Great news! I’ve finally put together a page with a list of all my favourite cookbooks after all the emails I keep getting for book recommendations. I’ve also added my notes and comments about the books and I hope that this proves useful to you.
Have a look, let me know what you think!
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It’s safe to say that Appelflappen, or apple fritters, are my newest obsession.
I’ve been making them everyday for the past three day, and sometimes more than just once a day. I’ve made so many different versions of them, I’m pretty sure I can fend any questions about them. Even about how it might be when you make them eggless (!). I looked up recipes for apple fritters, as the are made in different cultures – from making them with grated apples in Hungary to using specialised cast iron moulds for popover-like beignets called æbleskiver in Denmark – I settled on a recipe based on Dutch appleflapens, mostly because they seem simple enough and didn’t need special equipment.
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I made a Swiss Roll Cake today and I’m happy to report that with this cake ends my spate of kitchen mishaps that were a part and parcel of getting acquainted with my new gas oven. I have made over-baked cookies and under-baked cakes that I tried to salvage them in whatever way I could (vanilla ice cream topped with crumbled cookies, anyone?) From constantly looking up Celsius to Gas Mark conversions to being unable to gauge the colour of the crust through the tinted windows I’ve finally figured it all out. During this learning curve of mine, the only things that survived my unfamiliarity with the oven were the very resilient loaf cakes.
For the Swiss roll cake I used the recipe from David Lebovitz’s book Ready for Dessert. The only addition I made was adding a wee bit of melted butter in the end to keep the cake moist. Making this cake is a cinch if you’ve got electric beaters or muscle power (that’s how we made them at school). While a bunch of recipes for a Swiss roll cake call for using a special Swiss roll pan for making these, you really don’t need it. I remember one of the first cakes I baked was a Yule Log and the recipe called for a Swiss Roll pan – I went and bought a large pan thinking I’ll bake a nice, big log without realising that it wouldn’t fit in my oven! Back then I didn’t think I could use the Silpat alone (obviously, since I went and bought that pan), so I ended up using that pan placed at an angle in the oven with the oven door slightly ajar. Crazy times.
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I’ve been baking a lot lately: mostly making up for the times I couldn’t bake being stuck with a rickety oven and also in celebration of the fact that I can actually spread my arms out in the kitchen and not hit the wall.
I think it’s the cold that’s making me bake loaf cakes that are a spin on the ever-comforting pound cakes (like the chocolate-chestnut loaf I made). The kind I can bake and have sit around for a couple of days and that tastes even better the day after it’s made. I turned to the Rose Bakery cookbook for the pistachio cake recipe – I’d made the cake verbatim a few months ago because I’d enjoyed it so much while having breakfast with Noel when she was it town.
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Seems like whenever I make anything with chestnuts, a post on updates is in order. Here’s an update about a few recent and somewhat unrelated things.
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When I was back home in Bombay in January, I conducted a bunch of baking workshops. Readers from all over the country came over (yes, country! Delhi, Pune, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad) for my classes in a quaint little villa in Bandra. I was beyond amazed…I still am. It was a fun two weeks of getting things together, meeting folks whom I’ve known just from their email IDs and Twitter handles and talking non-stop about butter, flour and sugar.
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Aneesha Baig from NDTV’s Will Travel For Food popped by during one of the classes and then we went on to explore some of my favourite baking supply stores in Bombay. The show first aired over the weekend and I managed to get my hands on my segment. Here’s my 9 minutes of fame.
For those viewing this on email, cruise over to watch the “Purplefoodie on NDTV” Video here.
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Arjun and I have moved into our new apartment in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. It’s cute, it’s cosy and I’ve been trying to make it our own over the past few weeks. What I like most is the fact that I have a huge kitchen (yes, this is considered huge by Paris standards), and an orange one at that with a proper oven! So of course, this means that all the kilos we’ve lost during the months that my oven was broken will now be regained. Here’s a peek into my kitchen. Landlord willing, I will have a magnet strip on the wall for my Wüsthofs.
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It’s been a while since I baked for myself, just myself. Not something meant for a dinner party, or something that a friend requested, or for a baking class. Something I baked at leisure, at my own pace: my alone time in my new kitchen, getting friendly with my new gas oven.
And it finally happened this last week – I felt the need to tinker with a pound cake recipe to the point it had no resemblance to one : a loaf cake made with chocolate and my favourite chestnut jam. This little experiment ended up being a success with a crispy crust and a tight, moist crumb. And the next day, I had a slice slathered in raspberry jam.
160g butter
200g caster sugar
1/2 vanilla bean, split and scraped
3 eggs
100g chestnut jam/ chestnut paste
180g flour (I used 120g flour and 60g chestnut flour)
60g cocoa powder, sifted
1tsp baking powder
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