the heated cream over the melted chocolate. Make sure the temperature of the cream is higher than that of the chocolate or else the chocolate will form granules. Leave it for three to four minutes. After three to four minutes, mix them together well and the ganache is ready.

Place one chocolate cake and apply the ganache on top of it. Leave the sides bare. Place the orange cake over it. Make sure it doesn’t slide off. Once it’s settled, apply ganache on top of the orange cake and put the second chocolate cake on top of it. After letting it settle for a few minutes, apply ganache over the whole surface. Grate/chop some chocolates and spread it on top of the cake. Pop on a few candles because having made this cake is reason enough to celebrate, and you’re good to go.

The dark chocolate ganache and the slightly citrus flavor of the orange cake balances the sweetness of the two layers of chocolate cake and it provides you with a new, different, tasty treat to enjoy.

Bon appetite!

May 23, 2014