I have been thinking to bake and decorate a cake for my parents for a long time now. But since both of them don’t prefer sweets and because of the diabetes, I avoided it for so long. Then I thought of making it with sweetener and later I came to know, sweetener should not be cooked/baked. I asked my colleague Cindy, who gave me the idea of sweetener for baking . Now the next question was, which cake to bake? I didn’t want to bake the same cakes again and again, so I decided on searching for a all new cake. I wanted something that both pappa and aayi would eat with interest. So after around 1hr of considering different options, I decided to make something which had a strong ginger flavor. Pappa simply loves ginger in everything, so I thought he would like it. So ginger cake it was.
I made a very small cake this time, I am really fed up of throwing cakes in trash (we are having cake overdose, thanks to my cake decorating classes). So it came out to be a beautiful tiny cake, which even though didn’t rise much, looked like a perfect one.
Then it was time for decorating it. Since I had chosen pappa’s favorite ingredient in the cake, I decided to do aayi’s favorite decoration. The first thing that came to my mind was basket weave. She simply loves those woven flower baskets. She loves roses, so that was next. I messed up a bit in both basket and the flowers and buds on top. Both pappa and aayi simply loved it, worth all my effort. Only problem was, I could not use sweetener for icing. There should be some other sweetener which is suitable for icing, I will search that next time. I had to use normal confectioner’s sugar for it.
The cake was just out of the world. A best choice for any ginger lover. It had a strong gingery flavor and the grated pieces were a bonus. I will be baking this cake more often now.
The recipe I followed was adapted from All recipes . I made quite a few modifications to it and I am happy that I did those modifications. I would have hated the cinnamon taste in this particular cake (I absolutely hated the cinnamon flavor in last few cakes and so decided never to use it again).
Ingredients: 1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar or baking sweetner 1 tbl spn fresh grated ginger 1 cup all purpose flour 2 tea spns baking powder 1 tea spn vanilla extract 1/2 cup milk 2 eggs
Method: Preheat the oven at 350 F for about 10mins. Sieve together flour and baking powder, keep it aside. Mix butter and sugar(or sweetener) till they are well mixed. Now add eggs, vanilla extract and mix well till the eggs are mixed. Pour in milk and mix again. Now add the flour-baking powder mixture, a little at a time, mixing it all the time. When everything is incorporated well, add the grated ginger and mix. Grease a baking dish, dust it with some flour. Pour the cake batter into it and bake at 350F for about 40mins or till a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. While serving, dust with some confectioner’s sugar or decorated it.
Makes : 6-7 big pieces Preparation time : 10mins (excluding baking time)
I have posted a lot of Konkani dishes, but one thing that I have not covered is “sundried items”. During summer, like any other Indian families, we too make a lot of different papads , wadis/odis and other items that can be stored for the entire year. My aayi also used to make these when we were kids. I have very fond memories of the summer holidays when we made all these. I never attempted making any on my own, but when aayi came here, I made sure to ask her for these. Since the first few days we had a bright and hot sun, we could successfully make these bitter gourd( karathe – Konkani, hagalakayi – Kannada) sun dried chips ( kachri – Konkani, sandige – Kannada). I don’t know how this series will continue because there is no sight of hot sun in last few days.
After these pieces are dried, these are stored in air tight container. When needed, a small batch is taken out and deep fried. These fried pieces can be stored for 4-5 days in air tight container. The fried pieces can be eaten along with papad as a side dish, or crushed slightly and put in curd rise or crushed and used in chutney / sasam . Any which way, they taste simply out of the world. Today instead of deep frying, we fried them in a shallow pan with 1-2 tea spn of oil. They still turned out to be very crispy and tasty.
Ingredients: 2 cup bitter gourd thinly sliced (the thinner the better) 2 tea spn chili powder 1/4 tea spn asafoetida powder 1 tea spn salt
Method: Mix salt with the bitter gourd pieces( remove any hard seeds) and leave it overnight. Squeeze the pieces slightly to remove any water from the pieces (squeezing is optional, if you like them to be more bitter, leave the pieces as they are).
Now spread them on a plastic paper and leave under hot sun. After 3-4 days when they look slightly dried, make a paste of red chili powder and asafoetida with a tea spn water, and apply this paste to the pieces.
Spread this on the paper again and sun dry them till they become very crispy. When they are cooled to room temperature, store in air tight container. While serving, fry them in oil, serve as suggested above.
PS: When the pieces dry, some of the chili powder falls off the pieces. Asafoetida looses its aroma when dried for long. So both of these should be added as late in the process as possible.
