Spiced Persimmon Bread with Bourbon Dates and Walnuts & Weekly Menu Plan

Happy Monday !! How are you ? Around here, its been getting chillier even by the day. So the oven is on full time. well almost. and I have been baking and eating lots of breads, cookies and cakes. Also roasting a lot of root vegetables and loving it all. I am specially in love with this sinfully delicious Persimmon Bread... with Bourbon, walnuts, dates and the chilli flakes.. Yes chilli flakes. Do I see some brows frowning over that ?  Oh please don't. It really is wonderful.

The original recipe is by James Beard. I found it in David Lebovitz blog, made an eggless version of it and spiced it a bit with red chilly flakes.  I borrowed the idea of adding chilli  flakes from a Turkish Persimmon Bread recipe and I am so glad I did. The Bourbon, the dates and the chilli flakes are such a riot of flavors.. and yet so rich and gorgeous. Ever since I made this bread, I have been looking for more sweet bread recipes where I can fit these flavors in. I have found some recipes... will soon let you know how they go. 

This sweet bread is perfect for the season. Its great with tea as well as coffee. also great for pacifying the late afternoon or late night sugar craze (in case you like to give in to that sometimes). So if you are in the mood to indulge yourself bake this delicious Spiced Persimmon Bread with Bourdon Dates and Walnuts  right away.. You'll love it ! 

Spiced Persimmon Bread with Bourbon Dates and Walnuts  Minimally adapted from David Lebovitz
Preparation Time : 15 minutes                    Cooking Time: 60 minutes                      Yields: 1 9x5 inch loaf
Ingredients 1 3/4 cups all purpose flour 3/4 tsp salt 1 tsp baking soda 1/2 tsp baking powder 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup unsalted butter(1 stick of unsalted butter) 1/2 cup yogurt (as a substitute for 2 eggs) 1/3 cup Bourbon 1 cup persimmon puree (scooped out from 2 medium sized squishy-soft Hachiya persimmons) 1/3 cut walnuts, chopped 1 cup pitted dates, chopped 1/2 tsp red chilli flakes -  Instructions Grease a 9x5 inch loaf pan and line the bottom with a piece of parchment paper. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Sift together all the dry ingredients except sugar into a large mixing bowl and keep it aside. Melt the butter in a medium sized saucepan.  Switching off the heat beat the sugar into the melted butter.  Once the sugar has been well incorporated, beat in the yogurt, Bourbon and persimmon puree and beat till all the ingredients have been well incorporated.  Make a well in the center of the sifted flour mixture. Pour in the liquid bourbon-persimmon puree mixture into the well, then add the chopped walnuts and dates and chilli flakes and using a wooden spoon mix everything well. Now pour the cake batter into the prepared loaf pan and bake in the preheat heated oven. After 25 minutes reduce the heat of the oven to 350 degrees F and continue baking for another 35-40 minutes till a skewer inserted in the center of the loaf comes out clean. Cool the loaf completely before slicing and enjoying.

While we'll enjoying this spiced up sweet bread for breakfast and tea... these are the dishes we have for dinner this week....

This Week's Menu Plan
Sunday	Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup & Apple Pie from the Bakery
Monday	Crepes with and Refried Beans with Pumpkin,
Tuesday	Rice, Dal, Fish,  and Steamed Beans for toddler Masoor Dal, Roasted Roots Vegetables with Sauteed Baby Spinach,  Rice.
Wednesday	Pear and Chestnut Soup, Colcannon, Chicken Breasts with Herbed butter
Thursday	Beet Thoran, Moong dal with Peas and Cauliflower, Egg Curry and Rice
Friday	Magic Chicken Biriyani and Raita
Saturday	Leftovers for lunch, Pasta with Beet Greens and Onions for dinner

Sharing this with Meal Plan Monday @ Organizing Junkie 

 and Meal Plan Monday at The Diary of a Real Housewife.

I shall be sharing this at the following parties.

