all kinds of coconut cake

After my failed almond bread (which was nicely recycled as French toast sticks, but I never got the chicken sandwich I really wanted) I decided to try something fun. I'd recently seen Coconut Bars from Elana's Pantry. There's a lot of coconut here so they should have been great.

They were just okay. They were not what I expected and I'm calling them cake because they seem softer than what I think of with bars.

Almond meal, shredded coconut, coconut milk and coconut oil where no problem for me to find. The coconut flour here is not as fine as American commercial coconut flour, but a few seconds in the mixer takes care of that. (Notice all the coconut products? That's why I've renamed it "all kinds of coconut" cake.) There's no stevia here, and I don't like it much anyway, so I just omitted it.

Maybe I over mixed the batter, but it was much runnier than I expected. As it baked, huge bubbles rose. After the specified thirty minutes I took it out of the oven and popped the bubbles. The batter was under baked so I put it back in the oven. After five minutes, though, I could see that the bottom was going to burn.

The dish was supposed to cool on the counter for thirty minutes and then go into the refrigerator until "chilled." So I trusted that maybe the mushiness would disappear after chilling for a little while. Several hours later I cut a little piece. Hmmm. Coconut. But something was missing from the flavor and the consistency wasn't quite right.

I let the dish sit in the refrigerator for a couple days, mocking me and my weekend of baking failures. This morning I took it out again and offered a piece to Muffin on a whim. She's had a cold, which has made her a picky eater, and I wasn't expecting her to even try it. She loved it. I cut her a piece and it's not the end of the world that she had coconut cake for breakfast. The consistency was much better after being refrigerated for a longer amount of time.

I like the coconut flavor a lot but something is still missing from the overall taste of the cake. I have two solutions to that. I'm going to try a batch with golden syrup instead of honey. It's not in the same universe of being healthy, but it has a nice toasted marshmallow flavor that I really like in some baked goods. I'm also going to try a batch with dark chocolate chunks mixed in. I need something to complement the coconut.

One long weekend, two baking projects to take back to the drawing board. 

failed almond quick bread

This afternoon I decided to turn off Pinterest and actually make something I'd pinned. I hadn't had a sandwich in several months so I chose almond quick bread. I make sweet quick breads all the time and I liked the idea of not having to turn on KitchenAid mixers or bread machines in order to get a loaf of bread that could be used for savory sandwiches.

I failed on so many levels. I couldn't find tapioca starch so I used corn starch, wondering if it would be the same thing. I don't know if that's what went wrong or if it's because I used the wrong size pan (my own fault for not paying attention) in an oven that is wildly inaccurate. Even though my pan was well-greased, the loaf stuck. It wasn't burned, just browned and dry. The loaf is too narrow to make the chicken sandwich I was hoping for (due to the wrong size pan). I snacked on some of the crusty bits I was able to free from the bottom of the pan and they were pretty tasty.

Either we'll have French toast sticks for breakfast this weekend or I have a nice new batch of breadcrumbs.

You can't win them all.

thanksgiving wrap-up -- cranberry breads!

Our internet was out most of the day on Wednesday so instead of telling you about the cranberry breads I planned to make, or telling you that I posted a Thanksgiving article at Gluten-Free Works, I spent the day making a This-Isn't-Really-How-Pilgrims-Dressed dress for Muffin:

So now I will give a summary of my Thanksgiving cooking: Yum.

We were invited to a potluck dinner with some friends and our contribution was rice and cranberry bread. I cheated a bit and had my housekeeper make a rice pilaf (from the Moosewood Restaurant cookbook) while I made the cranberry breads.

Earlier in the week I tried a cranberry apricot nut cake from Anja's Food 4 Thought. There's no flour in it and if you use unsugared dried fruit then it's sugar-free as well. I had to substitute some of the nuts and I used cranberries that I'd brought back from the United States with us last summer. Ocean Spray Craisins can be found here sometimes, but I didn't want the expense and the inconsistent supply chain to keep me from making cranberry bread at Thanksgiving so I've been saving them to use since September. Anja calls for a mix of pecan and hazelnuts, but I haven't seen hazelnuts here in months so I used all pecans -- which hadn't been around for a few weeks and miraculously arrived on the shelves last Sunday. I bought enough to get me through Christmas. You could fool around substituting different fruits and nuts. (I bought some amazing dates this week, too, that would be good.)

Muffin and I ate most of that cake, which was evidence enough that it would be a good Thanksgiving dish. I had chopped and pre-measured the fruits and nuts when I made the first loaf so on Thursday morning I could make a fresh loaf in less time.

