Choco bliss: a bite at a time

Happy Leap day!
I have been meaning to share a couple of recipes this past month but haven't been able to do so. Well, starting this year I wanted there to be at least one post per month. 2-3 would be better, 4-5 would be great! Alas, we don't get to live in dreamland. But life, on Earth, does give you small yet meaningful gifts including an odd extra day every couple of years. Today morning when I was sulking, thinking 'There goes my resolution regarding this blog', I realized all is not lost! And here I am trying to make the most of the '28 dino pe ek din Free!' offer.

On to today's recipe. Chocolate cookies. Yup, nothing fancy, nothing extravagant, no frosting or decoration. Simple chocolate cookies. Simple, yet divine. And eggless.

These cookies are easy to put together and the prepared dough can be stored in refrigerator for about a week. So you can have fresh baked cookies whenever you have a craving. The dough needs to be refrigerated for at least 30 minutes before baking. Refrigerating the dough stops it from spreading too much while baking which yields thicker cookies. You can either shape the cookies immediately, refrigerate them for half an hour and then bake. Or do it the way I did, shape the dough in two logs roughly 1 1/5" in diameter, wrap them in plastic wrap and refrigerate the logs. Then when you want to bake, just unwrap the logs and cut cookies of equal thickness and bake. When doing it this way, ensure that there are not air pockets in the wrapped dough bundle, or the dough becomes dry and the cookies will be very brittle and dry. 

The original recipe is by Nigella Lawson, from here. I find Nigella's recipes a bit rich for my taste and I tend to tweak them a little to get results of my liking. But I haven't tweaked this recipe except for adding some vanilla extract. There was this one time when I even replaced some of the flour with equal weight of ragi flour. The results were equally great. The original recipe calls for a chocolate glaze. I found the cookies scrumptious on their own so I omitted the glaze.

Chocolate is the prominent flavour in this cookie which we get from the cocoa powder, so use the best quality cocoa powder you can get. I used Nilgiri's cocoa powder. 

I have baked these cookies numerous times since last Christmas; they don't last longer than 2-3 days. That is how good they are. I even earned a thumbs up from my kiddo. I hope you will try it out.

Here's the recipe.

Chocolate cookies

Ingredients:

1 cup + 2 Tbsp, 250g butter, room temperature
1 cup, 150g powdered sugar, not icing sugar
1/3 cup, 40 g cocoa powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups + 2 Tbsp, 300g all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda

Steps:

Preheat the oven to 170°C. Line a cookie baking sheet/tray with parchment paper or baking paper. It helps if you have two sheets so that one sheet can cool while the other is in the oven. If you have only one baking sheet, just let it cool down to room temperature before you bake the subsequent batch.

Cream the butter and sugar till the mixture is fluffy and light in color. Add the vanilla extract and mix.

Sift the cocoa powder. Add to the butter mixture and mix till evenly combined.

Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda and a pinch of salt. Add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture in 2-3 batches. Mix till combined. The dough will be a bit sticky.

Apply some butter or ghee to your palms and roll the dough into 1 to 1.5" round balls, flatten them slightly and place on the baking tray. Try to get all the balls of same size. This ensures that all cookies in a batch are evenly baked. These cookies spread so do not crowd the baking tray. Keep 1" gaps. Place baking sheet in refrigerator for 30 minutes.

Place the baking sheet in oven and bake for 10 - 12 minutes. The time will vary by 2-3 minutes based on the size and thickness of the cookie. The cookies will be soft when you take them out of the oven, but they will harden once cooled. Baking a small batch of 2-3 cookies to find the baking time is always better.

Let cookies cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes, them keep them on a cooling rack, a flat sieve (channi/chaalni) works too. Once the cookies are completely cool, keep them in an airtight container.


Happy Baking!
Shwe

Talking about 'good' fat

Come summer the market is loaded with summer seasonal fruits. Avocado is one such fruit, commonly known as butter-fruit in southern India owing to it's creamy-buttery-soft pulp. It is a pear shaped dark green fruit with parrot green pulp and a large seed. It has almost no taste, almost. Mash it a little and you might notice a subtle flavour.

So 'What's with the good fat?' you may ask. Fats and good-fats are a common running topic of discussion in our household. Arguments range from 'no fat is good' to 'some fats are good' to 'little amounts are essential'.
Apart from being loaded with potassium vitamin K and folic acid, avocado contains large amounts of good fat. So why not use it to substitute butter in a cake?!

I recalled coming across a vegan Chocolate Avocado Cake. Joy, the author of the blog, mentions it to be a moist and chocolatey cake. Bang on target on both accounts.
You wouldn't miss the egg or the butter. And definitely won't be able to make out presence of a fruit. You might smell the oil though. It was fun to see the expressions on faces when the ingredients of the cake were disclosed.

The original recipe includes a avocado based frosting. For me it had to be Ganache. Just two ingredients, chocolate and cream, some stirring and you get one of the simplest and quickest of frostings/fillings. You'll love to make and eat it if you are a chocolate lover. Check here for more info on how to make it.

I made sourcream ganache with coffee flavour. I added some icing sugar to reduce the tang lent by sourcream. I used it as a filling and for frosting the top of cake. I left the sides bare.

