Mushroom Bourgignon

Gosh I started making this recipe way back in 2009, and have been meaning to post it ever since. It's become a staple favourite of mine, especially in cold weather, and I have evolved so far from the original smitten kitchen recipe that I don't even know if it still is what I claim it is!

Lemon pound cake with lemon glaze

A cousin whose birthday I missed was the perfect excuse for this. She inhaled the tres leches I had left over, and would emerge from her book blinking sleepily to say 'cake? I heard cake!' every time anyone said anything that rhymed with cake, and so, even though she wanted chocolate, I begged her to choose something else for me to make. She graciously allowed me to choose, with this as the result.

This cake is fabulous. Light, moist, tart, sweet, and mildly crunchy if the humidity doesn't make the frosting gooey, it goes so well with anything at all, and stays for ever in the fridge. Though I don't know, the second time I made it I took three fourths of the bundt off to friends, and it didn't last long enough for us to measure it's longevity!

Tiramisu cake

My dad has a birthday last month, so I wanted to bake him a cake. He's mad about coffee and cricket, and since they haven't invented a cricket cake yet, it had to be this one.

The problems I had were silly, but problems nonetheless. I couldn't find mascarpone anywhere and simply did not have the time to bake it. I also had no one to eat the cake since I was leaving town the very day of his birthday, Amma was in the US, and neither he not my grandma should be eating that much cake. I decided to use a tiny tin, and I have one-third the recipe. Not a bad result at all! Remember to treble it and bake for 2 9inch cakes, or just mosey on over to Deb's and use the original recipe.

Best. Yellow. Cake. Ever.

All this frantic fancy baking - I was craving something nice and simple. Just, plain cake, you know? Vanilla, and moist, and crusty, and not too sweet; no complicated flavours, no brouhaha to prepare. Just cake. So I scooted over to smitten kitchen, and found these recipes.The second of which I then adapted. I shall babble no more and send you straight to the best cake ever.

Chocolate Tart

Ello! No I have not been neglecting you, I just didn't have the camera one week I cooked a lot and then I didn't cook much! However, here is the next in the birthday series, Chocolate Tart, from Deb of course. I must admit I was a tad skeptical, since I made a ton of the tart dough the previous week for a lemon tart and it was just too sweet, and a titch crunchy for my taste - I like em flaky and powdery. However, possibly because of the dark chocolate in the tart and the cup of sugar in the lemon tart, it worked fine.

Chocolate Whiskey cake with Baileys frosting

I promised all my friends I'd bake them cakes in March and April, mainly so I could bake all the delish recipes I've been dying to try, and then not have to eat them. A fellow whiskey-loving friend who periodically ensures there is Cutty Sark in my life recently had a birthday, and having seen these over on smittenkitchen, I decided I'd try them.

The first problem was that they're cupcakes and I needed to make them into a cake. Luckily, trawling the comments revealed a fairly straightforward formula for it. The second and larger problem was the lack of Guinness in our lives and not enough knowledge of beer to know what I could use to substitute it. I decided to ditch the beer entirely - a bad mistake I found out later when the cake itself tasted really bad. Then I needed to get my hands on Baileys, but that was solved by a quick search online, after which I made my own Irish Cream. DAYAM it was good.

Pizza from scratch!

It took two tries to get this right, and I'd say it still needs work, but I'm SO EXCITED! =) I've been wanting to try pizza dough forever, especially since people tell me it's easy. (Apparently not for me.) So I scooted over to, yup, you guessed it, smitten kitchen, and dug this one out. The first time I tried it I made my usual overestimating-the-power-of-ingredient-mapping error, and tried to have a slow rise in the fridge. Guess what happened? I came home and it was a rock hard, ice-cold ball. Took me over two hours to get it pliable, and of course it didn't rise at all.

The second time I left the dough to rise outside, after activating the yeast. It worked much better, only it took a good 2 and a half hours. The dough was not very pliable; in fact I think it might need more water here in Hyderabad. I don't know how it is supposed to turn out relative to bread dough, but it was a lot harder and tougher.

My second big problem was that I neither have a pizza stone nor a big oven. Never fear, I improvised a pizza stone by using the back a steel plate (good South Indian kitchen) that I heated in the oven, and then oiled with caution to prevent sticking. I needed to roll the dough out really thin though, but the end result was fabulous!

Double Chocolate Cake

So I quit my job recently and decided to have a party to celebrate. Heck, who'm I kidding, I just wanted an excuse to bake. Hee. I've been dying to try more from smitten kitchen, and it's been a long time since there was chocolate in my life. Therefore, double chocolate cake. As usual, it lived up to everything I am now coming to demand from anything of Deb's, and was inhaled by my friends. Not a crumb left.

Bananananana bread. Again

Now I know I've posted a Banana Bread recipe already, but hey, when Deb's got a recipe up, I have to try it. And boy was it worth it.

I had these bananas left over from the GM, that were black on the outside. I mean, I know I'm OCD about bananas, but even my mother wouldn't have eaten these. I also didn't have bourbon in the house, but the smell of the cinnamon and the bananas made me think of Old Monk, and would you know it, there is one way to make Old Monk taste good. I don't have a loaf pan, as previously discussed, so I baked it in my borosil lasagna pan. Worked. Turned out skinny as hell, but hey, so what.

Heads up, don't look closely at the pictures of the batter. Seriously. I had to toss most of them they made me nauseous.

Orange Yoghurt Cake

Now, it's been a while since the sistah introducted me to smitten kitchen, and I have been DYING for a chance to try out some of her stuff, especially the non chocolate desserts. It being the gramma's eighty-sixth, I decided to make her lemon cake. But there aren't enough lemons around, and deffy not nice ones. It is also orange season, and we have these that I think are clementines, but we call them khinu. So I decided to tweak it a bit. And add cream cheese frosting. Which didn't really work out too well cos I wanted it more like a glaze and it wasn't, and I suck at icing cakes so it took a gorgeous looking cake and made it look lame. But. The flavours went wonderfully. Still, I want to make this one plain some day. My soaking syrup wasn't very syrupy, but the ohh the moistness! I was also making it in a tearing hurry so I didn't have time to document the process. Next time!