Pineapple cake

With a three month old, there is no such thing as a routine. But its a boon to have my mother around, giving me the much needed break. The break is usually utilized by hitting the bed and getting a power nap. But I see things getting a little more manageable now. The fact that I actually got time to bake a cake for my husband's birthday and take a few pictures, actually says a lot.

Usually I would have done dinner and called friends over, but this time it was only cake cutting post dinner. Nothing fancy just a simple sponge cake with pineapple and whipped cream icing.

So here goes the recipe

For the sponge cake you will need:

Eggs: 4

All purpose flour: 1 cup

Sugar: 2/3rd cup

Butter: 2 tbsp

Vanilla essence: 1tsp

* this is good for an 8x8 sponge, we would need two cakes like this.

For the icing:

Tinned pineapple (in pineapple juice) : 2 tins

Pineapple jam or preserve: 1/2 cup

Heavy whipping cream: 2 cups

Sugar: 2-3 tbsp

Dry coconut: 1 cup

Method:

For the sponge cake

1. Grease an 8x8 cake tin, and preheat oven to 350 degree.
2. Beat the eggs and the sugar over a warm water bath, till it reaches the ribbon stage. This means, that when you lift up the beater, the batter falls down like a ribbon.
3. Add the vanilla essence.
4. Slowly fold in the flour one tablespoon at a time. Make sure you DO NOT add the flour all at once, as this will make the sponge flat and result in a hard cake. Fold with a gentle hand.
5. To this add the melted butter, and pour it into the prepared tin.
6. Bake in the preheated oven for 20-25 mins, or till a toothpick inserted comes out clean.
7. Let it cool.
8. Cut horizontally right through the middle.
9. Make two cakes like this, if you want a four layered cake.

For the icing.

1. Beat the heavy whipping cream with the sugar, till firm. Do not over beat or the cream will turn into butter.
2. Reserve the pineapple juice from the tin. Chop up 8-9 rings of pineapple, and keep 4-6 rings for decoration.
3. Now place one layer of cake on a cake stand or any other plate your going to present the cake.
4. drizzle a few tablespoon of the pineapple juice on the cake,to moisten it.
5. Spread a little of the pineapple jam or preserve, add some chopped pineapple and spread a generous helping of the whipped cream. Add the other layer of cake on top, and repeat.
6. Repeat till you use up all the four layers of cake.
7. Now on the top most layer, add the whipped cream, and spread it all over with the help of a flat spatula or a butter knife. Cover the sides too. Dont worry if it looks untidy, here is where the grated coconut is going to come to use. Take the coconut and stick it onto the sides of the cake.
8. Decorate the cake on top with the pineapple rings.
9. I had some cherries so added that for the decoration.

Done, now all you have to do is run the knife through and serve a slice on the plate.

Must tell you , a pretty easy cake that tasted really yummy. I must tell you though that the cake tasted much better the next day. So my suggestion make the cake a day before and let it be in the refrigerator overnight, trust me the cold pineapple along with the whipped cream and the moistened sponge cake...........simply delicious.

Hope you guys like this recipe. Feels nice to be back. Hope to hear feed backs.

Thanks

A Very Happy 2010.

Woww, we are already four days into the New year. 2009 got over with a blink of the eye. I donut think it was just me who felt that way, lots of my friends had the same to say. Wonder why?

Well hope 2010, paces itself. Hope we all have our dreams come true, and achieve our goals and aspirations. And hope all of us are able to keep up our New year Resolutions. Mine being......Be regular with my posts. Well I think I will be cause as of now, there is isn't much of extra curricular activities to distract me.

On that note, Here's wishing every one a very Happy and safe 2010.

Though no new posts I would like to send in a few entries to Divya's Show me your cake event. Here are the entries.

A total of five entries are allowed. I choose the best 3 cakes that I have made.

The first one is Praline and Fresh Fruit Gateau

The Second one is the one, that I had made for husband's 30th birthday.

