Another change I made was using a 13X9 inch baking pan instead of a loaf pan and also increased the oven temperature. The time mentioned to bake the bread was 60-75 minutes. Yesterday I found time to bake only at 10pm and I didn’t want to spend 1 hour for a single fruitcake, when I had plans to bake cranberry shortbread bars also, both to be gifted to the firefighters and others before christmas. So I decided to use a 13X9 inch pan, which definitely was wise because the fruitcake was done around 35 minutes itself. This was also very convenient to cut them into small pieces.

I also flavored the fruitcake with Supreme Spice’s Tea Masala Extract. For long time now I have wanted to try spice extracts, finally ordered it last week and got my shipment of Tea Masala Extract, Kesar Milk Extract and Tulsi Extract. The tea masala extract is my absolute favorite now. You have to try it to believe it. It transforms your ordinary tea into something exotic and it’s especially refreshing in this gloomy weather these days.

Tea masala extract is a blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cardamom, clove and pepper, which I thought would be perfect to pair with this fruitcake. At first I added 5 drops of the extract to the dough, but felt that it was not enough and so added another 5 drops and mixed the dough well. While the cake was baking the kitchen was filled with so much aroma of the spices, which made me think If I had gone overboard my adding 10 drops. I couldn’t wait until it was cool enough to cut it and have a bite. Anyway I let it cool on a wire rack overnight and cut them today. But by then the pungency of the spices had reduced and the cake tasted very good with the flavor of the spice extract in the background.

My Notes 1 Any combination of nuts and dried fruits can be used in this fruitcake. The only thing to be followed is that it should be 3 cups of nuts and 3 cups of dried fruits. I used 1 cup each of walnuts, pecans and sliced almonds. For dried fruits, I used 1/2 cup each of raisins, dried cranberries, dates, apricots and 1 cup of dried and sliced figs.

2 Let the fruitcake cool completely in the pan before inverting it. I was not patient enough and turned it over and the cake broke into 2 pieces. Fortunately I was able to patch it up. So I would suggest cooling it overnight.

This christmas fruitcake goes to
1. Egg Replacement Event – Pureed Fruit hosted by me.
2. Baking for Beginners hosted by Vandana.
3. Homemade Christmas Gift hosted by Happy Cook &
4. Santa’s Holiday Challenge hosted by JZ.

Rice Pudding is the western version of our own Indian Rice Kheer (Paal Payasam) but in the consistency of Sweet (Sarkarai) Pongal. We add saffron threads and cardamom in the Indian pudding. Here they add vanilla extract and cinnamon to flavor the pudding. While browsing “The Joy of Vegan Baking” by Colleen Patrick – Goudreau, I came across this pudding recipe using brown rice instead of white rice and non dairy milk instead of dairy milk. Since I had both soy milk and brown rice at home I decided to make it.

This is my entry for

1. Suganya’s Vegan Ventures
2. DK’s AWED – American
3. Srivalli’s Rice Mela

After the success of egg free version of the classic chocolate chip cookies (both chewy and crispy), I wanted to try my hands on another American classic the “Oatmeal Raisin Cookies”. I didn’t know then that it’s going to cost me a lot of time and material to find the perfect recipe for an eggless version. I had one recipe in hand from a book called “Cookies”. Since I have baked earlier from this book, I thought of proceeding with a recipe from that book itself. Then I saw that it used 1 and 1/2 sticks of butter, so I thought why not search for a healthy version of the cookies and found one in the net. It used only 5 tablespoons of butter, if I remember right. I proceeded with that recipe, substituting flax seed meal for the eggs in the recipe. I think I went overboard by replacing 1/2 the quantity of all purpose flour with whole wheat flour, because the cookies did not taste any good. I guess it was because of too many substitutions.

After the failure of the first experiment I decided to follow a regular recipe (not the low fat versions) exactly, but only replacing the eggs. So as per my first plan I decided to go with the recipe from the “Cookies” book. Again I used flax seed meal here to replace the one egg in the recipe. The dough came together and the cookies also looked like the store bought ones. I couldn’t wait to taste the cookies. But this time, the sugar in the recipe messed it up for me. It was way too sweet, even for a sweet toothed person like my mother and myself.

