Snowy White Coconut cake

Its a white Christmas here in Washington DC! We are here to celebrate the holidays with our friends and this cake is a reflection of our snowy white environ! Though the cake has a wintry appearance, its inspiration is quite tropical. Its inspired by one of my favorite cocktails, the Pina Colada. So it has coconut, pineapple and rum!

Back in the summer I had tried this delicious raspberry and buttermilk cake recipe from Gourmet. I used this recipe as the base for the coconut cake, substituting the buttermilk with coconut milk and the raspberries with pineapple. I also drizzled the cake with a liberal dose of rum, slathered it with a cream cheese frosting and topped it with some sweetened coconut flakes. Its a fittingly decadent treat for Christmas :).

Before I sign off with the recipe, I wanted to point out that I have signed up for a recipe marathon on one of my favorite blogs, One Hot Stove. So this is the first of my seven posts starting from the 25th to the 31st of this month! I have never blogged daily before and I am quite excited.

Merry Christmas to you all, I will be back tomorrow with another recipe from our Christmas dinner!

Ingredients for the cake:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 stick unsalted butter, softened
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 large egg
1/2 cup well-shaken coconut milk (I used the lite and unsweetened version)
1 cup canned/fresh pineapple (about 5 oz)

2 tablespoons of rum (or more as desired)

For the frosting:
1 cup reduced fat cream cheese
4 tablespoons coconut milk
3 tablespoons powdered sugar (more if you prefer it sweeter)
1 cup sweetened coconut flakes

- Preheat oven to 400°F with rack in middle. Butter and flour a 9-inch round cake pan.

- Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
- Beat butter and 2/3 cup sugar with an electric mixer at medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, about 2 minutes, then beat in vanilla. Add egg and beat well.
- At low speed, mix in flour mixture in 3 batches, alternating with buttermilk, beginning and ending with flour, and mixing until just combined.
- Spoon batter into cake pan, smoothing top. Scatter pineapple chunks evenly over top.
- Bake until cake is golden and a wooden pick inserted into center comes out clean, 25 to 30 minutes. Cool in pan 10 minutes, then turn out onto a rack and cool to warm, 10 to 15 minutes more. Invert onto a plate and flip .

- Drizzle with a liberal amount of rum and cool completely.
- For the frosting beat cream cheese, coconut milk and powdered sugar till combined and fluffy.
- Slather it onto the cake top and sides and top off with sweetened coconut flakes.
- Enjoy :)

I am sending this as an entry to the Jingle Event hosted by the lovely Priyanka at her blog.

Dal & kale

Dal & kale came about by substituting the spinach from Dal & palak (spinach). Dal is one of my favorite comfort foods and the weather here is shouting out for comfort food right now. Its cold and grey most of the week and if that wasnt enough it rains almost every day. And I dont like rain. So some hot dal with rice was the perfect meal to curl up on the sofa with.

We also had a lot of kale from our CSA which happened to be a perfect (if not better) substitute for spinach in the Dal palak recipe. And this was extremely easy to put together. I cooked the dal and kale in a pressure cooker, seasoned it with spices and topped it off with some fried garlic. The end result was very satisfying with a bowl of white rice.

Ingredients:
1 cup tur dal
1 bunch of kale, chopped
1/2 onion, chopped

1 chopped tomato
1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder
1 teaspoon chilli powder
1/2 teaspoon garam masala powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon tamarind pulp

2-3 garlic cloves, sliced thin

- Cook the dal, kale and onion with enough water in the pressure cooker.
- Once cooked, add another cup of water or more if required to thin out the dal.
- Add all ingredients from tomato through the tamarind pulp.
- Mix well and boil for 3-4 mins. Taste and adjust spices/salt as required.
- Heat a teaspoon of oil and fry the garlic slices, add to the dal and serve hot!

Makes 4 main servings with rice.

Happy Cookies come to life!

Ever since I first came across the Drop In and Decorate idea on Lydia's blog, I was really excited about baking and decorating all these cookies. I had set a goal of something between 150 and 200 cookies and at no point in time did I ever think of it as an impossible number. ...Till this Friday night when I actually started baking the cookies. I had never baked sugar cookies or any cookies for that matter from scratch. So when I saw all the ingredients laid out in front of me and the number I had to reach I was quite intimidated. But thanks to my wonderful husband and equally wonderful Kitchen Aid mixer, I ended up baking a whopping 170 cookies! And also made some icing for decorating the cookies.