The Corona Beer Bottle and Beer Mug Cake

And the last but not the least, my all time favourite,

The Marble cake

Here's wishing all a very sweet 2010.

Take care.

Enjoy.

German Chocolate Cake with Chocolate butter icing and Praline

My friends birthday was nearly a month ago and I had made this cake for him. I had already decided that this time I was going to try a cake mix and put all my work into the icing. But what icing and how not to make it similar to all my previous cakes. So I thought and searched , but could not find something convincing enough. not to mention the fact that my husband told me that it was better to get the cake from outside. That I think triggered me off.

And the result was is this yummy cake which all of them really enjoyed.

So here goes the recipes. The pictures don't do justice to the cake as I was more focused on getting everything right for the cake.

You will need:

For the Basic cake

Betty Crocker's German cake mix.

For the Filling
2-3 cups Ghiradelli semisweet chocolate chips.

1 cup Heavy whipping cream

The outer coating of Praline
1 cup sugar

1 cup mixed nuts (pecans,walnuts and cashews.)

For the icing

1 -1 1/2 cup Heavy whipping cream

Sugar

Vanilla Essence

For the chocolate stars

1 cup ghiradelli chocolate chips

Other ingredients

Icing pen for writing.

Coffee liquor for soaking

You have to :

For the cake:

1. Follow the directions on the package and bake the cake. This can be done a day before.
2. Cut it into 2-3 layers.
3. Make the coffee liquor by soaking any coffee in 1 cup of water and heating it till the coffee dissolves. cool it.
4. Spoon the liquor over the layer of cakes. soaking each layer well. This gives a real good taste with the filling.

For the filling:

1. Melt the chocolate either on a double broiler or in the microwave till the chips are melted.
2. Add the cream to this and whip till peaks form. Refrigerate.

For the Praline:

1. Break the nuts into small pieces.
2. Heat the sugar in a dry saucepan till only melted. Be careful, once it melts and begins to caramelize it hardens up very fast.
3. Add the chopped nuts and mix it all up. Pour it out on a parchment paper and let it cool.

The Praline getting cool.

For the stars and the chocolate plaque:

1. Melt the chocolate. Line a cookie tray with parchment paper.
2. Once the chocolate is completely melted pour it out onto the parchment and spread it in a layer. Let it cool.
3. Once it begins to harden, cut out a big round for the plaque with a cookie cutter. The stars or any other shape can be cut using a cookie cutter. If you do not have a cookie cutter, simply cut out long stripes with a knife.
4. Leave to cool completely.You can even put it in the refrigerator.
5. Do not remove it from the sheet. Only give it its shape.

For the topping:

1. Whip the cream with vanilla essence and sugar,till it forms peaks.

To Assemble the cake.

1. Place the bottom layer of the coffee liquor soaked cake.
2. Spread the filling in between.
3. Repeat with all the layers.
4. Know spread the whipping cream around.
5. Make sure you cover all the sides of the cake with a thick layer of the cream.
6. Now break the praline up and stick it all around the sides of the cake. You don't have to be particular about breaking it into small pieces. A little big pieces add to the texture.

8. With the icing writing pen, write down whatever message you want. I wrote Happy Birthday. Decorate with stars, or whatever shapes you have made.

9. Once completely cooled and firm, the chocolate stars and the plaque will come off the parchment really quick.

10. I then piped out some of the filling around the rim of the cake.

And voila, the cake is ready to be cut.

I made two cakes as there were thirty people comign for the party.

The cake as such is very easy to make, but what takes the most time is getting the different components ready to assemble them all together. This is a fun way I came up with, but there are endless possibilities with icing and cake decorating.

Hope you all enjoy this recipe.

More cake recipes coming soon.

Marble Cake

Life is full of the unexpected. A lot of you'll would agree to that I am sure. I had given up all hopes of getting back any of my pictures or data, that went down with the crashed hard drive. But my husband's colleague came in as saviour, and restored almost 40 gigs of the data !. What more all my pictures are safe and sound, just the way I had last seen them. Yipppeeeee!!!!!

