Pasta Cake

Pasta Cake - The idea originated from a shot shown during a promo of Masterchef Australia. The new season was coming and the promos were here and the colourful beautiful food was making my fingers itch. At any point, I am, at best, a decent cook. So the itchiness is something I generally ignore. But there was one shot there, in between those divine food and which, to my naive eyes and mind looked vaguely familiar. My culinary naïveté will be evident when I confess that it took me days before my rookie mind gave a name to it - Pasta Cake. It wasn't pasta cake and I wasn't able to find out what it actually was as we skipped this season of Masterchef Australia. But the thought stuck. And as usual, I trawled the depths of culinary blogs via an old friend, Google Search. I found quite a few. I wanted a vegetarian one and hence, I took elements from a few recipes to make a delicious Saturday lunch or comfort food on Friday night.

Here it is: 

2 cups of heavy cream

3 large eggs

Salt

Black pepper powder 

100 gms of cheese 

11/2 cups of spinach

3/4 cup of carrot (grated or 

finely chopped, as you wish)

1 large potato, finely chopped

A handful of French beans

2 large tomatoes

1 green chilli, deseeded and chopped finely

400 gms of spaghetti, freshly cooked

1/2 cup butter

Small handful of coriander leaves, to garnish

First step: Cook that spaghetti. Do not substitute spaghetti with any other kind of pasta.once cooked, let it drain. 

Take a skillet and heat oil. Lightly stir fry your tomatoes. Keep them aside. If it appeals, you could also lightly stir fry the other vegetables. 

Now it's whisking time. Take a large bowl and beat the cream and eggs with pepper powder and salt. Add the grated cheese, the tomatoes, chilli, vegetables and cooked spaghetti. While you are integrating all your elements, pre-heat your oven to 180 degree Celsius.

(Note: You can add more vegetables like cauliflower, pumpkin, sweet potatoes, peas. Also, make sure the mixture should not become watery as that makes for a mushed up pasta cake. Trust me, that does not taste good at all.)

Melt the butter and pour it into the pan; swirl the pan around so that it is nicely coated. Now pour your spaghetti mixture into the bowl, slowly, and make sure that the mixture is evenly distributed in the pan. Let it bake for 30 minutes. Your spaghetti cake will be ready when it begins to crisp at the top. Take it out of the oven and sprinkle some coriander leaves over it. Sprinkle some more grated cheese over it and bake it in the oven for another 10 minutes. Take it out, now, and let it rest and cool. Your magnificent Saturday lunch is ready. Have it with a lemon pickle or a good side of green salad. 

What a comfort food! 

The divine lemon cake

My dear little daughter is quite a fussy eater. If she agrees to milk one week, she will make up for it by refusing it for the next two weeks. If she likes idli with chutney in the morning; in the afternoon, she wants it without chutney; she will like upma without banana in the morning but will not mind it with banana at noon. And she fiercely refuses to have anything to do with fruits. Except apple, but then she doesn't realize she is having it as we disguise it within idlis, dosas and pancakes.

In my quest for simple baking recipes, I stumbled upon a divine little dessert - the lemon bar. Or as I eventually ended up making it, the lemon cake with shortbread. The first time turned out to be too tangy, too sweet, oh too much lemony. This was for these reasons: the shortbread dough was lesser than anticipated, so the filling overwhelmed the edges, instead of sitting comfortably within the shortbread; the lemon juice was a tad too much and the sugar a tad too less. So yesterday I tried to prepare it again. It turned out beautifully. Here are the measures:

For the shortbread:

1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar (powdered)
1/2 cup butter (at room temperature)
 A pinch of salt

Making the shortbread dough is key here because the filling is fairly simple to prepare. Into a bowl, add the butter and sugar. Use an electric beater to mix them till soft and creamy. In a small bowl, mix the flour and salt. Add the flour mix into the first bowl and beat it again. Be assured, the mix is supposed to look like bread crumbs and not like a proper dough. Take a baking pan and pour this mix into it. With your hands, spread it evenly across the pan. Press down with your palm so it is a compact mix now.
Preheat the  oven to 375 degree C for 5 minutes. Place the shortbread pan in the oven and bake for 15 minutes or until the shortbread begins to become golden brown at the edges. Remove from oven and let it cool for about 20 minutes.

While the shortbread cools, get about preparing the filling.

