My friend’s beautiful daughter turned 6 years old over the weekend. I asked my friend if I could bake a small cake for her. Initially I thought of baking just a simple cake. Then last week, I thought I would decorate it into a Princess. I had seen that she enjoys Frozen movie. Then I found some Princess cakes onlines, with blue dress which looked so beautiful. So I decided to go with blue dress. The blue Princess cake, I think it came out very well. Someone asked me which princess it was based on, since it had the bindi, I really did not base it on any princess characters, it was just that I really wanted to make it a light blue cake. I added the bright yellow flowers for the extra pop of colors.
The cake was Simple egg cake . The frosting was creamcheese-buttercream frosting . The doll is plastic. It was a 4 inch doll. Since the doll was kind of small, I thought of keeping it on a oval shaped cake. It gave the much needed height to the cake. Before frosting the cake, I cut each piece horizontally and applied a thick layer of frosting in between to give extra taste to the cake. I have seen many Princess cakes where a dressed doll is used as the insert. That may be something I will keep in mind for future. For now, I really enjoyed making the whole dress.
Pictorial :
Some more closeups of cake
Magge or moggem is a special kind of cucumber. It is widely used in cooking at our place. In Bangalore, it is sold as Mangalore Southekayi (cucumber), this is called Dosakaya in Telugu. This is usually cooked before consuming, but there are few recipes where tender magge is eaten before cooking. These sundried cucumbers or magge salli are very popular among Konkanis in our area. Tender magge which are called magge murto are used for this dish. Once the pieces are sundried with all the spices, they are served like pickle. They have a nice crunch to them. We used to make these very frequently when we grew magge in our backyard. These days were buy tender ones from sante (farmer’s market). These stay good for a week or so.
Pictorial: Cut magge and apply salt and sundry. Apply the spices and sundry again.
Sundried Mangalore Cucumber (Magge Salli)
Ingredients
- 4 cups Mangalore cucumbers magge/moggem
- 1 tea spn chilli powder
- 1/8 tea spn asafoetida powder
- 1 tea spn salt
Instructions
- Remove the seeds from magge. Do not remove the skin.
- Cut the magge into 3x3 inch pieces.
- Add and mix salt to the pieces.
- Sundry under very hot sun for 1-2 days (till they are half dried).
- Make a paste of chilli powder, asafoetida with just few drops of water.
- Apply the paste to half dried magge pieces and sundry them again for 2 days.
- Store in air tight container.