I did see a vegan oatmeal cookie recipe in “The Joy of Vegan Baking” book, but it used steel cut oats and I was not able to find it in the grocery store which I go regularly. So I thought why not try a recipe from the “Joy of Baking” website! Found this recipe and I was surprised that the recipe which I had tried out earlier was the same, but for the quantity of sugar. The previous recipe used 1 and 3/4 cups of sugar, whereas this recipe used only 1 cup of light brown sugar. This convinced me to try the recipe because only the sugar was excess in the previous batch. I baked these cookies yesterday and am very happy that they came out very well. Everybody liked the cookies, it tasted just like the ones from the bakery. Who said you need eggs to bake tasty cookies? We were not able to taste the flax seed meal at all. The cookies were chewy and tasted awesome. I can bet that nobody would guess that they are vegan cookies.

This is my entry for the following events:
1. Suganya’s Vegan Ventures.
2. DK’s AWED – American.
3. Egg Replacement Event – Flax Seed Meal hosted by me.

I’m a mother of a preschooler and like many others of his age he is also picky when it comes to food. Earlier I didn’t have any problem at all with him during mealtime. He used to eat a lot of veggies, rice, chapathis and fruits etc. But not anymore. So these days I’m hunting for healthy and tasty recipes which appeal kids. While browsing the “Vegetarian Times – Fast and Easy” book I found many such recipes.

The crispy breakfast bar recipe, especially caught my attention because these were “no bake” bars which can be prepared in a jiffy and are healthy too. These are crunchy chewy bars. They get fiber and iron from whole-grain puffed cereal and protein from almond butter and almonds. The original recipe does not have almonds, but I added it to give the extra crunchiness and protein boost.

Following the basic method, one can come up with a couple of variations, like using peanut butter and peanuts, chocolate chips, etc to mention a few. A variety of whole-grain puffed cereals are available in the grocery stores these days. I saw puffed millet and other puffed cereals too.

The prep time is only 15 minutes, which includes the time to take out the stuff you need from your pantry and you have to freeze the mixture for 30 minutes. So in 45 minutes you have a healthy treat ready, without any elbow grease.

So how does it taste? As I have mentioned earlier, my son “the picky eater” loved it so much, he ate 2 pieces as soon as he got home from school. We adults also liked it very much. Actually it’s a fancy “Pori Urundai” (puffed rice balls) with almond butter, raisins and honey instead of the jaggery syrup we Indians use.

This is my entry for:
1. Suganya’s Vegan Ventures.
2. DK’s AWED – Amercian.
3. Pallavi’s Sunday Snacks – Fix It.

Hi, everybody! Hope you all had a wonderful and safe Deepavali! I’ve been very busy for the past couple of days. Last week it was my son’s turn to provide snacks for his classmates at pre-school. It was for 2 days actually. So I baked Eggless Brownie Cupcakes using flax seed meal (I’ll post it shortly) and vegan pumpkin cookies. The next day was my husband’s birthday and I baked a cake for him. All this baking really made me very tired and nauseous. I realised that too much of anything is not good. I really wonder how people work in bakeries!

If this was not enough, I had a presentation in my son’s school about Diwali on the 27th. My mother suggested sharing some traditional sweets and snacks with the kids. So she prepared Coconut Burfi and I helped her in preparing the Maida biscuits. I don’t know the actual name for the maida biscuits, it’s mixing all purpose flour, salt, crushed cumin and black pepper and making it into a dough, just like making chapathi dough. Then divide the dough into small balls, roll each ball as thin as possible and cut them into small diamonds using a knife and deep fry them.

