Chocolate Coated Shortbread Cookies

‘Mmmm…Mmmm…Mmmmmm!!!!’ continued as Janc and Annu continued to pop one cookie after the other. No words were actually needed to describe these as the empty tray was telling its own tale :). When it comes to baking, cookies are an absolute delight because of the sheer simplicity of the process and the amount of variations one can bring in. The aroma of butter and cookie dough which fills the house and leaves your neighbors guessing is priceless too. Traditionally made from one part white sugar, two parts butter, and three parts flour, these melt in your mouth Shortbread cookies are Scotland’s favorite during Christmas and New Year parties. But as I really enjoyed baking these sweet and salty bites, I am so sure that I won’t wait till Christmas to make these. So it’s no surprise what I’ll have in stock for friends who decide to drop by next week. Ingredients
All-purpose flour - 2 cups
Butter - 1 cup room temperature
Confectioners sugar - 1/2 cup
Pure vanilla extract 1 teaspoon
Bittersweet chocolate for dipping
Making the Cookies
Whisk the flour and set aside.
In the bowl, beat the butter until smooth and creamy. Add the sugar and beat until smooth. Beat in the vanilla extract. Gently stir in the flour mixture just until incorporated. Flatten the dough into a disk shape, wrap in plastic wrap, and chill the dough until firm.
Preheat oven to 180 degrees C. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. On a lightly floured surface roll out the dough into a 1/4 inch thick circle. Cut into rounds or other shapes using a lightly floured cookie cutter. Place on the prepared baking sheets and place in the refrigerator for about 15 minutes. Bake for 8 - 10 minutes. Cool on a wire rack. Taking one cookie at a time, dip one end of each cookie in the melted chocolate and place it on a parchment lined baking sheet.

Christmas Bake Sale (for friends only in Bangalore)

Place your orders atleast 2 days before you require the goodies… you can mail me on FB or on pink.pallo@gmail.com and drop your number for confirmation. I’ll call you back..
I can’t get it delivered though :( so you can pick it up from Bagmane Tech Park, CV Raman Nagar or Banaswadi (my home) or come close to any of these places according to your convenience.

More Goodies coming up soon.. :)

Breads — The Golden Hue of Joy

Dinner Rolls, Chocolate Buns and Apple Cinnamon Buns

“This is ‘The Best’ thing you have baked so far”… these were Annu’s words as soon as he tasted the freshly baked Apple Cinnamon Buns, and I was on cloud nine ;). The second compliment came charging in when we took a set of them to Boney and Dani’s new house. This gave me the confidence that the recipe has been going in the right direction and my experiments with bread making are successful so far.

The best compliment was yet to come… I decided to bake a few Chocolate Buns and Apple Cinnamon Buns for Annu’s Team (Yahoo SCDians) and the response I got from them was very motivating. It was a bit of a disappointment that the buns couldn’t reach them hot out of the oven; the facilities chose the same day to take the microwave on their floor out for repairs. I also don’t know if it was enough for everyone to taste, but I still got the message that everyone loved it and it got over before Annu could even take a few pictures (to give me a firsthand account :P). Thank you all for the lovely compliments. As they say ‘pleasant words are as honey, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones’, I am totally inspired to cook better and will surely be sending in more treats.

I have to admit, given a choice, I’d prefer baking bread compared to cakes. Maybe it’s the satisfaction the end product gives after so much of hard work. Bread baking involves so many things that amateur bakers are often discouraged after a few failed attempts to turn out professional looking and tasting loaves. I have heard so many people complain that it is very tiring to make bread because you need to knead the dough so much, but I don’t really find it as complicated as I was told, rather it is very interesting. Though there is no denying that bread baking is a very delicate process, the sweet smell of freshly baked bread filling your home (and a little bit of the neighbor’s as well J) makes it all worthwhile.

Pasta al forno in Béchamel sauce

It is one of our favorite baked pasta dishes. It is very simple and you can play around and create several variants by just changing a few ingredients. This dish is like money in the bank — you can eat it the same night or deposit it in the freezer. When withdrawn the next day, the taste surely has added interests.

I added boiled shredded chicken along with some sweet corn, tomatoes and olives. You can also use sausages or lamb or simply boiled eggs to change the taste. What makes this dish creamy, cheesy and unforgettable, is the Béchamel sauce (or white sauce). Make sure to patiently deal with the sauce making process, as the consistency of this sauce can easily go for a toss.

