101 alternative flours | gluten free cake | ragi cake with carrot and orange

Recently I baked a cake for the birthday of a very sweet gentleman I had just met. It was really funny the way I got to know that it was his birthday that day, but once the birthday was revealed we had to do something. And what better to do than baking a cake?

It was last weekend when we were at Tijara Organic Farm, among fresh produce and lovely birds. We spent the weekend eating local cuisine cooked with the farm fresh organic ingredients while shooting pictures of the beautiful property lovingly constructed by Sneh Yadav and Tara Rao.

And it was Tara's birthday that day. I decided to bake a cake that resonated with the principles Tijara Organic Farm lives by.

We went through what was there in the pantry and decided to do a ragi cake with orange and carrots, everything fresh from the farm, ragi flour had come from the organic farmers in Rajasthan. Then I realised I had to work without an oven to bake the cake.

I used to bake a cake in pressure cooker long back, but the pressure cooker available there was too small. We did a lot of improvisations and decided to bake the cake in a ceramic pot with lid. For such baking one has to fill up the base pot with sand and then heat it up on gas stove, then the cake tin is kept over the sand and covered. In case of pressure cooker the lid is fixed without the pressure vent.

Here is how we placed the cake (in a borosil dish) inside the ceramic dish for baking.

Also, while mixing the cake batter that day I kept adding the ingredients by approximate spoonfuls and Sneh asked me whether I do this way always. I actually used to bake so much cakes earlier that the eyeballing method never failed me. I started weighing the ingredients only after I started writing the recipes for you all to follow. My instagram and facebook shares of the birthday cake brought in some requests for the recipe of this gluten free ragi cake.

So after coming back home, I made the cake again, weighing everything so the recipe can be shared. This time I topped the cake with loads of chopped walnuts, the way we like it.

ingredients
(makes 16 squares)

220 gm ragi flour (finger millet flour)
110 gm ghee (melted, at room temperature, or use soft white butter)
100 gm unrefined sugar
220 gm grated carrots
3 large eggs
1.5 tsp baking powder
zest of 2 oranges (I used local kinnows)
juice of one orange
pinch of salt
80-100 gm walnuts or a handful

procedure 

Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl. The ragi flour, the baking powder and the salt and sieve together or just whisk to mix well.

Grind the unrefined sugar with orange zest in coffee grinder or mixie jar. Now mix the wet ingredients. Add the eggs, ghee and sugar orange zest mix together and whisk till creamy and smooth.

Pour the wet mix to the dry ingredients bowl. Mix lightly while adding the grated carrots. The mixture will be quite thick and resist mixing. Add orange juice to ease out the batter but do not make it flowing consistency. It should be barely flowing.

Now grease a 7"X7" baking pan and pour the batter into it. Sprinkle the chopped walnuts and press using your fingers lightly to make them embed nicely.

Bake at preheated oven at 180C for 40 minutes or till the center becomes firm, check with a skewer if in doubt.

Cool and cut the cake in squares.

This ragi orange and carrot cake fills your home with a pleasant aroma while it is baking. It is difficult to resist but the wait to cool down the cake will be well worth.

This cake has a delicate crumb just like the ragi ginger honey cake I have shared few years ago. If you cut the cake when still warm it crumbs a lot but when you cut in after cooling down it behaves well.

Ragi orange carrot cake makes nice breakfast cake with milk and may be a banana or eggs. If you are baking it for a birthday you can dress it up with some orange chocolate ganache. Or may be some orange buttercream.

The birthday boy (Tara Rao) for whom I baked the cake that day is diabetic and I had baked the cake with lesser sugar. The ragi, ghee and carrots in the cake ensure the cake remains low glycemic even if it is lightly sweetened with sugar. So diabetics can have a decent sized serving of this cake too. 

I know many diabetics who wouldn't eat any desserts because they are denied and whenever they find a change they binge upon mithais and unhealthy cakes from the market. Baking such cakes for them more sense than making them crave for sugary stuff and giving in to temptations.

Tara messaged me that he loved the cake and finished the leftovers with his coffee the next day. Sneh said this was the best cake she has had. I know it was a sweet complement from a friend but Arvind loves it too.

I myself liked it when I tasted a small piece but personally I wouldn't be able to have it for breakfast like Arvind. I like my savoury breakfasts better.

This ragi orange carrot cake will be useful for those who want gluten free options and of course for those who want to watch their weight while enjoying a few pieces of cake sometimes. Do let me know if you try this cake recipe. It always feels great to hear feedback from you all.

I will share a pressure cooker cake soon. I know some of you were waiting for that too but I couldn't manage to do that. A pressure cooker cake needs either a short video or a step by step pictures to understand the process better.

Please not this cake doesn't behave like any white flour cakes but the taste is great. The texture is also very different from regular flour cakes but great nonetheless. Take care of reheating the cake slices before serving (in microwave, or any other method that you may apply) as the cake tastes best when warm. The cakes slices better when cold but tastes good when warm. Small inconveniences that can be overcome when you bake gluten free cakes. This ragi orange carrot cake won't disappoint you trust me. 