Monday : Mix it up Monday, The Scoop, Made with love Monday, 
Marvelous Mondays @ This Gal Cooks, Melt in your Mouth Monday, Inspiration Monday Party Sharing Monday, 
Inspire Me Monday, Clever Chicks Blog Hop,Maniac Monday Linky Party, Recipe Sharing Monday @Jam Hands

Meatless Monday:Meatless Monday My Sweet and Savory

Tuesday : Totally Tasty Tuesday @ Mandy's Recipe Box, Tasteful Tuesday Party @ Nap Time Creations, 
Show Me What You Got @ Our Delightful Home ,  Hand Made Tuesday @ Ladybug Blessings
Share it Link Party @ Winthrop Chronicles,  Tasty Tuesday @ Anyonita Nibbles,  Hearth and Soul blog Hop, 
In & Out of the Kitchen @ Feeding Big & More, Tuesday's Table @ Love in the Kitchen, 

Wednesday : What's Cooking Wednesday @ Buns in my Oven, Cast Party Wednesday @ Lady Behind the Curtain, 
Show and Share @ Semi Homemade Mom, Wine'd Down Wednesday, 
Wonderful Food Wednesdays at @ All She Cooks Wednesday, Whatsit@White Lights on Wednesday, 
Wednesday Extravaganza @ Hunger Little Girl, Create & Share @ The Trendy Tree House,
What I Whipped Up Wednesday @ Sugar & Dots Look, What I Made @ Creations by Kara

Thursday: Link it Up Thursday @ Seven Alive, Fantastic Thursday @ Three Little Chiefs, 
Thriving on Thursdays @ Domesblissity,  Full Plate Thursday @ Miz Helen's Country Cottage , 
 Freedom Friday @ My Turn,  Thursday's Treasures @ Food Done Light,Pin it Thursday @ Sweet Bella Roos

Friday : Foodie Friday @ Simple Living and Eating,  Friday Linky Party @ The Pin Junkie, 
Get Him Feed @ Anyonita Nibbles, Friday Favorite (DYI too) @ Simple Sweet Home,  
Foodie Friday @ Not Your Ordinary Recipes, Foodie Friday @ Rattlebridge Farm, 
Weekend Wonders @ The Thriftiness Miss, Friday Food Frenzy @ Mostly Food and Crafts, 
Weekend Potluck @ Sunflower Supper Club, The Weekend re-Treat @The Best Blog Recipes

Eggless Piña Colada Cake

Its been a while since I baked with Gayathri's Baking Eggless Group.  The August challenge was difficult and September challenge had too many steps. I couldn't get them right, so saving the recipe for later I decided to move on.. In October  Meena Thenappan of Chettinad Fiesta challenged us to bake this beautiful Pina Colada Cake.

According to me, the real deal of the challenge was to make an "eggless sponge cake" and then infuse it with the flavors of Pina Colada. While I have baked many eggless cakes before,  I hadn't yet tried a eggless sponge cake, so I took this challenge seriously. Initially I tried tweaking a couple of standard sponge cake recipes but that did not go too well. So finally I had to resort to a tried and tested recipe. I chose this eggless sponge cake recipe from My Diverse Kitchen, adapted the methods slightly and viola... I had a lovely moist eggless sponge cake in hand !

Once the cake was made impregnating it with the flavors of Pina Colada was an easy job. I simply sliced the cake in half, soaked each half in a coconut cream solution, sandwiched a pineapple-coconut layer between them, then slathering the cake generously with Cool Whip whipped cream, I sprinkled coconut powder on top and thats it... my Pina Colada Cake was ready to go... The final product was really delicious. I can easily imagine myself making this cake for special occasions. It is a lovely dessert that is sure to please everyone.

Orange Yogurt Cake with Syrup (Yaourtopitta me Syropi)

Yesterday I baked Orange Yogurt Cake and then poured tons of honey syrup over it. The recipe was Greek and i found it in Aphrodite Polemis's cookbook From a Traditional Greek Kitchen. 

besides wanting to bake something new and different, the thing that drove me to try this particular recipe was farina, one of the 'star' ingredients in the cake. i had never used farina before. in fact i had no idea as to what it was until yesterday. so you may say it was curiosity that made me try this cake. in case you too are ignorant about it, farina is a cereal food similar in texture to suji or semolina. once i saw how its texture was i thought, may be this cake was going to taste a bit like halwa. so i wasn't very surprised when the final product resembled a 'mithai' more than a cake. i mean cake in the sense of "birthday cake." however it is a nice sweet which i'll like plating out for Holi or Diwali or for Bijaya Dashomi, with an additional garnish of raisins and/or silvered almonds. though the recipe itself is pretty straight forward, soaking the cake in the syrup might take a while(at least it took my cake quite some time to absorb the syrup). so if you plan to bake it for any occasion, you'll probably want to get it done a day before.