For my second bread I went back and forth on whether I should add cranberries to either the Pamela's baking mix banana bread or zucchini bread recipes. I went with the banana bread. I know the recipe by heart so it was quick to make on Thursday morning. I made it as muffins to ensure it cooked evenly and to save time and mess from having to cut it up.

Muffin tossed all breads and muffins aside once she got her first taste of turkey. Last Thanksgiving she was too young for real food. This year she inhaled the turkey off my plate and took a few bites of mashed potatoes, rice pilaf, and broccoli as well. We thought giving her a turkey leg to play with would make a funny photograph and we were surprised to see her bite right into it. She is definitely a Thanksgiving eater.

flaxseed as an egg replacer

Maybe this is well-known to vegans and those with egg allergies, but it's news to me. I recently read on a package of flaxseed meal that it can be used as an egg replacement in some recipes. Here in a Hindu society, eggless recipes are a must. Alongside the regular Duncan Hines and Betty Crocker cakes mixes on the grocery store shelves, you'll see eggless varieties.

I tried the flaxseed replacement with a loaf of bread. A risky move, given the delicate balance of bread ingredients. For each egg I mixed 1 tablespoon of flaxseed meal with 3 tablespoons of water. I let it sit for a couple minutes to thicken up, then I added it to my bread at the time when I would have added the eggs. It worked! I never would have known there wasn't egg in the dough. I didn't notice any change in the taste or texture of the bread at all.

I think this could work well for a variety of baked goods. I'm surprised that news of this flaxseed replacement hasn't hit the bakeries here yet. Flaxseed is difficult to find, but I do see it occasionally in grocery stores. If more people knew about it, maybe there would be more flaxseed on the shelves.

double chocolate pomegranate cookies

I read this recipe at MADE recently and realized that pomegranates are in season here, too. With a few modifications to make the cookies gluten-free and to allow for local supplies, these cookies were a success in our house.

Here is the recipe as I modified it. If you live in the United States or another country were basic ingredients are easily found, or if by chance you stumbled upon this blog but you are not gluten-free, you can read the original recipe at MADE.

2 cups Pamela's Baking and Pancake Mix
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup butter (or half cup butter and half cup shortening, if shortening is available to you)
3/4 cup castor sugar (a finely ground white granulated sugar)
3/4 cup demerara sugar (a brown sugar substitute here that I really like -- it has more of a burnt sugar flavor and the large granules provide a nice texture)
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (I horde this stuff and buy it whenever I'm in an extract-selling country to bring back with me)

2 1/2 cups chocolate chips (or if you're like me and are unsatisfied with your local chocolate chip selection, chop up some chocolate bars; I chopped four 80-gram bars)
1 cup pomegranate arils, or seeds (you can slice a pomegranate in half and whack at it with a wooden spoon to get the arils out)

Do the standard cookie-backing stuff.

Preheat the oven to 350 F / 180 C.

In one bowl blend together the baking mix, cocoa powder, and salt.

In another bowl, cream the butter then add the sugars, eggs, and vanilla. Add the dry ingredients to the butter and sugar mixture. Then add the chocolate chips and pomegranate.

Drop by rounded teaspoonfuls onto a baking sheet. I like to line my sheets with parchment paper. Bake the cookies for 8 to 10 minutes then allow them to cool on a wire rack for as long as you can keep your family's paws off of them.

Yum.

If any play group moms are reading this, I froze half the dough and will be making a fresh batch for brunch on Friday.

There were a few shady moments were I wasn't certain these cookies would be completed. I didn't soften enough butter at first and when I grabbed my second box out of the fridge, I opened it up to find mold! I'd never even heard of mold on butter. Of course India could provide that experience for me. We had a small bit of table butter, which has salt in it, but I added it to my unsalted cooking butter in order to save Mike a nighttime walk to the local grocery, which probably wouldn't have had unsalted butter anyway. The cookies turned out not to be too salty, as I feared, but perfectly salted for the chocolate and pomegranate.

I was also dancing around on a cruddy floor. When I was pulling sugar out of the cupboard I was so relieved Muffin was distracted and not trying to help me that I didn't notice at first what distracted her. She'd dumped a box of loose-leaf tea onto the floor and was having fun walking on it in her bare feet. I have yet to get it all swept up. I am not having as much fun stepping on it in my bare feet.

Earlier in the day Muffin had a glue incident. The tea leaves were not spilled anywhere near the faint glue spot still on the floor.

I forgot about all of that when I started eating cookies.