As for the coconut burfi, I asked my mother to follow Anjali’s recipe. We usually prepare burfis from fresh coconut, which is a big process. You have to grate the coconut without the skin etc. But her method looked so simple using store bought dessicated coconut. So my mother first tried a little and we were definitely skeptical about the taste, but to our surprise it came out very good and tasted like the traditional coconut burfi. The only change my mother made was she powdered half the measurement of coconut and kept the other half as it is, which gave a good texture to the burfis. Also she used cardamom powder because we did not have the kesar masala milk extract. So she went ahead and prepared a big batch of burfis for the school. Thank you very much Anjali for this simple yet tasty recipe, everybody in the school liked it.

Now let’s see the recipe for the pumpkin cookies I was talking about. I got this recipe from The Taste of Home Baking Book. The original recipe by itself was vegan, so I didn’t have to worry about egg substitution. The cookies came out very well. If you like chewy pumpkin cookies, you should try this recipe. The recipe also had instructions for frosting, since I was baking them for kids I omitted it. I didn’t want them to become hyper-active in the class later.

This is my entry for the following events:
1. AFAM – Pumpkin hosted by me.
2. AWED – American hosted by DK.

Palada Pradhaman (pudding) is a very famous sweet dish in Kerala. It is made using rice flakes, jaggery syrup and coconut milk. These days the rice flakes (called ada) are readily available in Indian grocery stores. Also originally whole coconut is grated and ground to extract the milk in 3 stages, which is called the first milk, second milk and third milk. But nowadays both coconut milk and coconut milk powder are readily available, making the process of preparing pradhaman very easy.

I found this recipe for preparing Oats Pradhaman in a magazine. As I have mentioned earlier the recipe calls for coconut milk prepared right from scratch. So I have modified the recipe to simplify the procedure by using store bought canned coconut milk. The pradaman was yummy. It did not taste like oats at all.

This is my entry for Vaishali’s Sweet Vegan.

I thought of taking a “baking-break” for at least 2 weeks because of a couple of baking disasters. But I found out that I’ve sort of become a “baking addict”. Moreover when surrounded by a lot of cookbooks it’s really very hard to resist the temptation. Recently I bought “The Taste of Home Baking Book”. It’s a neat book with more than 700 recipes, 600 photos and also has a lot of baking tips. Earlier I have tried 2 recipes from “The Taste of Home” magazine and both of them were great success. So I was sure that the recipes from that magazine are tried and tested.

The German Chocolate Cookies recipe was so simple and I was also tempted by the description provided. It said that the cookies were chewy and have a wonderful bakery-shop flavor. I have baked eggless chocolate chip cookies earlier and it was the crispy one. Since I have a few successful recipes in the “silken tofu-cocoa combination”, I wanted to try this recipe too using silken tofu. I’m very glad that I found this recipe, because the cookies turned out very well. The description given is 100% true. These eggless chocolate chip cookies are chewy definitely have a bakery-shop flavor.

This is my another entry to the Egg Replacement – Silken Tofu Event.

I missed DK’s earlier 2 events, so this time I wanted to send at least one entry as early as possible.  This month’s theme being Italian and since I’m into eggless baking, I searched for Italian cookies and found this.  Lot of versions of these cookies are available throughout the net, but I found this one to be the easiest.  These are eggless whole wheat flour cookies, with a lot of almonds and raisins.

Ingredients

Margarine – 1/2 cup (I used 1 stick Smart Balance 50/50 Unsalted Butter Blend, more details in My Notes)

Cocoa, unsweetened – 2/3 cup (I used Droste, dutch processed cocoa powder. 2/3 cup = 1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons + 2 teaspoons)

Light brown sugar – 2 cups

Water – 1/2 cup

Whole wheat flour – 2 1/2 cups

Baking powder – 1 1/2 teaspoons

Cinnamon – 2 teaspoons (I used vanilla essence instead of these spices)

Cloves or allspice – 1 teaspoon

Almonds, finely chopped – 1 cup

Raisins – 1 cup

Yield: 53 small cookies

Step-By-Step Procedure(Click on the thumbnails for a bigger view)
1. Preheat oven to 350F.
2. Combine first four ingredients in a saucepan.