St Patrick's Day and Eggless Irish Tea Cake(A Cake A Week #4)

belated greetings to all for St Patrick's day. hope you wore green, ate green and had lots of fun throughout the day. here the temperatures were below freezing point. but that did not damp our spirits at all. dressed in green the three of us joined a whole lot of enthusiastic people at Rocky Point and cheered the St Patrick's day parade. think our little boy enjoyed it too. by the time we were bound homewards, he started waving at everyone we came across just as the royals, the officials and the enthusiasts did in the parade... so a quick glance on the highlights of the day before i begin rambling about this week's cake....

now the about the cake... to honor the day i decided to bake an Irish Tea Cake this Sunday. of course an eggless version of it. so i scaled this recipe to half and substituting the eggs with applesauce almost followed the recipe to bits. the result was a nice soft and moist tea cake which perfectly complimented my morning cup of  tea. not sure if  it bore much resemblance to the actual Irish Tea Cake after the substitution. nevertheless i was happy  with the bake. I baked the cake in my new spring foam pan and was totally in love with how the cake looked when done.

Probably just dusting the cake with sugar would have been a good idea. but impressed by this carrot cake, I had made 'posh plans' of decorating mine with a white chocolate harp and shamrocks. but things did not work quite well. my harp was too soft to stand by itself and most of the shamrocks were a little out of shape... so at the last moment i decided on a butter-cream frosting and a quick icing with Wilton tip 224 in much the same way as i had done for Week #3. and this is how my cake looked after it was decorated .....

springy... isn't it ?? anyway now the recipe behind the cake..

Adapted from Will Cook for Smiles

ingredients
for the cake 
3/4 cups cake flour

1/4 tsp baking powder

3/4 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 cup of unsalted butter, softened 

1/2 cup of white sugar
1/2 cup apple sauce
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 cup of whole milk
1 tbs Greek Yogurt

for the vanilla buttercream frosting
1/4 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 1/4 cup confectioner's sugar
1 tablespoon of milk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons whipped cream

what i did

• first i preheated the over to 350 degree F, greased a 6-inch round spring foam  pan and sifted the flour, baking powder, baking powder and salt together and kept it aside.
• then i whipped the butter and sugar together and once the mixture became smooth and light i added the applesauce, vanilla, milk and Greek Yogurt in it and whipped until all the wet ingredients were well combined.
• next i gradually folded in the dry ingredient mixture and whipped the batter until it was smooth.
• then pouring the batter into the prepared spring foam pan and i baked it for 55-60 minutes, until a toothpick inserted came out clean. 
• for the frosting, i simply whipped the listed ingredients together till it felt smooth enough. and after allowing the cake to cool down i frosted it with the prepared frosting and decorated it using Wilton's ready- to-use decorating icing icing tube and Wilton's tip 224. 

so that was my #4 cake of A Cake A Week. For week 5, I have a gorgeous Italian cake in mind.  More on that next week.... Have a great  day !

Sharing this with 
Mix it Up Monday @ Flour Me With Love's, Mop it up Monday @ I should be Mopping the Floor, What’d You Do this Weekend?  @ Tumbleweed Contessa, Bon Vivant #13 - Kids Delight

A Cake A Week #3 : Seeking the perfect recipe for an Eggless Vanilla Cake

around here, the family birthday parties begin in April and with just about a month before we celebrate Mr MN's birthday I have begun to panic ... for i do not have a good recipe for  the perfect Eggless Vanilla Cake. why eggless.. because this man LOVES vanilla cakes with rich chocolate frosting... and this year he celebrates his birthday on a Monday... another day of the week when i do not have non-veg. so I have been all over the place looking for that "killer birthday cake recipe" that makes all the celebrations worthwhile ...  that led me to one of my favorite baking references.... Deb Perelman's Smitten Kitchen. there i found  the

best birthday cake !

Now that lady knows to bake... and her post literally made my heart skip a beat.  Of course her's was with eggs and i assumed that a simple egg substitute like vinegar and baking soda would lead me to the end of my quest.  but not quite.. texture-wise the cake was excellent. we had no complains there.. and it tasted good too... but what made the recipe fall short of perfection was the egg substitute that i had used... it had my cake breathing of soda at every other bite.. though the soda smell lessened and reduced to a negligible whiff in the next 8 hours it was something i did not like and i am sure no one does... so that killer of a recipe did not work for me... since my cake wasn't a big hit i was in double minds about whether or not to share with you what i did... but on second thoughts i thought why not. perhaps you can make use of my experience and avoid the same mistake... and if you are an expert maybe you can tell me where i went wrong and what i can do to avoid the terrible soda smell the next time.  

now here's my Cake followed by the recipe which did not work too well... 