Preparing the Pasta

I used regular elbows (Gomito) for the dish; you can use penne, ditali, ziti, mostaccioli, etc.

Add water, oil and salt in a container. Heat it for a minute on high flame. Add pasta to it and heat it for 10 minutes on medium flame (or till tender). After boiling, separate out the pasta and wash with cold water and keep aside.

Béchamel Sauce Ingredients

Butter — 2 tbsp

All purpose flour — 2 tbsp

Milk — 1 cup

Salt

All purpose seasoning (I used oregano seasoning)

Making the Béchamel sauce

In a heavy bottom saucepan, melt 2 tablespoons of butter over low heat. Blend 2 tablespoons of flour into the melted butter. Add salt to taste. Cook over low heat stirring continuously for 4 to 5 minutes till flour starts to change color. Slowly add 1 cup of milk, stirring constantly. Continue cooking slowly until smooth and thickened.

Other Ingredients

Boiled and shredded chicken — 1 cup

Boiled sweet corn — ½ Cup

Fresh tomatoes — 2

Olives — ½ Cup

Regular Cheddar Cheese — 1/3 Cup

Mozzarella Cheese — 1/3 Cup

Plating and Baking the Dish

Place one layer of the cooked pasta in a greased glass baking bowl. Top it up with shredded chicken, sweet corn and some cheese. Place the remaining pasta to create another layer. Add the white sauce on top. Add the remaining cheese mix on top and line the tomatoes and olives over the cheese. Add seasoning and pepper if desired.

Place the pasta bowl in the pre-heated oven and bake it for about 20 minutes on 180 degree (Celsius).

If you have any favorite and different pasta dish (or any other dish), please post it in the comments section. I’m always looking for more ideas.

Chocolate Velvet topped with Vanilla Ice Cream

In the case of this chocolate velvet dessert, the base flavor is chocolate, chocolate, and chocolate. If you’re a chocoholic, you really owe it to yourself to try this. I give you my word that it’s not difficult, and your guests, or your special someone, will be absolutely impressed!

This innovative chocolate trifle like dessert was a mix of chocolate cake, chocolate custard and chocolate syrup along with vanilla ice cream. The name of the dish was Annu’s idea and he drew inspiration from its rich velvety taste. My version of this dish is completely eggless as I had a few vegetarian friends coming over, though you can easily substitute with cake and custard made using eggs.

Eggless Chocolate Custard Ingredients:

Whole Milk — 1 Litre
Sugar — 1 cup
Cocoa Powder — 1/2 cup heaped
Cornflour — 25gms
Vanilla Extract — 1 tsp

Making the Custard:

Take milk in a thick bottom saucepan. Take half a cup of milk in a small bowl. Mix in the sugar, cornflour and cocoa powder, to make a smooth paste and keep aside.

Heat the milk in the saucepan over a medium flame. When it comes to a boil, remove from flame and stir in the cocoa/cornflour/sugar/milk mixture. Set it back on the stove and cook until thick and creamy stirring constantly. Stir in the vanilla extract.

Eggless Chocolate Cake Ingredients

All Purpose Flour — 1 1/2 cups
Baking Powder — 1 tsp
Baking Soda — 1/2 tsp
Powdered Sugar — 1 cup
Cocoa Powder — 3/4 cup
Milk — 1 cup
Melted Butter — 1/2 cup
Vanilla Extract — 1 tsp

Making the Eggless Chocolate Cake

Sift flour, baking powder, baking soda, powdered sugar, and cocoa powder. Mix milk with melted butter in a mixing bowl. Add vanilla extract to this. Fold the dry ingredients into the wet mixture and put it evenly in a baking tin and bake for approx. 30 minutes at 180 degree (Celsius).

Plating the Chocolate Velvet

Take a dish in which you want to set the dessert (I used highball glasses). Pour in some chocolate syrup and a half inch cake piece which sits in the bottom. Pour over an inch high layer of custard and place in refrigerator for the custard to set. Once the custard is set place another layer of cake on top of it. Cover each glass with cling film and keep in the refrigerator. Take out while serving and top it up with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and some chocolate syrup.