Now I can post all my previous recipes with pictures.......

But as of now, I am going to post the cake recipe I made to say thank you. Since my husband was going to take it to work and then give it to his colleague, I did not want to do anything fancy.

As a young kid, my mom use to bake marble cakes for us. Simple, buttery with the perfect blend of cocoa and vanilla. So I decided on that.

I took my recipe from here. The recipe called for cake flour, but I substituted that for some all purpose flour and cornstarch. Here goes the recipe.

You will need

• 2 cups white sugar
• 1 cup butter, softened
• 2 1/4th cup all purpose flour
• 6 tbsp of cornstarch
• 1 cup milk
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 4 eggs
• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

You have to

1. In a large bowl, with electric mixer at low speed, beat sugar and butter until blended. Increase speed to high, and beat until light and fluffy.
2. Add flour, milk, baking powder, vanilla, salt, and eggs; beat at medium speed until well mixed. Increase speed to high, and beat batter 4 minutes longer
3. Remove about 2 1/2 cups batter to a medium bowl. With a wire whisk or fork, beat cocoa into batter in medium bowl until well blended.
4. Grease a 10 inch springform pan. (Here a 9 inch would have also worked well). Alternately spoon vanilla and chocolate layers into prepared pan.
5. With a large spoon, cut and twist through batters to obtain marbled effect.Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 1 hour, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean.
6. Cool cake in pan, and on a wire rack, for 10 minutes.
7. Remove cake from pan, and cool completely.

Cut into pieces and serve. It tastes great with a cup of tea, coffee or simply a glass of cold milk.

Note: I found this great tip, if a recipe calls for cake flour follow this

1 cup cake flour= 3/4th cup all purpose flour + 2 tbsp of corn starch.

Fruit Cake

Yet another late post. Looks like I have to stop cribbing about not being able to update my blog regularly and just do it as and when it happens. For this moment to arrive, I have been planning since the past one week. More so, when the recipe I am going to post is as old as the Easter weekend.

Though this was not an Easter speciality, but this what was my contribution to the potluck that we had at a friends place. She has a lovely patio, overlooking the canyon. The day was just a perfect sunny San Diego day. There was authentic uppam with stew, some yummy potpies, appetizers, and offcourse my cake. We ate, painted Easter eggs, and off course enjoyed lazying in the sun.

Even though I have made this cake quite a few times, I have never stuck to the recipe. Its a different recipe all the time. Well let me take that back, they are not very different, just a couple of ingredients here and there. But offcourse the basic funda is same for all. Lots of fruits, with just enough batter to hold them together, to result in this yummy, festive fruit cake.

I think I have written enough, I need to give the recipe now, here it goes. I found this recipe here

You will need

1 cup unsalted butter
1/2 cup regular sugar
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
3 large eggs
Juice and zest of 1 orange.
3/4 cup almond-coarsely ground
1/2 cup pecans-coarsely ground
1 1/2 cups chopped dried fruits (cherries, candied peel, dry ginger, raisins, cranberries)
2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4tsp salt
2 tbsp of brandy or rum extract (essence)

You will have to

1. If using brandy, soak the chopped dried fruit, in the brandy a week in advance.preheat oven to 350 degrees. Take an 8 inch spring form pan and line it with butter paper.
2. beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well
3. Add the rum extract,(if not using brandy) orange juice and zest. fold in the almonds , chopped dried fruits.
4. In a separate bowl sieve together baking powder, flour and salt. fold this into the cake batter.
5. \Bake in oven for an hour. Reduce oven temperature to 300 degree and bake for another half an hour.
   
   The cake can be brushed with brandy too and can be wrapped and stored for a long time in the freezer. The cake is usually made way in advance and is nourished with brandy until its Christmas time. yummyyyyyy!!!!!!!

More later.