Recipe Adapted from Smitten Kitchen.

ingredients.

2 cups all purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon table salt

1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened

3/8 cups unsweetened applesauce

1 cup sugar

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

2 tablespoons of vinegar + 2 tablespoons of water + 1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda (used as a substitute for 2 eggs)

1 cup  buttermilk (made by adding milk at room temperature to 1 tablespoon of vinegar so that the two together yield 1 cup of liquid)

for a crust

3/4 cup ground oats

1/2 cup all purpose flour

6 tablespoon butter, cut into small pieces

1/2 cup brown sugar

juice from 1 blood red orange

what i did

• i preheated the oven to 350 degree F ; sifted the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt and kept it aside. 
• next in a  glass bowl, i whisked the softened butter and sugar until it was creamy, then added the buttermilk, vinegar + baking soda mixture, vanilla extract and whisked until the ingredients were well combined.  
• i then gradually started folding in the dry ingredient mixture. i must have been a few spoons away from folding in the flour mixture completely into the batter when i felt that the batter was too thick. at this point to add moisture to it, i added the applesauce. once that was done, to me. the consistency of the batter appeared like the batter of a cake with eggs. 
• I was happy and very hopeful.. and thought that adding a crust to the cake would make it even more tasty. so  i mixed together the ingredients for the crust and spread a smooth layer of it in my iron skillet and put the skillet in the preheated oven with just the crust layer. after 5 minutes i took the skillet out, poured  the prepared cake batter over the crust and transferred it back into the oven to bake for 55-60 minutes, i.e until a tooth-pick inserted came out clean.

the cake had risen well and after letting it cool for an hour, it came off the skillet easily.. and then i began to see my mistakes. baking the crust a little more than the rest of the batter was clearly a bad idea. it had burnt. anyway that did not seem like a major problem... because removing the slightly burst crust did not effect the cake much. the main problem was the soda smell which was pretty dominant in the beginning and gradually diminished but did not vanish completely. 

since the experiment did not go as desired, in the beginning i wasn't sure if i wanted to decorate it. but for practice-sake i decided to do it anyway... first i frosted the cake using Duncan Hines Creamy Homestyle Classic Vanilla frosting. Then attaching Wilton's 224 tip to  Wilton's Ready to Use Yellow and White Decorating Icing Tube, I piped  out some flowers atop the vanilla frosting.. i first tired piping white roses. they didn't come out so neat. then by chance i piped out this dainty yellow darling...

this pleases me so much that i piped some more till a side profile of the cake looked like this...

incase you want to know, for those pretty yellow flowers, you have to  press your icing tube fitted with 224 Wilton piping tip very close to the surface, and after the initial frills have been piped out, lift off the tube lightly making sure that the edges of the piped frills rest on the edge of the flower. 

so that was my #3 cake of A Cake A Week. Now that you know my story wouldn't you like to share your recipe of the perfect Eggless Vanilla Cake with me. I'll really need one and will highly appreciate if you share yours with me.

Hoping to hear from you soon... 

yours lovingly.......

sharing this with the following parties and seeking help from whoever stops by...

Mix it Up Monday @ Flour Me With Love's, Mop it up Monday @ I should be Mopping the Floor, What’d You Do this Weekend? #6@ Tumbleweed Contessa

Eggless Apple Cake ( A Cake A Week. #2 )

This week I baked an eggless apple cake following yet again a recipe from Madhuram's Eggless Cooking. As always her instructions were flawless. but this time I felt that the cake would taste slightly more moist with an extra helping of fat or oil substitute. so i modified the recipe accordingly. 

now the picture and the recipe.

ingredients

• 1 1/2 cup all purpose flour
• 1/4 cup cocoa powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup water
• 1/4 cup unsweetened applesauce
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice, freshly squeezed
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 cup of small pieces of apples
• 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoon granulated sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg powder

what i did

• i preheated the oven to 350 degree F, lightly greased and floured a 9x1.5 inch circular cake pan.
• For the cake batter, I began by sifting all the dry ingredients together and keeping the mixture aside. 
• next in a microwave safe big enough container, i put the butter and sugar and microwaved it for 30 seconds till the butter was soft. then adding applesauce and the rest of the wet ingredients to it, i beat the mixture till it was smooth. i then folded in the dry ingredients and the apple pieces into the wet mixture, adding them alternatively a little bit at a time till the batter was smooth. 
• then pouring the batter into the prepared pan i baked it for 35 minutes, i.e until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake came out clean.

