Lemon vanilla marble cake... A non-chocolate eater's new-found delight

Rains in any metropolitan city in India eventually brings traffic to a stand still, which leads to long journeys back home. Although I love monsoons, however such days usually leave me too drained as it takes ages to reach home from work... This year the rain gods have been especially kind to us. The National Capital seems to have finally got it's pending spell of continuous rains bringing with it the much-needed respite from the summer heat. But it also meant having to wait for what felt like ages to get an autorickshaw, a breakdown in the city's lifeline Metro, a snarl in traffic movement. So this other day, after taking over 90 minutes to reach home after office which usually takes less than half of that time, I needed to do something to de-stress and what better way to do that than some good old baking :) :) :)  However, I wanted to experiment. I know the basic recipe for a chocolate marble  cake in theory but as I don't eat chocolate, had never made it. So keeping all this in mind,  I thought of replacing chocolate with some flavour I like.  And add some colour to it, so that the cake has two shades. So decided on my all-time favourite flavour of all time -- lemon! And add a pinch of yellow food colour, and voila... I had my awesome (I liked it) lemon vanilla marble cake!!!

So here's my humble recipe...

The basic recipe remains that of a sponge cake and we basically divide it into two parts and add flavour to one. So first the recipe for a basic sponge cake:-

1. Fine flour - 2 cups
2. Eggs - 4 nos
3. Castor (grinded) sugar - 1 1/2 cups
* Tip: Always measure castor sugar according to sugar in raw form, so here I mean one-and-a-half cup of raw sugar, which we need to dry grind to make a powder of it.
4. Butter - 90 gms (I used one pack of 90 gms of Amul Butter)
5.  Vanilla essence - 2 teaspoons (tsp)
6. Baking powder - 1 tsp
7. Baking soda - 1/2 tsp
8. Refined oil - 1 tsp
9. Milk - 2 tablespoons (tbsp)
* Tip: Measurement is the key to baking. So ensure you have the set of measurement spoons and cup in your pantry. It is easily available at utensil stores or shops which sell kitchen storage stuff (dabba dibbi wali dukaan :D)

Procedure:
Semi melt the butter in the microwave for 30 seconds or let it come to a bit gooey texture at room temperature. Then prepare your baking tin. I used a 25 cm diameter tin. Put 1 tsp of refined oil in the tin and coat it entirely with turning it sideways and front and back wards. Sprinkle a lil' bit of fine flour (maida) and coat the tin by beating the edges on your kitchen counter or a table top.
Beat the eggs in a bowl to a fluffy white foamy consistency, and sugar and butter in a separate one. Then add the beaten eggs to the sugar and butter mixture. Use an electric blender (I use a Morphy Richards hand blender).
Whisk in the flour into the mixture. (I find it easier to use a normal egg beater for this as electric hand beaters tend to make a mess by flying here and there with an electric beater.) Keep mixing the batter in cut-and-fold pattern—3 times clockwise and then make a straight line in the batter and then 3 times anti-clockwise and then make a straight line. Then add baking soda, baking powder and vanilla essence and mix again. Add the milk to give the batter a smooth finish.
I don't have an OTG and bake in convection mode of my microwave (LG intellocook), which basically means at 180 degrees Celsius.
So pre-heat the oven at convection for 5 minutes with a stand in it. Put the cake batter into the tin and again gently beat the edges on a table top to remove any air gaps. Put the tin on the rack and put it on convection mode for 40 mins. After 35 mins, take out the tin from the oven using oven mittens and put inside a skewer or knitting needle and if nothing from the cake sticks, it's almost done and put it again for 7 mins (it usually takes 42 mins baking and 1 min standby). Switch off the oven and let the cake be inside it for a couple of more mins, I can never wait over a minute, thus 1 min standby time :-p Let it cool. Put a plate on top of the tin and invert it and the cake shall come out, turn it over and enjoy!

Now for the lemon vanilla marble cake.

So till the batter, everything will be same. Post that, we will need 3 more things.