I couldn't get a good photo of the cookies, but if this isn't a good endorsement, I don't know what is:

It's cookies like this that have encouraged me to join the Holiday Bootie Buster Challenge. I run to eat baked goods. At least these cookies have vitamins and antioxidants, right, due to the pomegranates? There's still time to sign up for HBBC. Come join me!

les premièrs macarons

Recently I wrote about my new obsession with macarons and how I was planning to battle the India humidity to make my first batch. I did battle the humidity and the little cookies came out much better than I expected.

Per the book Cecile Cannone's Macarons: Authentic French Cookie Recipes from the MacarOn Cafe I separated my egg whites two days before using them. Early in the morning on baking day, I took my egg whites and other ingredients out of the refrigerator to bring them up to room temperature. I also turned on the oven early and brought the dehumidifier into the kitchen to dry out the room as much as possible.

I had to dry out my almond meal before I started the real baking and that took about thirty minutes in the oven. After that things moved along much more smoothly than I expected. I used the Cuisinart food processor (nearly blowing a fuse but stopping when I could feel the electricity struggling) to grind the almond meal and confectioner's sugar (or icing sugar) into a fine, smooth powder. I had to use an electric handheld mixer rather than my KitchenAid stand mixer to beat the egg whites (because the KitchenAid did blow out a few weeks ago and I haven't been able to get it repaired yet) so it took a long time to get the egg whites and sugar to the stiff peaks they needed to be at but it eventually happened. And I did a little dance of joy because I was so relieved and happy to see them beat properly!

I carefully folded the egg whites with sugar into the almond meal with sugar to complete the batter -- yeah, lots of sugar. So far things had gone by the book but I actually had no idea if my batter consistency was correct. It seemed useable so I kept going.

Getting the batter into the piping sleeves was a tricky, sticky mess and who knows how much I wasted. I had a blocked nozzle once or twice with some almond meal clumps but for the most part the batter flowed just as it was supposed to. I made my little circles on my parchment-paper-lined baking sheet, let the cookies rest for a few minutes, then popped them into the oven.

It's the resting and cooking time that can be difficult. The mixing of stuff is all mechanics, but the resting and cooking is a total crapshoot. The cracked cookies and the ones without the nice little shelf on the bottom are the ones that either did not rest long enough, or rested too long, or were not cooked long enough, or were cooked too long, or the oven wasn't opened enough times to let out steam while they were baking, or they were removed from the tray and parchment too early, or too late. There are lots of factors to worry about.

Although my introductory photograph is purple, I did not use food coloring for this first attempt. The purple is the result of my fooling around with some new photo editing stuff. I wanted to see what the macarons looked like naked, so to speak.

They looked pretty good. Much better than I expected them too. They were shiny on top and not all of them cracked. The cracking is the result of too much moisture but there are a few tricks I can use to combat the moisture next time, especially since we are moving away from the rainy season.

Fresh out of the oven. My first tray, before I got the hang of making perfect circles.

The best macaron from the whole batch.

Lots of them cracked.

They tasted great. They are sweet, that's for sure. But they melted in our mouths just like they were supposed to. We ate most of them plain, but when we had some friends over for dinner I made sandwich cookies, some with chocolate frosting left over from birthday cupcakes a few days earlier and some with cherry preserves.

I'm game to keep trying. I have some colors and flavors in mind to play around with. I've purchased several macaron cookbooks lately and I love the colorful photos. I kind of want to make them just so I can take photos of them, too!

Note: I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you click on the book link and ultimately decide to buy it, I will receive a small amount of money.
All photos taken by me. 

pumpkin seeds

This was originally published on 3 November 2007. I updated it with our recent jack-o-lantern photo. I actually liked the pumpkin seeds from our Hyderabadi pumpkins better than seeds I've gotten from American pumpkins. They have a nice meaty inner seed.

If you carved a pumpkin this week, then you had a bunch of pumpkin seeds laying around afterward. I've always loved roasting them for a post-carving snack.

I wanted to say a little more than "spread on tray and put in oven" for this post, so I turned to Wikipedia for some pumpkin seed info. Pumpkin seeds are a good source of stuff that's good for us: iron, zinc, essential fatty acids, potassium, and magnesium. There's also new research showing that they are high in tryptophan. So when you're feeling jittery from eating all that trick-or-treating loot, down a handful of pumpkin seeds to help you relax.

There are various "favorite" ways for preparing pumpkin seeds. I separated mine from the pulp and rinsed them in a colander. Then I forgot about them and left them to dry overnight in the sink. The next morning I spread them on a foil-lined baking sheet and lightly salted them. I baked them at 350 for about 15 minutes. They were crispy and light brown on the outside and just a little chewy on the inside.

First I ate them by the handful while they were still warm from the oven. Later in the day I mixed some with sweetened dried cranberries for a sweet and salty snack. Then I topped a green salad with the last of them.

