Life As I Know It

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...

I have a slight obsession with Japan and all things Japanese. This fascination of mine has lead me to some very exclusive websites where I can read and watch mangas and animes to my heart’s content. It was on the comment section of one particular anime called ‘Food wars’ that we all got discussing how intricate the Japanese are with their desserts. It was from there that I learnt to get the smoothest slices of cheese cake. This person told me that if I follow the recipe I will not be eating a heavy dense cheesecake but a soft fluffy piece of cloud. The recipe might look intimidating but if you have a good playlist you shouldn’t feel too daunted. I will now pass on this wisdom to you. Litchee/Lytchee/Litchi – Are all the same. Ingredients: 100 gms litchi flesh finely chopped/minced (room temperature) 180 gms cream cheese (room temperature) 200 ml Fresh Cream (Frozen in the freezer for 3 hours then moved to the refrigerator 1 hour before...

Do you ever pretend you are a participant on Master Chef and you are in the bottom four so you end up in the round with surprise ingredients and you are supposed to take what you have and make a delicious dish with it? I do. I live in my head even on non-quarantine days but now I see scenarios playing in my head more often than before. Here’s what happened, Marley said he wanted to eat biscuit pudding. I said okay and left it at that. Then he asked for it again. A couple of days later my mom said she wanted post lunch dessert. I decided it was time I whipped up a dessert. I noticed we only had one pack of Marie biscuits and usually I use two packs to make this pudding. I realised if I used the regular recipe we’d all only be eating slivers of pudding instead of a nice chunky piece and we know that, that’s the only way to eat dessert. I set myself the task of not going out of my way to buy any ingredients for the pudding and make do with whatever was at home. Hence was born this wonderf...

It was my dad’s birthday in July and I wanted to make him something nice. My dad loves the colours green, pink and white in that order. My mom and I decided to plan our menu accordingly so we decided to have a strawberry dessert. It was supposed to be a layered dessert with the layers in the following order – strawberry cake, strawberry custard with strawberry slices, strawberry cake, strawberry whipped cream and garnished with strawberry slices. Except when I told Lulu of my ambitious project she reminded me that Strawberry season was over and told me to make a Trifle instead. That’s how this idea was born. I now had to come up with ‘green’ fruit options and other fruits that would go well with the said green fruit. Suddenly like magic the ingredients fell into place and I was ready to make the dessert. Ingredients: For Custard: 500ml milk 3tbsp custard powder 6-8 Tbsps of sugar For Whipped Cream: 200ml Fresh cream (Amul) 1Tsp Corn starch 6-8 Tbsp of powdered sugar 2-3 drops of Vanill...