10. Lemon juice - 2 tbsp
11. Lemon rind - 1 tsp
12. Yellow food colour - A pinch

So after making the batter, divide it equally into two bowls. Into one, add the colour, juice and rind and give it mix till the batter takes a beautiful yellow colour. Now in the prepared tin, put one small ladle of plain batter and one ladle of flavoured batter and complete a circle. (In my tin, I could put five small ladles in the outer circle.) Then make an inner circle similarly (I could put three) and if space left another ladleful in the centre. Now use the skewer to slightly mix the batter by forming an 'S' shape across the circles. Make it twice or thrice cross sectionally. It will look like a modern art painting, don't worry. Now put it in the pre-heated oven for 35 mins and then check and put it again for 7-8 mins. Take it out, let it cool, cut slices and tadaaa! Eat and enjoy :)

And now some pictures...

The semi-melted butter

Eggs

Eggs ready to be beaten

 Beating eggs

 Butter and castor sugar

 Keep mixing

Adding the flour

Adding vanilla essence

Adding baking powder

                                     

                                                                   Whisking in

                                                                         Adding baking soda

                                                               Equal division into two bowls

                                                                     Adding lemon rind

                                                                          And lemon juice

 Adding the food colour

                                                             Mix till the batter turns yellow

 The prepared tin

 The modern art like batter

Cutting the cake

 The marbled effect

Kuch Mitha ho Jaaye! Peanut Butter Honey Oatmeal cookies

Don't we all just want to bake like Nigella Lawson someday? Well I would definitely love to do so... Was speaking about the food... Not the other things :-p I have always held people who can bake well in the highest regard, as baking is pure art. 
I have learnt the basics of baking very recently after my marriage from my mother-in-law Mrs. Rita Das. I would like to share a bit about this amazing lady. Eldest of six siblings, she got married right after completing her Bachelor's in Arts degree in Bengali Honours from Nistarini Women's College in Purulia, a small district near the then Bihar-Bengal (now Jharkhand-Bengal) border.  She went on to complete her Bachelor's in Education degree after her marriage. She got a few government job offers, but she chose to remain a housewife to look after her family and her children. I might not say it to her often but she has changed my views about feminism a lot. From being patient to perfecting the art of dealing with the toughest of situations with a sense of humor without hurting anyone, she has helped me transcend from being a girl to a women in this first year of my marriage. 
Her hobbies are reading, chatting, watching cookery shows and she loves cooking. I have an eye on her hand-written collection of recipes :-p But she is too generous as a teacher to tell you everything. She makes the world's best chutneys (sweet/tangy sauces) and pickles. She learnt baking from a neighbour in Dhanbad but went on to develop her own expertise in it, with the encouragement from my Father-in-Law. Her enthusiasm for cooking even at this age (she'll turn 60 this year) never ceases to inspire me.
She taught me how to bake a cake in the most simplest way possible. We gel a lot on our experimental nature towards cooking and the following recipe is a result of that.

                             Ma in her elements in her favourite place, the kitchen

I don't eat chocolate (I know, I know... I can see the look of disgust on your face), infact I can't eat chocolate since I was a kid as I found it bitter. So, I am usually left with options in desserts that are way too sugary and sweet.  So I always look for choices that are good on the pallet and are kind on the sugar content as well. Thankfully, my husband Arindam is a foody, so he doesn't crib about anything. 
I don't know about others, but I don't like the packed bakery biscuits or cookies, especially the sweet ones, as they have a weird smell. But Arindam loves bakery goods so I needed to make something which will satisfy both of our demands. So who came to our rescue but our very own... Sanjeev Kapoor :) He is my first guru of cooking like a lot of other Indians. I've learnt how to chop vegetables from his show Khana Khazana.  So, we found a recipe online, we (me, Ma and my husband always assists me in such endeavours on our week offs )  made some variations as per our choice and voila... We made the first perfect batch of cookies :) :) And you know what was the best thing, a friend of mine saw the pic  of the cookies I shared on Instagram and asked for the recipe, and made it herself and told me it was awesome. 