For the filling:

1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 tablespoon lemon zest
3 tablespoon all purpose flour

Take a large bowl. Add the granulated sugar and beat the 2 eggs into it till it becomes soft and creamy. Add the lemon juice and lemon zest into the mix. (Before removing the zest, clean the lemons well. Make sure that the rind of the lemons are a clear yellow without any blemishes. Remove the zest from the lemons before squeezing their juice.) Beat them well. Then fold in the flour.

Take the shortbread pan, pour in the filling and place it back in the oven. Let it bake for 15-18 minutes or until the filling has firmed. Take it out and let it cool for about 15-20 minutes. Once cooled, place it on a plate and cut in. Yumm...

Enjoy!

We begin da' baking...

Joy and I, both of us, love watching cookery shows. If we are not sitting down to watch anything specific on the telly, we will settle for a good cookery show. While we were often enthusiastic about experimenting with savoury dishes, the desserts intimidated us. Finally, Masterchef Australia broke us and as 2012 hit midway, we bought a small oven. And thus our ambitious efforts were born. We started off with a simple sponge cake - the first four tries of our oven was to make this sponge cake. The first time we made it, it got too fluffy and collapsed in on itself - though, to be honest, it was yummy. The second time, it didn't fluff up at all, though again, it was quite delicious. It was like eating a softer biscuit. Of course, we trawled the internet for each cake's postmortem. The first time we had beaten the eggs and flour too excessively. The second time the flour was a little more than necessary and the eggs were beaten a little too less. The next two efforts were better overall, however, they weren't something that we would have loved to serve up for friends.

Following these disappointments, we were dejected and there followed a lull in our baking endeavours. We would take turns to look at the oven wistfully a few times a day. Gathering up our spirits took a while. A few weeks later, we planned an alternative approach. We said, "well maybe not the cake, how about trying for something smaller, a cupcake recipe perhaps?" Very tentatively, we made a plain cupcake. We took a bite off the first one, chewed it and our eyes and taste buds lit up. It was GOOD. Our eyes twinkled and we could hear each other think "We should make this more often" before it was articulated aloud. Then, we laughed. And then, we spent the next couple of days wading through the entire batch with a song in our hearts. Hahahaha I exaggerate, of course. The days didn't go down like that. In hindsight, that cupcake gets us an A+ for simply trying it. Otherwise, I might have spent forever sending wistful looks at the oven.

Here, then, was the genesis for our weekend cupcake capers.

We often made little variations in fillings and choice of flours. I am still too intimidated to make any bold changes.

I will pen down these simple recipes for cupcakes and other desserts that we have tried so far and we plan to prepare next.

It is then...

In the middle of a quiet afternoon 
or in the sleepy corners of the night – 
it is then that it hits. 
It is then that it hurts. 
The loneliness. 
The hoodless-ness. 
The ties that bind 
surely are most slack then. 
Where are they 
when the heart stretches and stretches 
and yet finds that that which fills it 
is not the intangible belongingness; 
it is the more the tangible emptiness. 

Emptiness. 
Pervasive emptiness. 
The flaccidness of the empty corners of the heart. 
Kinfolk were never kin, you see. 
Shattered dreams. 
Uprooted to a distance, 
the short thread of dreams 
hardly withstood the pull and push and pinch. 
Loneliness of hearth. 
Loneliness of frailty. 
Begets loneliness of kinlessness. 
Wandering heart forever. 
Anchored in bravado. 
Moored in the gloating of meaningless triumphs. 
The pull of façade did unmoor it. 

Wandering heart. 
Pining heart. 
Seeking heart. 
Painful beyond measure. 
Thus did the heart grow. 
Thus did the heart shrink. 
And yet the emptiness loomed. 
Cynical heart. 
Questioning heart. 
Tallied up with chary mind. 
A moat. 
More like a swamp. 
The emptiness turned jellysludge. 
Trapping. 
Mocking. 
Laughing. 
Loss. 
Utter loss. 
Pervasive loss. 

A quick silver flash of fulfilled life. 
Washed away in the tide ever rising. 
Mourning heart. 
Wasting heart. 
The beats vary. 
Dunn-dunn-dunn. 
And then that’s all. 
Swamp conquering. 
Failing heart. 
Clutching heart. 
Fate beckons still. 
Quickening beats. 
Tired beats. 
Pleading beats. 
Another chance. 
Life is for once. 
Live it or fail it. 
Failing, falling.  
The falls are near. 
Drowning. 
Gasping beats. 
Final stand. 
Feeble. 
Failed.