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June 05, 2006

Almost Yum!

Have you watched the Rachael Ray 30 minute cooking shows on Food Network? Blank look? No, have more useful things to do? Well, I don’t :), so I watched it and was so impressed with one of the desserts that she whipped up ;) that I thought I’d try it too!

Ingredients: Brown Sugar, peaches, butter, vanilla ice cream.

That’s all. Simple ingredients and a simple recipe...well, I did spend a few minutes wondering whether to buy the light brown brown-sugar or the dark brown brown-sugar, I settled for the light brown one, it looked better :)

The dessert came out pretty well, unlike my other sun-tv Sunday samaiyal attempts. All I had to go was melt 3 spoonfuls of butter, add ¼ cup of brown sugar to it and stir it till it melts, cut pecans into little pieces and fry them in the mixture. Then the fun bit, To one scoop of vanilla icecream, add the fried pecans and a little bit of the syrup left behind on the pan and you are done! It tasted heavenly although I didn’t set the pan on fire with a little cooking wine and add three layers of whipped cream to the icecream (which is what she did on TV).

And then I thought, since my dessert attempt was a big hit, I’ll try baking a cake. So, I bought two boxes of Betty Crocker’s cake mix, lemon and chocolate, a cup of chocolate frosting and a tin of condensed milk (which was to be my egg-substitute) and I wore my apron (that’s a must, you can’t bake if you don’t wear the apron).

But then, I decided to alter the measure of ingredients to suit my mood, and so I added 1/4th a cup of oil instead of 1/2, I added 4 spoons of condensed milk and a little bit of yoghurt instead of eggs and then added the cake mix to this and used the hand mixer to beat it (Can I say “to beat it” although I didn’t add eggs?). For some reason, I missed the 11/2 cups of water, I just didn’t see it in the recipe the first time I read it. When the cake came out, it looked a bit sad, instead of being all fluffy and happy, it kind of sat depressed in the center. Also when they say extra-moist lemon cake mix, they mean extra moist because the filling in the center of my cake was really moist.

So, anyway, my second experiment was not as good as my first but I shall still put on a brave front and cook more exciting, new err…experimental stuff (In my defense, I also tried an angel hair pasta with my very own tomato based sauce and it came out really good!)

Anyway, Until my next experiment, eat healthy ye' all :)

12 comments:

Prabhu said...

hahaa LOL thinking of Kamal :)
angel hair pasta thaanaa next potluck la?

expertdabbler said...

Paavam K;)
Also, now i know why he chooses financial magazines for company:)

Adhu seri oru nimisham "brown sugar" nu partha udane i thought of something...:D

Agnibarathi said...

Err...where di you trap an angel for the angel hair pasta?

Parth said...

Food Network? Well, I am not surprised. My wife watches a lot of HGTV and I never understood that for most part either.

dinesh said...

Since when did you start to be in the cooking department ?

I thought K cooked all the time ? :)

Okay, just trying to mean that's all ! Good that you're trying out all this new stuff !

IBH said...

:) rombhhha varusham munnadi me and mom started trying to bake cake in a pressure cooker..:) yeah! u can do that! only if u knew how exactly u should do :)

cooker adile mannu podanum.....or somehting podanu,...nanum enga amamvum adha maradnhu...rombha neram kalichu we just opened and it was still soggy...we threw the entire thing out :)

illena cake a tumbler oothi kudichurukanum nanga ellarum :)

Hellboy said...

too much freelancing following the recipe i guess. no wonder the cake looked sad :). whenever i cook i try to follow the recipe to the dot. may be add a half a teaspoon less or more sugar, that would be it.

and is that Rachel Ray in that picture, i should tune into the show once in a while :)

Kumari said...

Few of Rachel Ray's recipes(the veggie ones) are good but I just can't stand the way she talks with the corner of her mouth.

My latest fave is TLC's 'Take HOme Chef'; one helluva handsome hunk who comes home n cooks :D

Tough luck with the cake :( But a simple sponge cake is the easiest recipe to start with. And one rule is, w.r.t baking one should follow exact measurements. Somehow eye-balling never works with baking as much as it does with rest of the cooking :)

All the best :)

GG said...

Cool...peaches and icecream always sounds good :)

Personally, I don't like Rachel Ray that much...her recipes (not for desserts) don't always taste as good as she claims and they take way more than 30 mins!!

But next time wait and watch Giada's show called Everyday Italian!
1. Shes a pleasure to watch since shes sooooo pretty!!
2. Her recipes are interesting...many of them are meat...but she does veggies and soups too :)

Of course, Tyler Florence (hes a NY cutie) and Ina Garten (shes a professional caterer) are also my favorites!!
And they are real gourmet - the tips they share are priceless :)

Let me know if you ever watch their shows :)

GG said...

oooh...another thing any baker will tell you - Baking is literally a scientific experiment...don't play with measurements - follow them to the t.

RS said...

prabhu - prabhu, kandippa but only if you sing eechi elumbachi song! :p

p~k - :p

sriram - in the garden of eden :)

parth - I like HGTV, lotsa cool real estate, landscaping and house shows!

dinesh - yeah yeah, you are one big meanie :)

ibh - Inga normal cakekuke ivolo kashtam, I can imagine how your pressure cooker cake turned out :))

hellboy - I have noticed that guys are more particular about ingredients and procedure when they cook but they also take much longer to cook :)

kumari - Take Home Chef seems interesting :p

Sigh, now I know I shdnt mess with the cake recipe, gonna try the chocolate one soon :)

gg - Cool! Lots more shows to watch, Kamal's not gonna like that :)

I shall post my next cake baking experience soon :)

Twisted DNA said...

"Brown Sugar, peaches, butter, vanilla ice cream."
Whatever proportions you mix brown sugar, butter and vanilla ice cream, the concoction has to taste good. We don't need rachel ray to tell us that ;)

I did watch her show a couple of times (my wife almost had to wrestle to watch it). She is good. My wife is a big fan.

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