decorating the Cake.

after letting the cake cool for over an hour i frosted it using Duncan Hines Creamy Homestyle Classic Vanilla frosting and i piped using Wilton's Ready to Use Decorating Icing Tube. For the rippled border and the smaller flowers(I know they are not perfect... nevertheless i call them so..) I used Wilton's 104 tip and this tutorial that i found on youtube. Of course turning the cake around wasn't as easy as turning the cupcake. but it helped to put the cake on a quarter plate and turn that around. 

so that was my #2 cake of A Cake A Week. honoring St Patricks Day, I am planning on a eggless minty streusel-ribboned cake for week 3. More on that next Sunday....

Have a great week !

Sharing this with Mix it Up Monday @ Flour Me With Love's, Mop it up Monday @ I should be Mopping the Floor, What’d You Do this Weekend? #5 @ Tumbleweed Contessa,  Must Try Monday's @ My Favorite Finds

Chocolate Avocado Coffee Cake.

okay.. so i am officially addicted to cooking with oats. and if you have been there.. you know exactly what i am talking about. it was past midnight yesterday when i took the first bite of my bake of the day.... Chocolate Avocado Coffee Cake.. mmm.... it tasted good... may be a little more sugar would be better.. but Nishi disagreed. he said it was perfect with his espresso..... that was that... so after two failures, there was a success. Yaay !!

for a while I have had chocolate avocado cake in my mind. i had pinned Joy the Baker's Vegan Chocolate Avocado Cake ...  and because Nishi LOVES chocolate and i like avocados i had a good mind to try it out.... but.. somehow i never got around baking it until yesterday... it  thus happened that while baking the strawberry cobbler  the previous night it struck me that the same oats-flour-sugar mixture can be used for the crumb in a coffee cake... and that prompted me to bake this moist flavorful dense chocolaty coffee cake using the aforementioned recipe as a guideline. i must mention here that though i could smell the avocado in the first few minutes of baking... as Joy the Baker said... 'not a lick of it could be tasted' later. it merely substituted the fat required.. with the goodness of avocado. now isn't that lovely.

ingredients

for the cake

1 cup minus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/2 cup oats flour (i ground old fashioned oats)
2 tablespoons cornflour
3 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup  sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/8 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup soft avocado, well mashed
1 cup milk
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

for the crumble

3/8 cup oats flour
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/8 cup + 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
3 tablespoon butter, softened
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

what i did.

For the crumble, i combined the brown sugar oats, flour, cinnamon and  butter in a bowl till the mixture was coarse and then set it aside.

For the cake, I first preheated the oven to 350 degrees F, greased and floured a 9.25x5.25x2.75 inch  bread loaf pan and set it aside.

Next I combined all the dry ingredients (all-purpose flour to baking soda) except sugar in a bowl and the wet ingredients in a separate bowl and let them stand for a while till the mixture of wet ingredients  became turbid. I then added the sugars to wet mixture, stirred it for a while before beating in the dry ingredients into the wet mixture to form a smooth batter. To this I added the mashed avocado and whipped the batter some more before pouring into the prepared pan and putting it in the oven.

10 minutes later I pulled out the pan and topped the settling batter with the prepared sugar-oats-flour-cinnamon mixture and then put it back in the oven to bake for another 35 to 40 minutes, until a toothpick inserted came out clean. i then let it cool for a while before digging right into that chocolaty crumbly loaf.

after thoughts. 

though Nishi felt otherwise... those with a sweet tooth like me will perhaps like a little more sugar in the cake. maybe 1/3 cup of brown sugar instead of 1/4 cup or an extra helping of crumbs... but for others this might be the perfect bite with their tea or coffee... 

Sending this to , Slightly Indulgent Tuesdays @ SS& GS, Cooking with seeds -  Priya versatile recipes  event hosted by Amruta Pore,

 the event New "U"- Cooks Joy hosted by Vardhini,

and the event  Bon Vivant #11 - Healthy Appetite  at Sumee's Culinary Bites.