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fruit juice Rasgulla and fruit cocktail Rasgulla | Indian desserts made healthy | no added sugar Rasgulla recipe

Rasgulla or Roshogolla is a cottage cheese dumpling soaked in light sugar syrup. It is one of the healthiest Indian desserts and the good thing with this dessert is that the spongy spherical balls of cottage cheese can be squeezed to remove most of the sugar from it and it becomes a low sugar dessert. I have never seen anyone who doesn't like Rasgulla, some people like it lightly sweetened and some like it in thick sugar syrup, I prefer fruity flavour in Rasgulla.

The making of Rasgulla is a little tricky but very simple once you understand how it works. Freshly made cottage cheese is blended very smooth till it becomes cohesive and makes smooth balls when rolled in one's palms. These smooth cottage cheese balls are then poached in a very light sugar syrup till they fluff up and get almost tripled in size. Normally these Rasgullas are served chilled along with some of the poaching syrup without any other flavouring added. But some add a hint of Cardamom or Saffron to the syrup to make it mildly flavoured.

The most favourite way that I like Rasgulla is either the Orange juice rasgulla or on Pomegranate juice. This Anar (pomegranate) Rasgulla makes everyone happy.

The fruity version called Komola bhog or Orange Rasgulla is also made by commercial sweet makers but that is mostly a synthetically flavoured version, although I have made and shared a naturally Orange flavoured Rasgulla earlier. I keep making Rasgullas with fruit flavours and in a few more ways and have always got very good feedback from whoever eats them. One of the most stunning recipe is this fruit cocktail Rasgulla that makes a very nice healthy dessert for family get-togethers.

One thing to note when making Rasgulla with fruit juices is that the Rasgulla which is basically spongy cheese balls, take on the colour of the fruit juice and most fruit juices are a mix of different types of plant pigments. So the colour the Rasgulla soaks may not be the same colour of the juice. It works like Chromatography, only specific coloured pigments are absorbed by different proteins and starches, so don't be bothered if your Rasgulla in pomegranate juice looks brown after an hour of soaking in it. It is perfectly fine. Make a point to use the fruit juice rasgullas within a couple of hours of making and keep them chilled.

Now let's see what is the procedure.

The detailed procedure of making paneer is here, the loose version of the same cheese is called Chhena which is basically cottage cheese. I have shared a basic rasgulla recipe here and have discussed in detail how to make chhenna (cottage cheese) for rasgulla.

To repeat, I must say the raw (I use pasteurized) milk is heated till 90 degree C, then lime juice is added slowly till you see curdled milk solids and clear whey. Strain the cottage cheese, rinse it under cold water, squeeze it and then knead to make a smooth dough. Then make small balls for rasgulla, keeping in mind they double in size and get even bigger depending on milk and cheese quality.

Now make a weak sugar syrup (50-100 gm sugar on 700 ml water) or plain water (as I do), sufficient enough to let the Rasgullas poach freely, boil it in a pressure cooker or a deep pan or stock pot, tip in all the Rasgulla balls one by one and simmer them till you see them doubled.

I generally cover the cooker with lid and pressure cook them shortly (till the first whistle) to ensure the Rasgullas fluff up to maximum.

You can see the Rasgullas have become big and the poaching liquid gets cloudy. This is because of the Casein (milk protein) which leaks into the poaching liquid. If the poaching liquid has enough sugar for your liking you can chill it along with it, else add some sugar or date syrup or even honey and dissolve, then chill to serve as desired.

But if you are like me, you would squeeze the ready Rasgullas lightly and dunk them directly in fruit juice of your choice.

Like in this fruit cocktail Rasgulla I used pomegranate juice infused with a little Thai basil and some cut fruits. The result was spectacular and very mildly sweet that we love. You can add additional sweetener of your choice at any point after this.

For this Anar Rasgulla I sometimes use plum juice along with pomegranate arils to make it look ruby red. This one had wooed many people trust me.

The fruit cocktail gets mixed reviews because some people do not like one of the fruits or some people get suspicious of the Rasgulla getting a tad bit darker when served. Kids get a lesson on Chromatography if they are in doubt.

Wouldn't it be a good way to teach them some science? And about natural plant pigments and how they behave, how beneficial they are for our body as antioxidants and anti-inflammatory agents too.

One can always replace cakes when a dessert like this is served for birthdays. Both of us hate the sickening dressed up birthday cakes and will grab any opportunity to make such display of desserts replace birthday cakes.

I know many people, mostly adults who love this idea of birthday special desserts. We can always make our kids learn better and condition them from the beginning. Or one can always have a conventional cake and then a few of these healthy desserts too. At least they start appreciating what is eventually good for them.