I have no authority on calling any recipe ‘perfect’, unless it is tasted and certified. I think calling any recipe perfect has more to do with an individual’s tastes and preferences. However, my friends who came over loved this dessert, as you can clearly see from my friend Athira’s expression.

This dessert is every chocolate lover’s dream.

Sausage, Mushroom, Spinach and Corn Quiche

In my experience, a quiche is one of those dishes that always taste better just as it comes out of the oven. It is a French, oven-baked dish made with eggs and milk or cream in a pastry crust. Unlike omelettes and frittatas, which don’t necessarily contain milk or cream in the egg mixture, quiche gets its wonderful richness from the addition of whole milk and cheese.

My first trial to bake a quiche was to surprise Annu, who was working pretty hard those days on some presentation, and I was pretty much successful in my attempt as he loved the Quiche and you should have seen him scarf it down.

I went through many quiche recipes but some changes to the recipes were in order. The most time consuming aspect of preparing the quiche, besides preparing the filling, is to make a pastry which is just right. The perfect pastry is light, very easy to cut into and has a slight crispy-flaky nature to it. Needless to say, you know you’ve got it right when you don’t really have to chew at it.

Pastry Ingredients

All purpose flour — 2 cups

Salted Butter (cold, cut into cubes) — 100 grams

Egg — 1

Sugar — 1 tsp

Cold Water — 3-4 tbsp

Making the Pastry

Sift the flour over a large bowl and add the tiny cubes of butter. Incorporate the butter to the flour with your finger tips till the dough starts feeling a bit coarse between your fingers. Push the flour and butter mix on the sides of the bowl and dig a hole in the center. Add the egg, beat it a little with a fork then incorporate the flour. Add the cold water little by little until the dough is mixed through. Knead the dough and form two balls of the same weight. Place the balls of dough in plastic wraps and let them rest in the fridge for at least an hour before using. Let the dough warm up a little before you start rolling it out.

The filling requires a lot of ingredients to be assembled. Once you get all your ingredients ready, you should be able to put this together in approximately an hour.

Filling Ingredients

Fresh Mushrooms – 500 gm
Spinach — 500 gm
Fresh American Corn Kernels (boiled) — 1 cup
Sausage (your choice of meat) — 1 cup (cut into small pieces)
Olive oil — 2 tbsp
Onions (thinly sliced) — 2 medium
Green Chilly (chopped) — 2
Salt and pepper to taste
Whole Milk — 1 cup
Eggs — 3 Large
Grated Cheese (I used a mix of Mozzarella and Cheddar cheese) — 1 cup

Making the Filling

Heat the oil in a nonstick skillet over high heat. Add the chopped onions and chilly and cook until the onions turns translucent. Add mushrooms and spinach along with salt and pepper. Cook and stir frequently, until the mushrooms start releasing water and shrink, and the spinach is cooked. Add boiled corn and sausage pieces and stir for 1 more minute. Take off the heat and allow it to cool.

Assembling the Quiche

On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough into a circle which will cover your quiche tray. Fit into the greased quiche pan, pressing dough into corners and also lightly prick the bottom with a fork. Transfer to a freezer for 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 200 degrees (Celsius). Bake first for 15 minutes, remove from the oven and allow it to cool for a few minutes. Place the quiche pan on a tray to prevent any spills. Sprinkle half the cheese over the bottom of the crust and add the filling over the cheese.

Whisk together milk and eggs and season with salt, and pepper. Pour it over the filling and then top with remaining cheese.

Bake for 30 to 35 minutes. Let it cool for about 10 minutes before sinking your teeth into it. Annu learnt it the hard way.

This is the ultimate dish for all meat and cheese lovers, and if you’ve got the time and patience for baking this genius of a dish, it’s definitely a must have..

Mad about a Pound Cake (Fruit Cake)

I recently discovered my love for the Pound Cake. Though making a perfect pound cake is little difficult and little more time consuming than making a regular soft cake yet I am in love with baking these amazing cake loafs with different combination of chocolates, fruits and nuts.
I first tried my hand at baking a Banana Walnut loaf cake. My hubby loves the combination of Banana and walnut and he finished it all off (with a little help from his sis) before you could say Hannah Banana.