Why do I only do this once or twice a year? I only roast them when I've cut up a pumpkin for some reason. It's just not the same to buy them from the store. I like to get my hands in the pumpkin guts.

laddu

For Diwali this week, our housekeeper showed me how to make laddu, one of the traditional sweets. They're made with besan, which is lentil flour.

She started with 500 mL ghee, which is clarified butter. She heated it up on the stovetop until it was clear. Then she took small spoonfuls of the ghee and put it in a frying pan with a few spoonfuls of the besan, heating it all up together until it was all incorporated and the mixture was free of clumps. She did this for a long time, until she'd combined the ghee with about half of a kilogram (about one pound) of besan. It takes a while because you have to do such small amounts at once, in order to keep the besan from burning.

Then she put half of a kilogram of sugar in the food processor until it was very fine, and she stirred that into the besan-ghee mixture. She also added a few shakes of ground cardamom.

Once everything is mixed and is the right texture, you pick up small handfuls and form little balls. You can also add chopped nuts to the mixture and our housekeeper did half with cashews and half with pistachios. They sit in a cool room (we had to blast the air conditioner over the dining room table) until they've hardened up enough to not fall apart. Then they are eaten!

I liked them. They are heavy and sweet, but also quite filling because of the lentil flour so I tried to convince myself that one or two with a cup of coffee wasn't the worst treat in the world. Muffin enjoyed them as well.

According to our housekeeper, laddu are also given to women in labor to help ease the pain and they are also given the children who are deemed "too skinny."

These are easy to make, but I probably won't make them again until next Diwali because they are too sweet and heavy to enjoy on a regular basis. Next year Muffin will be old enough to get her hands in the dough and help shape the little balls.

Heating up the ghee.

Heating up the besan with ghee.

After the sugar and cardamom is added, shaping the dough into little balls.

A tray full of laddu.

More laddu pleeeeeeeeease!

dreaming of macarons

For some reason I've become obsessed with macarons. Not the coconut macaroons, the French macarons made from almond flour. I've only had them once in my life, in Paris, but I've decided that one of my goals by the end of the year is to perfect making macarons in India. India loves sugar and food coloring, which are part of the specialness of macarons. But once my supply of almond meal from the States is used up, I'll have to grind my own from almonds that are expensive here. There's also a bit of a humidity problem this time of year. And I may have to grind granulated sugar in order to make it "superfine," as many of my recipes call for. It's going to be tedious and messy and time-consuming -- but hopefully delicious -- and I will have to run many miles to combat all the sugar and butter I'll be test-tasting over the next few weeks.

Armed with Cecile Cannone's Macarons: Authentic French Cookie Recipes from the MacarOn Cafe, I'll be making my first attempt this weekend. I'll be separating the eggs tonight, as Cecile suggests, in order to bake on Saturday or Sunday.

Stay tuned!

Image from Ladies Day to Play, "Interview with Cecile Cannone."
Note: I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you click on the book link and ultimately decide to buy it, I will receive a small amount of money. That will go toward purchasing almonds, most likely.

gluten-free flours, grains, and legumes in india

This is more for my personal reference, but if it helps anyone else, that's great! I'm sure this is not a comprehensive list. I'm making additions and adjustments all the time as I learn about new flours and different names in different regions. I can't really guarantee ultimate gluten-freeness because you never know about cross-contamination and kitchen conditions, but I can say I've been living in Hyderabad for almost a year now and I've only had one gluten incident, and I know exactly where it came from so I can now avoid it.

Here's what I've been working on:

India to English
 amaranthus = amaranth
 bajri = millet
 besan = lentil
 chana = chickpea
 cholam = sorghum
 corn flour (sometimes “corn flour” is actually corn starch)
 corn meal
 dhokla, dhokra = blend of rice, urad dal, and chickpeas
 gram = chickpea
 jowar = sorghum
 kurakkan = millet
 kuttu = buckwheat
 moog dal = lentil
 mung dal = legume
 okhla = buckwheat
 ragi = millet
 rajgira = buckwheat
 rice flour
 soya = soy flour
 urad dal = legume

English to India
 amaranth = amaranthus
 buckwheat = kuttu, okhla, rajgira
 chickpea/lentil/legume = besan, chana, dal (moog, mung, urad), gram
 corn flour (sometimes “corn flour” is actually corn starch in India)
 corn meal
 millet = bajri, kurakken, ragi
 rice flour
 sorghum = cholam, jowar
 soy = soya
 blend of rice, dal, chickpeas = dhokla, dhokra

I have compiled this list through personal experience, discussions with bakers and cooks here, and with help from Cook's Thesaurus and the discussion boards at Celiac.com.