Kids make good choices if we provide them with options. If they grow up eating fondant covered neon coloured cakes they would never know there are better options.

Brings the best options home. Let you body and mind have the best of treats for celebrations as well as everyday treats.

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black, purple and red rice varieties of India | recipe of black sticky rice and coconut cream pudding with mango

We have such a tremendous variety of produce in India thanks to the geographical an climatic diversity through the length and breadth of the country. And I am one of those mad people who collect such produce from wherever we travel.

I often bring even fresh produce in my hand baggage but the suitcases are stuffed with varieties of rice, lentils and millets many a times. A few millet grains tumble out of one of my suitcases whenever I open it for the next travel, thanks to a torn packet once.

But I am also lucky to get many of these produce at the India International Trade fair stalls here in Delhi. I make it a point to go to the state stalls and buy as much as I can carry. And I can carry a lot trust me. In the trade fair grounds you have to carry whatever you buy, a classic shop till you drop situation. The black and purple rice from North East I always get from there.

I got many queries about rice varieties and their availability when I posted this picture last week on Facebook. Thankfully we have started getting these varieties in organic shops almost all around the country, sourcing them locally is the best bet though.

The white rice in the picture is a short grain aromatic variety called Kala namak in eastern UP, the same rice is called Gobindbhog in Bengal and probably Ambe Mohar in Maharashtra. The top right is black rice, bottom right is purple rice and bottom left is red rice from Tamilnadu. The kerala red rice looks a bit different.

Here I am sharing about the black and purple rice varieties from north east India. Both varieties are mostly available hand pounded as these are not industrially produced. The black variety is so rich in pigments that the taste is quite complex due to that. The concentration of anthocyanins in black rice is the highest found in food (higher than blueberries) and it is rich in essential amino acids too.

This is how one of my pigment rich meals looks like. Here I have served the purple sticky rice with beetroot tzatziki, boiled eggs and sauteed spinach with garlic and chillies. Both beets and spinach were homegrown in this meal that I shot 2 years ago.

Apart from such meals my favourite way of using these black and purple rice varieties is to make desserts with them. The rice gets nice and creamy when overcooked and combined really well with both milk (dairy) and coconut milk or cream. The black rice pudding made with coconut cream is the one I love the most. The rice lends a nutty and creamy flavour to the pudding that combines really well with mangoes.

Sometimes I add just enough coconut cream to make a thick setting pudding and sometimes I add more coconut cream to make it creamier to coat the fruit cubes.

Here is how the well set black rice pudding looks like, over a bed of cubed mangoes and some toasted coconut chips.

The creamier version looks like this. Moreish and indulgent, very delicious pudding that you can't resist. I make it without any added sugar and it has never disappointed me. The natural sweetness of the rice and coconut cream combines to make a heavenly dessert.

I even make this pudding with the white short grain rice pictured above, the inspiration of this dessert comes from Thai Mango sticky rice and I have been making several versions of it for so many years.

Black or purple sticky rice just makes it so much more value for each calorie consumed. I wouldn't tell you how many times I made this dessert this season. I tried it with all the mango varieties we could lay our hands on and it tasted great with each one of them.

This creamier version I served to my extended family when we all met this weekend and everyone loved it. I had made two more desserts and only one of them (rice kheer) had little sugar in it and my dad who is a diabetic lapped up the 'no added sugar desserts' happily.

The basic recipe remains like this Thai sticky rice with mangoes, the black or purple rice need about 3 times water to raw rice and I prefer it overcooked. If you keep the rice grains just cooked you might feel a slightly bitter aftertaste which disappears once you overcook them.

Once cooked, just stir in coconut cream (25%fat) and adjust thickness as you wish. For 1 cup cooked rice I usually add 200 ml coconut cream to get a set consistency (after refrigeration). For the creamier pudding I add 500 ml coconut cream to 1 cup cooked sticky rice and whisk well till uniformly mixed.

No sugar is required to sweeten it but you can add if you wish, just take care to preserve the natural sweetness of the rice and coconut cream in this dessert, you wont like sugar to hit your palate first in this case.

Try it without any sugar for the first time and see if you want it sweeter. Trust me you wont feel like having any added sugar in this dessert. May be the mango to sticky rice proportion can change if you want it to be more fruity and that is quite good too.

Thai sticky rice and mangoes gets a new lease with black sticky rice trust me.

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Mishti Doi recipe from scratch | a sweetened yogurt with caramelised milk flavour | Calcutta style Mishti Doi

I am so glad I started making yogurt once again. Dahi as we call yogurt, is an everyday thing and we were generating a lot of plastic cups apart from relying on a dahi that was not real.

Making dahi at home gave way to collecting the clotted cream from milk and processing it to make ghee too sometimes. But we consume full fat milk and yogurt everyday, the clotted cream (malai) is collected rarely so ghee making is not too frequent, I would like it more often as it gives fresh real buttermilk as a side product that I love.