3. Heat slowly, stirring till the mixture resembles a syrup. Let cool to room temperature.
4. Combine flour with baking powder and spices (if using).
5. Pour in chocolate syrup and work into a stiff batter. (See My Notes)

6. Add almonds and raisins. Raisins generally stick together, so take little flour and mix it with the raisins and separate them with your fingers, so the raisins will be spread uniformly throughout the batter.

7. I scooped out the dough using half tablespoon (see My Notes) and dropped it on the cookie sheet. The cookie does not spread, so leaving 1/2 inch space in between is sufficient. I was able to arrange 24 cookies in a large baking sheet.

8. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes.
9. Remove it from the oven and let it cool in the baking sheet for 5 minutes.
10. Then transfer it to a wire rack to cool completely.

The cookies tasted more like chewy brownies with the perfect amount of sweetness from the combination of brown sugar and raisins.

I saw this recipe in a tamil magazine a couple of months back.  I was very hesitant to try it because I was wondering how ridge gourd would taste in a sweet dish.  Finally I got the courage and prepared it yesterday.  The experiment was a grand success.  I did not tell my husband what I was preparing.  After it was done I gave him little payasam and asked him how it was.  He told,  “It tastes like any other payasam.  Why do you want to post it in your blog?”  He has a very sensitive nose, so he can guess what’s cooking even with the mildest aroma.  He himself could not believe that it was made with ridge gourd.

Ingredients in the original recipe:
Ridge Gourd, Big – 1
Milk – 4 cups (I used 2% milk)
Water – 1 to 2 cups for cooking the ridge gourd
Sugar – ¼ to ½ cup as per your taste
Cardamom powder – little

Optional:
Condensed Milk – 2 tablespoons
Cashews, raisins for garnishing
Ghee for frying the nuts, 2 teaspoons
Green food color

My variation:
Milk – 2 cups for cooking the ridge gourd (I used skim milk instead of water)
Cashews, whole – 5 (to cook along with the vegetable)

Servings:
For 6 cups of milk used, I got 4 cups (exactly) of ridge gourd payasam.

Procedure:
1.  Wash the ridge gourd under running water and peel the coarse ridges.  Discard it and then peel the skin and save it for grinding chutney.

2.  Cut the gourd into small pieces.  I pressure cooked the gourd, 2 cups of skim milk and 5 cashews for 2 whistles.

3.  While the ridge gourd is cooking, boil the 4 cups of milk in a heavy bottomed vessel.

4.  Wait for the pressure to release and grind the cooked vegetable in a blender.  I used an immersion blender and got a very smooth ridge gourd puree.

5.  Add this puree to the boiling milk and let it cook for another 10 minutes or until you are not able to smell the vegetable.  Keep stirring once in a while so that the bottom of the vessel does not scorch.

6.  Add the condensed milk, sugar and cardamom powder and the food color if you wish.  Let this mixture simmer for a while.

7.  Meanwhile heat the ghee in a small frying pan and fry cashews, raisins and add it to the kheer.

8.  Serve it hot or cold.

My Notes:
1.  The paysam was very delicious.  At first I added ¼ cup of sugar but felt that it was not sweet enough.  So I added another ¼ cup, but this made the payasam very swweeeeeeeet.  I will reduce the quantity of sugar  the next time (more than ¼ cup but little less than ½ cup) .

2.  In case you choose to cook the vegetable with water, just remove the cooked vegetables alone and blend it.  Reserve the liquid for some soup or stew.  If you use milk, you can blend everything together.

3.  The author of the original recipe has also given recipes for potato, chayote squash (chow chow), cabbage, cauliflower, green peas, bottle gourd and red pumpkin kheer in the same method.  I have prepared the red pumpkin kheer a couple of times and it tastes very good too.  I have not yet tried the other vegetables.

4.  I also prepare chutney with the ridge gourd peel and chow chow peel always.  Yesterday morning I prepared chow chow kootu (daal), so I had reserved those peels too.  So I prepared a chutney with the peels of both the vegetables.  I know that many of you do it already.  Those who are not aware of the recipe, if you are interested I will post it here.  Let me know.