So here it is, my first recipe :) Peanut Butter, Honey and Oatmeal cookies:-

Ingredients:-

1. Fine flour  - 1 cup 

2. Peanut butter   - 1/2 cup

3. Oatmeal  - 1/2 cup

4. Peanuts (roasted and then grrinded) -2 tbsp

5. Castor sugar (grinded sugar) -  3/4 cup

6. Honey - 1 tbsp

7.  Desiccated coconut - 1/2 cup

8. Milk - 3-4 tsp

9. Baking soda - 1/4 tsp

10. Cinnamon powder - 2 tbsp

11. Lemon rind - 1 tbsp

Procedure:-

Take the peanut butter and castor sugar in a bowl and mix them together with a spatula, I prefer using my own two hands :) Sieve in the flour, cinnamon powder and baking soda into the mixture. Add the oatmeal, grinded peanuts, desiccated coconut, honey, lemon rind and milk and knead it all together into a hard dough.
Cover it with a cellophane or transparent polythene and keep it in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.
After that, take the dough and make small balls (like laddoos) and press them. You can make designs 

over it with pressing a fork. Don't make the cookies too thin, keep them a bit thick. One can use cookie cutters as well.
Now grease a baking tray with butter. Preheat the microwave oven on convection (180 degrees Celsius or 356 degrees Fahrenheit). Place the cookies on the tray and bake it on the same convection mode for 15 mins. Let it stay in the oven for a few more minutes after switching it off. Take it out on a tray and cool it and put it in an air tight jar. It will harden in some time. Voila! Eat, share and enjoy :)

Before baking

                       The wait! Can't explain in words the high it gives to see your cookies rising upp!

                                                             Wallah :) :)

        No meal is more sumptuous than the one you share with your near and dear ones :)

From a kitchen hater to falling in love with cooking, here's my story!

I read a lot of food blogs and see that people have childhood memories of watching their mothers and grandmothers cook and helping them around, which imbibed the seed of culinary arts in them. As I lost my mother at a very young age, I do not have any such memories. My earliest memories of food or kitchen was my father teaching each of our new maid how to make the one staple we used to have on a daily basis--egg curry.

I have never had any interest in cooking, apart from my occasional experiments in the kitchen, that too because  I wasn't allowed in the kitchen. However, these experiments seldom resulted in something remotely palatable.
My father tried to imbibe in me some cooking skills after I hit teenage but was highly disappointed at my lack of interest in the entire process.
At the age of 14-15, this was hardly a serious matter for me. In fact in hindsight, I guess I believed like others that I will somehow deal with this  problem when I will face it but life doesn't always give us that time.
I'm someone who started cooking as a last ditched effort to keep herself alive... like literally, believe it or not I'm not exaggerating.
I have lived alone for... quite a while and after trying every permutation and combination to keep myself well fed, I finally decided to learn how to cook one day when I just couldn't take it more, in fact my body couldn't. It was after, and I still squirm at the idea of it, I fainted one day  as I had eaten just Maggi and Pepsi Blue for a month...

What happened in between is a long story, to be told some other day...
Well, so I decided to learn cooking that day. It was a couple of months before I moved to Delhi in July, 2005.  My cooking  journey started with me making a conscious effort to first learn to cook all the things that I like to eat. So it started with calling aunts in Calcutta to know the difference between two vegetables or asking friends' mothers for a recipe if and when I ate something at their places and liked it .

It has been nearly 10 years since then and it has been an absolutely wonderful journey to develop my culinary skills. My biggest high as a cook is to feed people. And I have been extremely lucky to have friends and families who have only encouraged me .

It was on Saraswati Pujo (Basant Panchmi) this year when I cooked for 20 people alone, that I felt it's time to share my experiences with all.

I'm an Indian non-vegetarian who doesn't eat chicken, so I will post both veg and non-veg recipes, with a fewer chicken dishes. 
I'm a Bengali by birth and got married in a Bengali family, with both my paternal and in-laws having roots in erstwhile East Bengal. 

I have been brought up in Jabalpur in Central India and have been living in Delhi for a decade now. My husband spent his childhood in Dhanbad, Bihar. 

I have found my new love in baking. So my recipes will have an influence of all these cuisines and more :) 

I don't claim that whatever I cook or recipes I follow are the best or the most authentic one. I might share recipes that you hate or can improvise and make it better. I'm all ears for feedback -- good or bad. I just want to reach out to that girl/boy who might be missing their home-cooked food while eating a bad bowl of noodles and say that you are not alone and cooking can be fun. I'm gonna share my experiences, of which some you might find useful and some of you might say, hey I told her that. Yes, my recipes are a dedication to all who have taught me and all who ate my food, good or bad with a smile...

So let the journey begin! 

NOTE: If any of the pictures used in the blog have copyright issues, please inform and it will be taken off within 24-48 hours.