I will share the ghee making process soon, because home made ghee is the best. Not that I don't buy any from the market.

When I posted the home made yogurt procedure some time ago many of you asked for a Mishti Doi recipe too. Mishti Doi is a popular sweetened (caramelised) yogurt from Bengal that has become popular all over the country.

To say the truth, I used to make Mishti Doi very frequently till my yogurt making habit suffered and I resorted to Mother Dairy. I had even posted a Mishto Doi recipe on Banaras ka Khana blog. I must tell you we both love the Mishti Doi from Mother Dairy and that was one reason I stopped making it.

But when many of you wanted a Mishti Doi recipe and  Prasad Np and Sushmita reminded me a few times to share it I had to make it again and click pictures, reason enough to share again. The older Mishti Doi recipe uses condensed milk and is way too sweet for me.

I made it twice with 2 slightly different methods and sharing both of them with my notes on taste and texture.

recipe of Mishti Doi with palm sugar 

ingredients 

1 liter milk (full fat 6-7%)
3 sachets of palm sugar (18 gm)
2 tbsp fresh yogurt for culture, preferably hanged

procedure...

Reduce milk over medium flame till it becomes 500 ml. Cool down till it becomes lukewarm to touch. About 45 C.

Add the palm sugar and the yogurt and whisk well till the milk gets frothy. Use a wire whisk to do this and whisk vigorously. This helps emulsify any fats that may clot at the surface when the yogurt is set.

Now strain and pour in the earthen pot or a ceramic or glass jar. Keep in a warm place for 4-5 hours or till set and smells like yogurt.

Slow reduction of milk naturally caramelizes the sugars in milk (lactose) making the colour brownish, in this recipe a little color is enhanced by the palm sugar too. I used very little palm sugar as we eat mild sweet desserts so the flavours of the palm sugar are not too prominent. This mishti doi is quite delicately flavoured and mild sweet.

The creaminess is lesser because of less fat content. The sweetness is mild and flavourful due to the palm sugar.

Thanks Sushmita for the Palm sugar you brought from Thailand, we are using it lovingly :-)

recipe of Mishti Doi with caramelized sugar 

ingredients...

1 liter full fat (6-7%) milk
3 tbsp sugar (45 gm)
3 tbsp fresh cream (45 ml)
2 tbsp thick yogurt for culture

procedure...

Reduce the milk by simmering it over medium flame till the volume becomes half. Cool till it becomes lukewarm to touch.

Meanwhile, caramelise the sugar. To do this, add 1 tbsp water to a flat base frying pan, add the sugar and place the pan over high heat. Keep rotating the pan so the sugar dissolves quickly over heat and starts getting brown at the edges. Keep rotating so the sugar doesn't burn at one spot, the sugar melts and gets browned within a minute or so, taking the consistency of honey. Now pour this into the cooling milk. Stir to dissolve.

Once the milk is lukewarm, add the cream and yogurt and whisk well till frothy. Strain and pour into desired pot or individual serving pots. Keep in a warm place till the yogurt is set.

This one will be more creamy and sweeter. When you use caramelised sugar to get the colour you can't do with light sweetening. This one was not too sweet but just like the Mother Dairy one.

Remember milk has some sugar too, which makes it sweeter when milk is reduced.

Too much sugar would prevent setting of the yogurt and will spoil the taste of yogurt. You wont want sugar to hit your palate first. 

You can add some saffron or cardamom while whisking in the yogurt culture, but I like it plain. We sometimes have it with toppings of nuts or dried fruits or even shredded aam papad.

Srikhand is another yogurt based dessert from Maharashtra which is made by whisking hung yogurt so much that it becomes creamy and smooth. Srikhand can be flavoured with fruits, spices like cardamom and saffron etc too to be served as a dessert, but plain sweetened Srikhand is eaten with poori too I got to know. I have never tried and I don't intent to either.

Mishti Doi always is a proper dessert, sometimes served with a rasgulla dipped into it. The first time I ate a rasgulla dipped in Mithti Doi was at the wedding of Arvind's Bengali friend in Banaras about 2 decades ago. We were not married back then and I remember I was being treated to all sorts of good mithais and mithai combinations because G's father was very fond of Arvind and me.

Making you eat more mithai indicates more love in our country :-) It is well worth gobbling all that mithai if it is good old Rasgulla and Mishti Doi served together. They make a great combination.

Try it sometime and let me know.

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palm fruit or Ice apple, one of the most exotic fruit | recipe of ice apple and mango creamy dessert fit for breakfast

Yes this would be the yummiest gluten free breakfast even if I don't tag it as the 101 gluten free breakfasts. After all it is made of fruits, milk and nuts. No added sugar for me please. Ice apples, ripe mangoes, cashew nuts and milk, these four ingredients can cast a spell in a bowl.