My next pound cake was a tutti-frutti delight. It took us back to our childhood days, when the only thing moms could put in a cake to make it look better were tutti fruttis (no chocolate chips, no sprinkles). It was really colorful with a melt in the mouth texture. And as you can see, I have no pictures to put up for it, which bears reason to its short life-span.
Last night I made a Choco-Walnut pound cake. I baked it especially for Annu’s team at work (The SCD team, Yahoo) and the reviews told me that all of it vanished in no time.
A slice of pound cake is a perfect companion at snack time and can be sliced and stored like bread for guests.
Heated and served with ice-cream — it is a perfect ending to a light dinner.
(Each variant is slightly different from the other. Drop me a mail if you are looking for the recipe)

Huachinango a la Veracruzana- Red Snapper with a Spicy Red Sauce

Both of us are not fish lovers in particular but we were always attracted to the Red Snapper (the awesome pink hue could’ve had something to do with it mayhaps) and we always wanted to try it out. Finally on Friday on the way back from work we picked one up to kick start our weekend… A little reading up on the Red Snapper revealed that it is a Mexican favorite (abundantly found in the Gulf of Mexico) and is known to take up flavors very easily. We were sure that we didn’t want to cook it in our traditional way and thus we decided to have a Mexican ‘Cook’-Off, choosing Huachinango a la Veracruzana from the numerous recipes online (probably the most famous recipe for this fish).
Ingredients
Whole red snapper (we got the head and the tail removed)
Fresh Lime Juice – 2 tbsp
Salt and Pepper – To taste
Onion – 1 sliced
Garlic – 6-8 cloves peeled and diced
Tomato Sauce – 1/2 cup
Tomatoes – 3 coarsely chopped
Olive oil – 3 tbsp
Bay leaf – 1
Dried Oregano – 1 tsp
Jalapenos – 5 roughly chopped
Green Olives – 10 quartered

Marinade
If you’re using the whole snapper, clean it and remove the scales. The recipe told us to just poke the fish a bit using a fork, but we decided to go for scoring the fish (several diagonal cuts on both sides) since it looks better and definitely helps the marinade to sink deeper.
Lay the fish in a shallow dish.
Mix together the lime juice, salt, pepper, nutmeg and garlic and pour over the snapper.
Refrigerate for about an hour.
Sauce
Heat the oil in a large heavy bottom pan over medium heat and start frying the onions.
When they become translucent, add in the garlic and continue to cook for about 1-2 minutes until they are soft.
Add the tomatoes, tomato sauce, bay leaf, oregano, jalapenos, and olives.
Simmer the sauce for 5 minutes to bring the flavors together.
Cooking
Remove the fish from the marinade and place in shallow baking dish. Cover the fish with the sauce and bake at 200 degrees (Celsius) in a preheated oven for about 30 minutes turning once.

The baked fish was succulent, to say the least. Even though it is baked at a high temperature for a long time, the fish doesn’t dry up and stays really moist and soft. It’s a pleasant change from fresh water fish where you have to spend hours, hunched over a plate, trying to pick out the minute bones lest you choke on them. Like a majority of sea fish, the snapper also has a central spine and only a few big bones (the ribs) and you can’t really miss ‘em unless you’re really careless.

If we enjoyed it so much I am very sure that the real fish lovers will relish it a lot more. Do try it.

El Principio..

My introduction to the kitchen was very dramatic. I wasn’t attracted to cooking and neither was it any special recipe which inspired me to get started (I was actually too young to know salt from sugar). On the contrary, it was sheer attraction towards a unique utensil (a flat ladle with a looonnngggg handle and a small end) which made me enter my Granny’s kitchen every now and then. My Granny probably foresaw the talent and steered my way in to the kitchen.

I learned early on that I enjoy good food and also that there was nothing that would make me more happy than the compliments I got on serving good food. There were no culinary schools, no cooking classes, and no fancy kitchens. Cook books were confusing most of the time (bear in mind that there was no Google to help me then). Sanjeev Kapoor’s Khana Khazana was an inspiration once in a while, though there were times when some common things were not available in my hometown (Jamshedpur) and I had to figure out the substitutes. 

Things changed after moving to Bangalore. Almost everything is readily available here. But then you really can’t nurture your cooking skills when in a hostel. So since then I was waiting to have a place of my own, my own kitchen, and the freedom to experiment.

Things have not changed much from my first cooking experience. I still get attracted to new cooking or serving dishes first and then think of the recipe which would be best cooked or served in it.

Like they say; old habits die hard.