CORONA BEER BOTTLE AND A BEER MUG CAKE

"Thirty is the new twenty" that is how my dear hubby responded, when he was asked, how does it feel to be thirty. Though his birthday was yesterday (the 8th of Sept), we celebrated it on sat the 6th.
We had a party at home, with friends, food, music and drinks. Since I had decided to make all the food along with the cake at home, my prep work started on Thursday itself. hence the reason for no posts for nearly five days.
With around thirty guests, I had to think of something that was easy to prepare, and needed less time to assemble and serve. more over, I had challenged myself to make a very different birthday cake this time. so I needed a lot of time.

This is what I planned:

DRINKS: Margarita, coke, juice,corona beer (there was a lot of corona!!!)
SNACKS: paneer bread circles, mini samosas
MAIN COURSE: chana masala and kashmiri aloo dum.
ACCOMPANIMENTS: peas pulao, naan and boondi raita.
DESSERT: the birthday cake.

apart from the mini samosas (I used frozen store bought ones) and the naan (we ordered them from an indian restaurant), rest was all to be made by me, from scratch. made the chana masala and the cake on friday. Saturday morning made the kashmiri aloo dum and the snacks ofcourse. my husband and my brother in law (who had come down from San Jose),were in charge of the drinks.
The main work went into making the cake, actually icing it. I have usually made simple round cakes with all different icings, usually made using cream. This time I thought of doing something really different. I thought of making a cake shaped like the corona beer bottle and a beer mug. I saw this idea here.

I did not want to use butter cream icing, I wanted to use cream cheese, whipping cream, and chocolate. While doing my grocery shopping, I spotted real cheese cake filling. All one needs to do is spread it on a crumb base and its all set. I thought that this could be a good substitute for the butter cream, and I could add the required food colouring.
Here is how I went about baking, carving and icing the cake.

FOR THE CAKE

You will need

• 4 eggs
• 2/3 cup flour
• 3 tbsp butter
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• 1 cup sugar

You have to

1. sift the flour. melt the butter.
2. beat the sugar and the eggs together with a beater at high speed. keep beating till the batter reaches a ribbon consistency. to check, lift the beater and let the mixture fall on the surface of the batter. it should leave an impression.
3. slowly with a spatula fold in the flour little by little.
4. add the melted butter along with the vanilla essence.
5. fold everything together.
6. pour it into a greased sheet pan. I used a 12x8 inch Pyrex glass cookware. bake in a preheated oven at 350 degree Fahrenheit for 25 mins. or till a toothpick inserted comes out clean.
7. cool. slice it.

I made two cakes like this for the beer bottle.

I made one cake with the same measurements, in a 8x8 cake pan, for the beer mug.

FOR THE ICING

You need

• 1 tub philladelphia ready cheese cake filling
• 3 cups heavy whipping cream
• 2 cups melted chocolate
• yellow, black and brown food colouring
• 1/2 cup powdered sugar
• piping gel

You will have to

1. whip the cream with sugar, till soft peak stage. chill in the refrigerator.
2. empty the cheese cake mixture into a large bowl and whip it. add yellow and brown colouring to around two cups of the mixture. mix. check for the colouring. This is a trial error method till you get the exact beer colour. You might have to add a little bit of black too.
3. mix black colour to the piping gel and set aside.
4. mix black colour to one cup of the whipped cream.

for the filling

1. cut the two sheet cakes into four layers.
2. alternate each layer with the cheese cake filling, the melted chocolate and the whipped cream.
3. cut the 8x8 into two layers and spread the filling. I spread cheese cake on one side and melted chocolate on the other.

To carve the cake.