Ice apple or Palm fruits are in season right now and this peak of summer is the short span of time when they appear in markets of some Indian towns. Yes, these are seen only in some Indian towns although the Palm tree (Borassus flballifer) grows almost all over the country. Such a pity. But one of the reasons why it is not avaialble throughout the country could be the absence of the trained people who climb the Palm trees to pluck these and sell them after chopping off the hard shell these Ice apples are enclosed into.

Ice apples are the delicate jelly like endosperm of the Palm fruit (Borassus flabellifer) that is so flavourful one has to eat it to know what I mean. Not sweet like other fruits but mild cooling sweetness that quenches thirst like nothing else. The texture of this jelly like fruit feels almost watery when tender, and starts getting a bit chewy as it matures.

Ice apples are called Taal shash in Bengali, Nungu in Tamil, Thaati munjalu in Kannada Tad gola in Marathi and Tad phal in Hindi. I asked my father and he told that these fruits were once common in the north too but later these were considered fruits for the poor. What a pity. 

I spotted these Palm fruit sellers in Hyderabad 2 weeks ago and could not refrain myself from buying some every time I passed through this road. One has to choose the tender ones because the mature Ice apples are a bit chewy and less sweet. The tender Ice apples have a sweet watery fluid inside it's cavity and the flesh is jelly like.

One Palm fruit encloses three Ice apples (endosperm part of the fruit) inside and each one is enclosed in a thin soft peel. Nature's wonders.

These Palm fruit sellers are quite deft at chopping off the hard shell of the fruit and delicately sliding off the fruit (edible endosperm) into a poly bag. I wish they had leaf bowls to sell these.

But it is a delight to see these Palm fruit sellers do their job. I was wondering if they accidentally cut their own palm while handling such sharp knives on such hard fruits.

And to my shock I spotted this scar later when I was seeing the cell phone pictures I had clicked. This man had actually got a deep cut sometime in his early life may be.

This is how the husk looks like. This would make good manure after it decomposes.

I clicked these pictures while Nirupama, my friend in Hyderabad collected the Palm fruits in a poly bag. She was the one who asked the seller to give us the tender fruits.

We enjoyed the fruits once we reached Bhavana's place. Nirupama told that the creamy white and thin peel of the Ice apples is used to rub on skin to cure summer rashes, the prickly heat.

I asked a few more people if they cooked these Ice apples too or made salads or desserts with these but everyone said they eat them as is. In fact it is very difficult to save these fruits to cook something as everyone just loves eating them as soon as it arrives.

Later, on my way back to airport I asked the cab driver to stop for the 'Thaati munjalu' (telugu name for these) and he kept looking for them. Such a sweet fellow he stopped where a Palm fruit seller was sitting with a huge heap of these. He even asked him to cut only the tender fruits for me. And I got two dozen of these Ice apples packed into my handbag, though I feared these might be seized at the airport.
But thankfully, these are no arms :-)

Back home, both of us enjoyed the chilled Ice apples of Thaati munjalu to our heart's content. I shared a picture of facebook and friends came up with suggestions to have these with chilled milk. Intrigued, I searched the internet and found someone had blended the Ice apples with soaked cashew to make a payasam. I loved the idea as we both love cashew nuts a lot.

And there came our first Nungu payasam.

I made this one with soaked cashew nuts paste blended with reduced milk (evaporated milk) and added chopped tender Ice apples. This was heaven in a bowl when chilled.

Just a dozen soaked cashew nuts blended with a little milk, added to a cup of reduced milk and a cup of chopped Ice apples. I did not add any sugar and the flavours of ice apple in the natural sweetness of cashew and reduced milk was something we will keep craving till the next time we get Ice apples.

And the next day I added some chopped mangoes to the same mix to make Nungu Mango payasam, and had it chilled for breakfast. This is going to be one of the best breakfasts we ever had. We love fruits and we love milk, this combination of milk and fruits is going to be one of the most favourite thing we did.

Clicking pictures was difficult as I kept eating while I clicked and took just 3 pictures to document the recipe.

This Nungu Mango payasam has no such recipe again. A dozen soaked cashew nuts blended with little milk, added to a cup pf reduced evaporated) milk and then mixed with 3/4 cup of chopped Ice apples and 1 cup of chopped ripe mangoes. No added sugar and still so sweet and flavourful. 

No added sugar to kill the natural sweetness of these flavourful fruits.

And remember this dish can be served as a chilled dessert too, you might like to add just a hint of honey to it if you find it bland as per your 'dessert sense'. My dessert sense agrees with the natural sweetness of fruits.

So a larger serving of such a dessert for breakfast is a good idea for me.

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my column for Exotica magazine | a lime and lavender posset recipe served with lime and lavender butter cookies

I know I am terribly late in sharing about this column I am doing for Exotica magazine. Seeing my interest in unusual ingredients, exploring new recipes with them and also my column at Down to Earth, I was asked by Exotica to do an ingredient based recipe each month for the magazine. The ingredients that we are growing in the country are great quality most of the times but don't get their due respect as most of us are unaware about them.