For both the cookies and the icing I used Lydia's recipes from the Drop In & Decorate website.

For the colors I chose a 4-pack of pastels which seemed like a really good choice till we started decorating the cookies and they looked a lot like they were being made for a baby shower :) Oh well. I did have some red sparkling gel and sprinkles to add some holiday cheer! For the decorations I had some very enthusiastic friends over who did a wonderful job decorating all these cookies! Thank you ladies :)



We left the cookies to dry overnight and took them over to the Ronald McDonald House in Durham today who were very happy to receive them. It was a kind of dreary day here and it definitely brightened up when we carried these cheerful cookies there!

Thanks and many kudos to Lydia for coming up with this great idea. Also special thanks for the fail proof recipe for the sugar cookies and icing. They were so easy to follow especially for a novice baker like me!

Here is all of us.

Ten Minute Tacos

I would like to make a recommendation before embarking on my ten minute taco recipe. If you like tacos and you are around the Triangle area, you must try the Taqueria La Vaquita in Durham. Its a cute little shack with a huge plastic cow on the roof. There's very limited outside seating but the food is fresh, simple and really good! Their tacos have handmade tortillas, flavorful fillings and come topped with radishes, onions and cilantro. Very good!

Image above is from http://lavaquitanc.com

But with all the rain and cold weather we have here now, outdoor seating is a thing of the past and the Taqueria is currently out of reach. So I tried to satisfy taco cravings at home with this super fast black bean salad taco. I made the salad by combining all the taco filling ingredients together and dressing them with some lime juice and spices. I had some radishes and lettuce from our CSA this week which made a great addition to this salad. I didn't have any cilantro or jalapenos on hand but they would definitely be super in this too. For the taco shells, I used corn tortillas from Trade Joe's. Incidentally A found that microwaving these with a damp paper napkin makes them seem almost as fresh as the tacos at at La Vaquita. Almost :)

Ingredients:

1 14oz can of black beans, rinsed well and drained
1 avocado
1 tomato
1/4 onion
2 small radishes
1 cup, chopped lettuce
1/2 teaspoon cayenne
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon cumin powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
juice of 1/2 lime

8 corn tortillas

- Chop the avocado, tomato, onions and radishes and combine with the black beans.
- Add the lime juice, salt and all the spices. Mix well, adjusting spices as per preference.
- Microwave the corn tortillas, covered with a moist paper napkin.
- Spoon the black bean salad filling on the taco shells and serve!

Makes 8 tacos.

Sweet potato and turnip soup

This post has been way overdue. I made this soup a few weeks earlier but then there was a busy Thanksgiving weekend and then an even busier week, which kept me away from blogging. In the week before last, we got these gorgeous turnips and fingerling sweet potatoes from Coon Rock Farms. I don't have much experience cooking either of these so wasn't too sure of what to make out of them. So I decided to take a page out of my Mum's recipe book. She makes this soup which we call the Mommy B soup (that has to be another post). It involves cooking any combination of vegetables with garlic and peppercorns in the pressure cooker and then pureeing them. It can't get any simpler! This is exactly what I did with these turnips and sweet potatoes. Except I was feeling a bit adventurous and decided to garnish it with some sweet and spicy walnuts. Here goes!

Ingredients:

1 large turnip, peeled and chopped into chunks

4-6 fingerling sweet potatoes or 1 large, also peeled and chopped

1/2 onion, halved

1 large garlic clove

7 peppercorns

1 teaspoon maple syrup or sugar

- Combine all the vegetables along with garlic and peppercorns in a pressure cooker.

- Cover with just enough water and pressure cook for 10 mins.

- After the mixture is cool enough, blend into a puree.

- Put back on heat and add salt and maple syrup or sugar (this is only to counter the slight bitterness of the turnip).

- Top with some walnuts if desired and serve hot!

Sweet and Spicy Walnuts:

Handful walnuts

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon sugar

1/2 teaspoon cayenne powder

- Heat a pan and add walnuts.

- When walnuts are heated through, add the salt, sugar and cayenne.

- Get the pan off the heat and mix well. (At this point its important to turn the heat off, if not there will be spicy cayenne smoke. I write from experience :))

Kheema Puffs

We had a really fun Thanksgiving weekend. Lots of great food and great company. I really wanted to make a post last week about all the great food but it got so busy that we simply forgot to take pictures and before we knew it there was none of it left! However, A did manage to get a picture of these Kheema (ground meat) puffs before they were gone :).