I ran a knife along the surface of the cake to get the shape and then cut it. But the best way to do it, is to get an enlarged picture and make a cutout. that can be placed on the cake to be carved.

for the icing

1. I started with the bear mug. simply spread the cheese cake mixture coloured to a beer colour, all over the cake. leaving the top empty.
2. cover the top with plain whipped cream. let a little tip over the yellow colour, to look like froth.
3. fill an icing bag with melted chocolate,fit it with tip # 3 and pipe out the border.
4. for the beer bottle, I started with the cheese cake mixture coloured yellow. then I iced the white part with whipped cream. next the black part was also whipped cream.
5. the writing was with plain whipped cream. the black writing was with the piping gel.

here are some important things to take care of.

1. after each layer of icing, it is important to chill the cake for at least half an hour. otherwise the colours will run into each other.
2. I realised the white writing could have been done with plain white cream cheese.
3. food markers are an easy way, but I do not know how well they will work on a cream icing.
4. for those who love to have butter cream icing, it would be less taxing to ice it with that.
5. To spread the icing on the cakes, I used an angled spatula.

though there were a lot of small imperfections in the icing, but I was happy with the overall result. For my first attempt at 3-d cakes, this one surely came out well, and tasted good too.
well with cheese cake filling, whipped cream and melted chocolate, should we be expecting any less.
enjoy

PRALINE AND FRESH FRUIT GATEAU

There is nothing like a moist, creamy, chilled fruit cake. I had made this one for my husbands birthday. Though it did take a lot of time and effort, but you know, after all it was for his birthday. This cake looks so colourful, specially with all the fruits on a snow white creamy icing. I added praline to the sides of it, which gave it that little sweet crunch.
I made the sponge cake at home, but i realised that one could make it with store bought angel food cake too.
Here is the recipe

You will need:

8 inch round sponge cake (recipe below)- 2 cakes, cut horizontally into four layers. (or one full angle food cake, cut horizontally)
Fruit cocktail- 1 tin. (keep the syrup)
Chopped strawberry- 1/2 cup + a few slices to decorate
Chopped kiwi- 1/2 cup + a few slices to decorate
Heavy whipping cream-3 cups
Sugar- 1/4th cup
Praline (recipe below)- 1 cup.

You have to

1. Whip the cream with sugar, till it forms peaks.
2. Place a layer of the cake on a serving plate.
3. Soak it with a tsp of the fruit cocktail syrup, that you kept aside.
4. Add a tbsp of the fruit cocktail, some strawberry and some kiwis.
5. Spread some whipped cream.
6. Place the other layer on top, and repeat the process.
7. After placing all the four layers, cover the entire cake with the whipped cream.
8. Crush the praline, and stick it on the sides of the cake.
9. Decorate with strawberry slices and kiwi slices.
10. Add a few pieces of praline.
11. Chill overnight (preferably).

enjoy..........

For the cake

YOU WILL NEED

all purpose flour-1,1/2 cup
eggs-4
sugar- generous 1/2 cup
baking powder- 1/4th tsp
vanilla essence- 1/2 tsp

YOU HAVE TO:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degree Fahrenheit.
2. Grease an 8 inch cake tin.
3. Separate the egg yolks and the egg whites.
4. Sieve the flour and the baking powder.
5. Cream the egg yolks and the sugar, over hot water, till the mixture turns a pale yellow.
6. Beat the egg whites till it stands in peaks.
7. Slowly add the egg whites to the egg yolk and sugar mixture.
8. Fold in the flour.Add the vanilla essence
9. Bake in the oven for 30 minutes, or till a skewer inserted comes out clean.
10. Leave in tin for 5 mins, cool.

For the praline

YOU WILL NEED

Mixed nuts-1 cup (cashews, pecans, hazelnuts)

Sugar- 1/2 cup

Water- 1 cup

YOU HAVE TO:

1. Dissolve the sugar and water. Heat.
2. Once the sugar solutions begins to brown, add the chopped nuts.
3. Grease a plate.
4. As the sugar begins to caramelize, and the mixture started to stick.
5. Empty it out on the grease plate, and spread it.Let it cool.
6. Break into pieces, or crush with a rolling pin.

I know it got a little elaborate, but trust me the taste is worth all the effort.

happy eating.