The biggest shock of my life regarding this lack of awareness about ingredients was when I heard a very senior cardiologist say that flax seeds are imported and not grown in India. This was about 6 years ago and I decided something should be done to correct such a lack of awareness, a lot of us are actually forgetting what our older generations used to grow and eat.

Not only about the traditional and native ingredients, there are many fruits and herbs that were 'introduced' by the settlers all across India and made it's own, so much so that we don't even realise the potatoes, the chillies and even the mango was not native to India once. India being so varied in the terrains all across the country, anyway has a very rich flora and fauna, type of food cultivation and food habits so there is always something new to explore in the far away corners of the country. I am hoping to explore some such native and 'introduced' ingredients and foods through this column of mine at Exotica. Suggestions from you are also welcome, I learn every day interacting with all of you too.

The first ingredient to be highlighted was Lavender, a bright violet that we had once seen growing in Palampur and had experimented with the aromatic flowers a few times, I was developing a Lime and lavender butter cookie recipe for Mittal Teas back then and decided to pair those cookies with a nice refreshing posset. Read my piece (verbatim) that was published in March issue of Exotica.

Lime and Lavender: a fantastic pairing of flavours for a delicate dessert

A mention of lavender brings thoughts of calmness as it is known for inducing sleep and relaxing the nerves. As if Lavender has borrowed it’s colour from Mother Nature to carry on the same vibe through visual senses too. The violet-purple haze of Lavender fields looks heavenly, like connecting the dots with all its beauty of visual, aromatic and flavour profile, the gift of God to soothe the nerves and bring tranquility to the face of Earth.

Adding lime to the mild aromatic flavours of lavender makes the lavender energy zingier, ready to seduce anyone who takes a whiff. Enjoying a dessert made with these flavours would be a perfect foil to wrap a meal with loved ones.

Lavender grows in Himachal Pradesh and is available fairly easily in India now. Many farmers are growing exotic flowers in the foothills of Himalayas to cater to domestic demand and Lavender is grown mostly for essential oils to be used in perfumery and aromatherapy. Recently I was talking to Mr. Vikram Mittal from Mittal Teas who uses Himachal grown Lavender for his tea blends and got to know this locally grown Lavender is as fragrant as imported blossoms. He gave me a fragrant sachet of Lavender to experiment with and I infused these beautiful aromatic blossoms in my tea that day quite predictably. Then I started thinking about some nibbles to be enjoyed with tea and promptly did a trial batch of Lime and Lavender cookies and the resultant flavours seduced everyone who tasted.

Later the same flavour bouquet was used in a simpler easy to cook posset with the same flavours to be served with the cookies. The Lime and Lavender cookies will be available very soon at all Mittal Tea outlets, the posset can be made within 10 minutes at home for a quick but delectable dessert.

Posset is a traditional British drink that was made by mixing hot milk with herbs and ale to curdle it and was served warm. Posset used to be a homemade potion for common colds and to induce good sleep in older days, lavender does absolute justice to that traditional way of having posset before bedtime.

Interestingly, Lady Macbeth used poisoned posset to knock out the guards outside the Duncan’s quarters in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It must have been a much desired drink to be used like this.

Later the posset became popular as an easy yet fancy set dessert to be served warm or chilled. This balmy lime and lavender set posset would definitely induce good sleep and would bring tranquility after a long day.

Ingredients

4-6 servings

Double cream 300 ml

Sugar 40 gm

Lime juice 20 ml

Dry lavender flowers 1 tbsp

Lime peel zested in large curls from one large lime

Method

Simmer the cream along with lavender, lime zest curls and sugar for about 6-7 minutes. Strain it and mix with the lime juice when it is still warm. If you want a creamier posset you can mix the cream with lime juice when completely cold, pour in serving glasses and refrigerate till set.

Adding the lime juice to cream mix while the cream is still warm results in a slightly grainy posset with a little bit of syrup in the bottom.

Serve with plain vanilla butter cookies or lime and lavender cookies to reinforce the flavours in this minimalist dessert. 

This posset is so easy to make you might like to combine rose or other aromatic flowers or herbs to make this, if lavender is not your favourite or not available to you.

April issue of Exotica is out too, will share the next story soon with all of you. Stay tuned please.

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white chocolate bars with mixed sun dried fruits and hint of mint : perfect gifting ideas

These white chocolate bars or bark if you prefer to call them like that, were made in the first week of February when we had planned a reunion of our classmates in Banaras. Now that both of us (Arvind and me) were classmates for our post grad, we were looking forward to it keenly. And since most of the other classmates follow my food and blog updates and keep nudging me teasingly to make them taste any of those, I decided to carry some edible gifts for all of them. I made a few fruit jams and marmalade, some cookies and these white chocolate bars with sun dried assorted fruits.

