Life As I Know It

  My favourite Indian dessert is homemade Gulab Jamun. My mother makes them for me every year on my birthday. I love the taste of deep-fried doughy balls soaked in cardamom and rose flavour infused sugar syrup. [Get your minds out of the gutter.] For the longest time I have only ever liked the Gulab Jamuns my mother makes, then one day, my mother in law came home from work and sat on the chair for 2 minutes before she looked at me and said let’s eat Gulab Jamun. Before I knew it, she was in the kitchen, getting the dough and syrup ready. Soon enough the Gulab Jamuns were ready and in the fridge. I didn’t express it but I was just waiting for dinner to be over to eat them Jamuns. When we finally sat to eat it, it was SO good. I texted my mother and said her uncontested Gulab Jamuns now had some serious competition. My mother laughed. As much as I love Gulab Jamuns I have never made them. I am petrified of deep-frying things. I have this deep-rooted fear of oil splashing back in my...

  As a child I loved lizards and thought they were exquisite and even cute. I thought they came home to play with me and so I wanted to hold them and play with them. You can read more about that here . As time went by and I grew older  and then one day, I noticed a lizard try to harm a baby lizard and since then I have been a little wary of them . I am now going to proceed to say something that is inappropriate and I fully understand that body shaming is wrong but I don’t know if you have noticed this, lizards in regions that are exceptionally hot tend to be fatter than lizards from regions with neutral weather/temperature for most part of the year. Yes? No? Okay! When I first visited Delhi it was in the early 90s during winter and I thought the city was beautiful and had a lovely time because the child me wasn’t traumatised by the length and breadth of a lizard. When I was a child, I was tiny but I’m not so small now but thanks to the quarantine I have increased in breadth an...

  What’s your favourite comfort food? I enjoy a variety of comfort foods – Rajma chawal, Ragada chawal, quinoa salad, watermelon and feta cheese, fruit cakes that are easy to bake. When I am feeling out of sorts or if my mind is on over drive with thoughts, I keep busy with things I know will yield good results. This Apple Cinnamon Cake is one such recipe that is not only easy to bake but is light on the stomach, easy to store and keeps for days, even months in the fridge and tastes better and better with time. I have tried baking cakes with butter but I find they become extremely dense and aren’t as light and moist as those when made with oil. Hence my preferred fat for cakes especially if I intend to eat it over days is – oil. You can choose any oil of your choice – coconut, sunflower, vegetable oil, olive oil etc… During winters I make fresh Apple sauce and pour it hot on Vanilla ice cream and eat it with some crackers. This combination has been my favourite so I tried to r...

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy, caught in a landslide, no escape from reality… this pretty much sums up the life of the privileged during this pandemic. Those of us who are home, staying safe and social distancing and at the same time enjoying the benefits of life as we were even otherwise are yet complaining about wanting to go out   when there are families that would rather stay home but have no other option but be physically present at their work place. Can’t go to the movies? No problem, watch latest releases across streaming platforms on the tv. Worked too hard and want to blow of steam? Binge watch. Basically, the quarantine has guaranteed us one thing, that is to enjoy watching movies in the confines and comfort of our homes. Here we may hoot to our hearts content, pause when we need a loo break, rewind a scene we want to re-watch, fast forward if the story is boring but my favourite is to go back and watch bits that I liked. When Bohemian Rhapsody ha...

My favourite cake is the Red Velvet cake. I like the colour, the texture, the salty-sweet-cream cheese frosting and that mild zing of flavours which alternate between cocoa, vanilla and citrusy. I am not a food blogger. I just have started blogging about food because the pandemic has invariably brought out the chef in me and I have started experimenting on a scale I would not otherwise have. I am usually satisfied with a small cake. It takes less time and less effort… that’s what I thought. Until I decided to make a layered cake. Same time and same amount of effort. After I was done, I realised that baking actually isn’t rocket science. It does take some patience, understanding of how ingredients combine and a bit of artistry to make it pretty. I compensate for my lack of artistry with imagination and creativity. I had set out to bake me a Red Velvet cake. The moment I realised that my birthday will also be during the lockdown I knew I’d have to go about fixing this wi...

Hello reader, this time I am back with a recipe post. In the previous recipe post – Vanilla sponge withbuttercream frosting I had mentioned my backup cake. Well, the back up was just as light and delightful as the genoise and it was bursting with mangoness. I had asked Marley to buy me half a dozen ripe mangoes that were ready to eat. I refrigerated them to chill completely before I transformed them into a delightful disk of cheesecake. I had previously made an Oreo cheesecake and Litchi Cheesecake in one I had used curd in the other fresh cream. I wanted to retain the primary flavour of mangoes and a hint of salty-cheesy flavour from the cream cheese. Therefore, I decided to completely skip any additives to add volume to the cake. I could have passed this cake as a completely natural cake if I had used a setting agent that wasn’t gelatine. Here’s what you need to make a mango cheesecake: Ø 160gms of biscuits (any, but after using digestive biscuits I found that t...