The inspiration for this enticing appetizer comes from my Mum who makes delicious Kheema patties. This involves a delicious mixture (ground goat with lots of spice) in a mashed potato cover which is then shallow fried. Sinful but totally worth it. It is also quite labor intensive, especially the part of stuffing the mince into the potato covers. I took an easier route by using puff pastry sheets, filling little pockets of these with the kheema mixture and baking them. The result was quite good :).

During this long weekend especially with all the cooking and eating, I couldn't help thinking about this article I read a couple of weeks back in The New Yorker. It's a story about this amazing woman (The Good Cook) in North Korea who survived the famine in the 1990s by cooking anything edible, including grass and weeds she collected. Its a story of unimaginable hardship for something as simple as a basic meal. It made me feel eternally grateful for everything we have.

Ingredients:

Marinade:

2 big garlic cloves, grated/minced

1" piece of ginger, grated/minced

3 tablespoons yogurt

1 and 1/2 teaspoons red chili powder

1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder

1 and 1/2 teaspoons garam masala

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 kilo mince goat/lamb meat (kheema)

3 cloves

7 peppercorns

1 bayleaf

1/2 cinnamon stick

2 medium sized onions, chopped

2 tomatoes, chopped

juice of half lemon

2 puff pastry sheets

- Combine all the ingredients for the marinade together with the ground meat and marinate atleast for an hour or preferably overnight.

- Heat a tablespoon of oil and add all the spices from cloves through cinnamon and fry for a minute or till fragrant.

- Add chopped onion and fry till golden brown.

- Add chopped tomatoes and fry for another 2-3 minutes.

- Add the marinated ground meat mixture and mix well, stirring for another 2 minutes.

- Add a cup of water (add more if more gravy needed, for the puffs its preferable to have no gravy) and bring to a boil.

- Pressure cook till the meat is well cooked (10-15 minutes).

- Cook for another 5 minutes uncovered till the water dries up.

- Add salt if required and lemon juice.

- Let mixture cool down completely.

For making the puffs:

- Roll the puff pastry sheets to thin them out a bit.

- Cut into squares and spoon the filling onto them.

- Bake in a 350F oven for 20 minutes or till golden brown.

2 Puff pastry sheets make around 24 puffs. If there is leftover kheema, I am sure you will find a way to use it up :)

Rainbow chard and lentil pasta

A couple of weeks ago, a couple of our friends told us about Coon Rock CSA. CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) offers city dwellers an opportunity to get fresh produce from nearby farms. It's not only a great way to eat fresh seasonal organic vegetables and meat but also a great way to support local farms. The idea of getting a box of vegetables every week seemed a bit daunting at first but Coon Rock Farms makes it even more convenient and flexible. Instead of signing up for a weekly supply of vegetables, you can also create custom orders. Its really simple: join their mailing list, get a weekly list of the produce, mail them back with what you need and pick up from a location nearby!

We picked up our first custom CSA order last Thursday and we are quite excited! We have fingerling sweet potatoes, purple top turnips, rainbow swiss chard and some chorizo sausage. I have been trying to figure out ways and means of putting these to good use over the last couple of days and have come up with this pasta so far.

This pasta with chard and lentils is inspired from two different pasta dishes we had over the last couple of weeks. One was made by our friends who cooked us a wonderful Middle Eastern dinner last weekend. The pasta dish they made is a Damascus specialty and is somewhat like a pasta casserole with lentils. The second pasta dish was made by another of our friends for dinner this weekend and had swiss chard with fettuccine and walnuts. I loved both and decided to combine the lentils and chard into one dish. I tried to refrain from using any strong herbs/spices in this dish so that the fresh chard would be the star.

Ingredients

One medium onion, chopped

3-4 garlic cloves, chopped

Bunch of swiss/rainbow chard

1 cup cooked lentils

2 cups of fusilli/penne pasta

juice and lemon zest of half a lemon

lots of fresh ground pepper

2 tablespoons parmesan cheese

- Heat a tablespoon of olive oil and add chopped garlic.

- Stir garlic for a couple of minutes and then add the chopped onion.

- When the onion is soft, add the chopped chard and saute well.

- Once the chard wilts, add the cooked lentils (I boiled them in water)

- Add lemon juice, zest, salt and pepper.

- Add the cooked pasta and mix well. Cook for a couple of minutes to get all the flavors mixed in.

- Sprinkle with parmesan cheese and serve.