Now there is nothing technical involved in making chocolate bars, or very little technicality to be honest, one can always get a good quality bar or pellets of any chocolate, melt it over double boiler or in microwave and set it again along with whatever one likes. Long ago I used to make white chocolate with a prominent minty taste, just because I did not like white chocolate and someone had gifted me a kilo of Callibout white chocolate couverture pellets. That mint infused white chocolate bark had changed my perception towards white chocolate as I made about 3-4 batches of the same till the chocolate lasted.

The idea of bringing colors to a white chocolate bar was there on my mind for quite long and I once tried such bars with mixed nuts and some prunes and cranberries from Del Monte.  Yes I had started stocking white chocolate couverture after my tryst with the minty white. But it so happened that last year I sun dried so many fruits that I broke all my previous records of doing so. To make it clear I do not follow actual 'sun' drying procedure always but use low temperature oven dehydrating method mostly or a mix of the two processes to make the sun drying faster and better.

If you sun dry any fruit or tomatoes in the sun it may take days to completely dehydrate, so I just slide a semi sun dried fruit laden tray into the oven at 80 C or so and let it dehydrate more for an hour, repeat the process after 3-4 hours again and the method works well for me

Here is the strawberries I dehydrated last year when I had bought too much from the outskirts of Dehradun while traveling there, I had no option to just dehydrate them. I am not regretting one bit.

These perfectly chewy slivers of strawberries get so intense on flavours that you would feel like dehydrating more whenever you get a chance. The ones you get in stores is candied or 'sun dried and coated with glucose syrup' strawberries FYI. Better to make your own if you can.

I even dehydrated peaches last year and those have been so good for snacking..

These were peaches from Mukteshwar, brought from my Te Aroha visits where I am currently working on the menu and training the kitchen team. These peaches had very nice sweet and sour taste and sun drying converted them into perfect bites of fruity indulgence.

I dehydrated black grapes and apples too just to see how different the taste is from the glucose syrup coated ones. I was right in my assumption they would be better and will be rightly sweet and intensely flavoured. For these white chocolate bars I dug out all these jars of sun dried fruits and chopped them up.

ingredients...

good quality white chocolate bar or pellets ( I used Callebout white couverture pellets) 1 kilo
sun dried strawberries 100 gms
sun dried apples 200 gms
sun dried black grapes 100 gms
OR a mix of any colourful sun dried fruits 400 gms
sun dried mint leaves or powder 10 gm or to taste

You can always use sun dried fruits from brands like FabIndia or Del Monte or others.
And if you are making bigger batch of this you can follow the procedure of melting the chocolate in two batches. The way I did as I made double this recipe.

procedure..

Melt chocolate in a double boiler.
To make a double boiler contraption in home kitchen you can take a saucepan or stockpot (pateela) and a deep bowl that fits the rim of the stockpot. Fill the stockpot half with water and let it come to boil. Place the deep mixing bowl over the boiling water stockpot and place the chocolate in the bowl to melt. Stir a few times to see if it is melting evenly.

In the mean time line a baking tray with silpat. I used 2 baking trays of 9"X11" size.You can use any convenient size according to the thickness you want in these bars.

Chop all the dried fruits and half the mint crushed and mix with the white chocolate and incorporate everything together.

Pour the melted mix onto the silpat lined baking trays, sprinkle the rest of the mint leaves over it and press a bit. Let the mixture cool completely before cutting bars with a sharp knife.

These jewel studded bars of white chocolate will be loved by everyone who tastes them. I am planning to make them again as Arvind was cribbing he didn't get to taste last time.

 Never use chocolate compound to make such bars because chocolate compound has trans fats, all the cocoa butter in real chocolate gets replaced with trans fats when they process it to make the compound. Choose the best quality for your family, it will be great in taste and good for health too.

No extra sugar is added to these white chocolate bars, the sweetness of assorted fruits and the couverture is great together and a small bar of this treat will not hamper any health goals you are working towards.

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2 desserts using fresh water chestnuts : using seasonal produce to make diwali desserts , a panna cotta and a chocolate pot de creme recipe with fresh water chestnuts

Diwali is a time when the winter vegetables and fruits are already in the markets and many of them are here just for a couple of months. Water chestnuts are one of those seasonal produce that stay for a couple of months only around diwali season. Most people in North India use water chestnuts during Navratri fasting, in our home we keep eating them all through the season and always get a huge bagful of water chestnuts from our weekly market. We eat them raw or stir fried, or we boil them and add them to salads or eat as is.

A water chestnut and sweet potato salad with feta cheese and a mung sprouts, sweet corn and water chestnut salad keeps repeating in some or the other form at out our table. A really tasty halwa with fresh water chestnuts (actually a pudding) is a perennial favourite in my home.

Peeling them is quite time consuming but once you take care of that it will be a pleasure on the table. Using water chestnut to make a quick dessert for Diwali would be wonderful if you want to avoid the regular mithai and cake-donut rut. I know you are extremely wary of the store bought mithais (if you are reading this) in the festive season as all those are prepared quite early to meet demands on the D-day and is loaded with sugar, trans fats and artificial colours apart from the regular culprit white flour (maida) and others of that ilk. I also realise we don't usually have the luxury of making mithais at home for a festivals and buy the stuff just to get the feel of the festival.