What was intended to be an experiment turned out to be a great party cake! Here's the recipe:

Eggless Chocolate Avocado Cake with Sourcream Ganache

 

Ingredients:

Cake

1 1/2 Cups All-purpose flour
3-4 Tbsps cocoa powder
2 pinches of salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 Cups granulated sugar
2 Tbsps vegetable oil (I used olive oil)
1/4 Cup soft avocado, well mashed, about 1/4 medium avocado
1 Cup water
1 Tbsps white vinegar
1 tsp vanilla extract

Ganache

200 ml sourcream
150 gm chocolate chips or chopped chocolate
2 tsp instant coffee powder
1 tsp hot water
4 Tbsp icing sugar, sifted
*For making ganache, among Indian chocolate brands, I suggest using Cadbury Bournville.

Steps:

Preheat oven to 180° C. Grease and dust an 8" round pan.

Sift together all of the dry ingredients except the sugar.  Set aside.

Mash the avocado. Mix it with remaining wet ingredients in a bowl.

Add sugar into the wet mix and stir.

Mix the wet ingredients with the dry ones all at once. Stir until smooth.

Pour batter into a the prepared pan. Bake for 35-40 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
Cool the cake in cake pan for 10 minutes. Turn it out onto a wire rack. Let cool completely.

Preparing Ganache:
Dissolve the coffee in the hot water, set aside.

Heat the sourcream in a heavy bottom pan. Once small bubbles appear around the edges of the cream, remove from heat and add the chocolate chips.
Stir every 2 minutes, to ensure all the chocolate is melted. If you find unmelted chocolate chips, reheat cream-chocolate mixture on double boiler for about 10-15 seconds.

Once the chocolate is completely melted, add sifted icing sugar and mix. Ensure that no lumps remain.
Add the coffee once the ganache is warm to touch.

You can use the ganache right away by pouring it as a glaze on the cake. It thickens as it cools. Once thickened, you can spread it on the cake with a spatula. I kept the ganache in refrigerator for about 2 hours and whipped it to get a lighter fluffier texture. On whipping, it lightens in color too, this gave a good contrast to the dark rich chocolate cake.

Assembly:
Slice the cake horizontally in two layers. Spread about half the ganache on bottom layer, leaving about 1/4 inch around the border. The filling gets pushed towards the edges once you place the top layer.
Lightly lay the top cake layer on the ganache filling. Dump remaining ganache on the top layer and spread evenly. You can make swirls using the spatula.

Try baking this cake while the avocado season lasts. As Rose says 'You won't regret it'.

Happy Baking!
Shwe

It's about time...

It's about time I log what I bake and what better way to do that than a blog. A little bit of history is called for here. I used to bake, learnt basics from mom, internet and books. My creations were savoured and appreciated by friends and family. They would encourage or suggest me to do 'something' with my 'talent'. So here I am taking a small step, putting into words and pictures the recipe, the final output and what goes behind the scenes in baking.

Here I present a banana almond raisin bundt cake. It is eggless, whole-wheat and yummy. This is an any-time-of-the-day cake, breakfast, snack or munch time.

I have tried banana in cakes earlier but this was my first try without eggs. The inspiration for the recipe is here. It includes cardamom (ilaichi / veldoda). I like cardamom but was a bit skeptical as to how it will work with vanilla and chocolate.  Since I was going to use cardamom, I decided to give it a desi twist. So out went the chocolate chips and the vanilla, and instead entered raisins and almonds. And while I was at it, I replaced some of the all-purpose flour with whole wheat flour. I threw in some wheat bran as well. The bran adds to the fiber content and gives the crumb an interesting look as tiny golden specks. The original recipe calls for brown sugar. Since I didn't have any at hand, I used part white sugar and part jaggery.

The combination of banana, jaggery and cardamom was a winner I think. The fruit I used was the small yellakki you get here in southern India. It has a slight tang to it which gave the cake a nice flavour. Plump raisins added moistness.

I baked the cake in a bundt as it is camera, eyes and slicing friendly. And more importantly it was easily reachable in the rack. A warning for the first time bundt users though, a bundt pan needs proper greasing and dusting. Here's the recipe:

Banana almond raisin bundt cake

Ingredients:

1 Cup minus 2 Tbsps All purpose flour

1/2 Cup whole wheat flour / atta

2 Tbsps wheat bran*

1/2 Cup sugar, powdered

1/4 Cup firmly packed jaggery/gud

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

2 pinch salt

75 gm butter, softened at room temperature

3 yellakki bananas, mashed (about 1/2 cup) or 1 large banana

3 to 4 Tbsps milk

2 cardamom pods, powdered

2 Tbsps soaked raisins

2 Tbsps chopped almonds

*wheat bran is optional. You can use full 1 Cup all-purpose flour instead.

Steps:

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Sift the flours, bran, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Mix the ingredients again using a whisk to ensure that all ingredients are distributed evenly.

Put the softened butter, sugar and jaggery in a bowl and beat till the mixture is fluffy and creamy. Then add the mashed banana and beat till smooth.

Add the flour mixture in 3 batches alternating with milk, starting and ending with flour, and mix till combined. You can add a tablespoon or two of milk, adding just a teaspoon at a time, if the batter seems too dry.
Fold in the raisins and almonds.

Scrape the batter out into a greased and floured 6-cup bundt pan and bake at 165°C for 30 minutes. That would be 180°C for 30 mins for a regular square or round pan.

Test using a toothpick or a skewer. Remove pan from oven when done. Cool in the pan for about 10 minutes and then unmould the cake. Cool completely on a rack and serve yourself a thick yummy slice!

All in all the experiment was success. My kid, lets call him T (16 months old), loved it too. He seems to have a very developed sense of taste. Just the other day I tried something with blueberries, was my first attempt with the berries, and he didn't eat a second bite. hmm-mph.

I would suggest you try the original recipe too, banana and chocolate-chips is a great pairing.

Happy Baking!
Shwe