Making some quick desserts that look good too will be quite sensible if you ask me. I am sharing 2 of those here, each one can be cooked within in 15 minutes flat and then chilled before serving.

Here is a fresh water chestnut panna cotta that I cooked some time back and sent the recipe as guest post for Pratibha's blog.

Water chestnut is used as a thickener in this recipe and a gelling agent too as it sets into a nice jelly when it is cooked and chilled. I use the same procedure with some tweaks to make a few more desserts as the gelling property of fresh water chestnut puree can be used to make pudding like desserts easily.

For this fresh water chestnut panna cotta I cooked 200 gm pureed fresh water chestnut puree along with 80 ml heavy cream and 50 gm sugar till the mixture starts thickening and big bubbles arise and burst spitting out hot air. Added 2 tsp rose water and mixed well, poured into serving glasses and chilled. That's it. .

Use the mature and hard water chestnuts for this recipe as those have more starch and gel well. If you have tender water chestnuts you can add 1-2 tsp of corn starch to enable the panna cotta to set well or a little gelatin if you wish.

Garnished with pistachio slivers and rose petals this dessert was an instant hit and has been repeated a few times already. You know Arvind loves desserts for dinner and he would eat 2-3 servings and not have anything else for dinner. This is the reason I need to make our desserts healthier but thankfully he likes them very lightly sweetened and loves all the healthy desserts I make. But to be honest I don't like anything sweet so I can barely finish one serving of this panna cotta, although I love the taste too.

The detailed recipe of this fresh water chestnut panna cotta is shared on Pratibha's blog here.

Another dessert of the same type I made was very different in taste and aromas. The dark beauty that treats the taste buds with some Tryptophan in dark chocolate along with whatever flavours you add to it.

This is a chocolate pot de creme that doesn't use cream. Since fresh water chestnut puree is a good gelling agent and makes the dessert creamier, I used only full fat milk for this pot de creme and it was quite rich tasting. I used good quality dark chocolate (Callebout 72%) and a dash of nutmeg and cherry brandy to get deeper flavours in this chocolate pot de creme but you can add rum and your choice of spices to get desired flavours too.

I sprinkled some seas salt crystals on top of the pot and it tasted really good.

Ingredients
(5 medium servings)
fresh water chestnut puree 1/2 cup
full fat milk 1 cup
2 tbsp brown sugar
dark chocolate chips (pellets) preferably 72% or at least 60% 3/4 cup or a bit more
dark rum or cherry brandy 2 tbsp (optional)
nutmeg powder a pinch
sea salt crystals 1 tsp use as required
hazelnut chopped for garnish

procedure 

Mix the water chestnut puree and milk in a saucepan along with the sugar and heat it on high flame. Keep whisking all the time till it starts bubbling.

Take the saucepan off the fire and add the chocolate pellets and whisk till a smooth creamy mixture is formed. Add the liquor and nutmeg and mix well.

Pour into serving glasses or bowls and chill before serving. Add the chopped nuts and sea salt at the time of serving.

 I have clicked these pictures while the chocolate pot de creme was still hot hence the sea salt crystals have sunk into the chocolate dessert. But it doesn't affect the taste at all.

Now I must tell that I am myself not too fond of chocolate and hot chocolate is the only form of chocolate that I like and crave for in winters. So this chocolate pot de creme was diluted the next day with more milk and reheated in microwave and was had like a real thick and creamy hot chocolate. One of those desserts that even I would like as my dinner sometimes, piping hot in a large mug to wrap my fingers around. The nights are getting nippy.

You would know how good this chocolate pot de creme tastes once you make it. And how easy it is to cook in a jiffy. Very low fat and mildly sweet so you can enjoy this treat even if you are on a diet.

Do let me know if you cook these desserts using fresh water chestnuts. There is a thing in the seasonal bounty that makes it bursting with taste and fresh water chestnuts get a refreshing nutty taste when cooked with butter, ghee or cream this way. I have just exploited that property of fresh water chestnuts to makes these Panna cotta and pot de creme.

Wishing you all a happy Diwali. It will be healthier too if you eat the right things. Please take care of what you put into your mouth in festive season too and trust me it is very much possible.

PS : I must add to tell you that this pot de creme was so delicious when diluted with milk, heated in the microwave and had like a hot chocolate. Deep dark creamy hot chocolate to enjoy at the end of the day when winter is just knocking at the door.
Also, please note that dark chocolate (72%) is not everyone's idea of a good chocolate. So if you are the milk chocolate person of like something between 55-60% dark chocolate, please go ahead and use your own favourite chocolate. I realised after serving it to someone who likes her chocolate really sweet and light.

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