Lemon Cupcakes with Strawberry Cream Cheese Frosting

I combined a few recipes to create this one, for a baby shower I was helping plan! Makes 24 normal sized cupcakes 

• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 and 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2.5 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened to room temperature
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup milk
• 2 tbsp zest + 2 tbsp fresh juice

Preheat the oven to 350F, and line your cupcake pan with paper liners. 

Beat the butter and sugar together on medium-high speed in a large bowl until creamy. Add eggs and vanilla, and beat on medium-high speed until everything is combined.

In a medium bowl, combine the flour and baking powder using a whisk. Dump the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, beating at a light speed. The batter should be fairly thick. Pour in the milk, add the lemon zest, and lemon juice, mixing until just combined. Do not over-mix this batter at any point. 

Spoon batter evenly into 12 cupcake liners. Bake for about 20 minutes. Check at intervals. A toothpick inserted in the middle will come out clean when done. Remove from the oven and allow to cool completely before frosting.

For the frosting:

I made up the frosting, and so the recipe isn't exact. 

Roughly cut up about 6-7 strawberries, sprinkle with about 3 tbsp sugar, and set aside for a few minutes. Then puree this in a processor or blender. 

Whip about half a cup of cream and add a few tablespoons of cream cheese to this. Then throw in the strawberry puree, while beating with an electric beater. Taste and add more confectioners sugar as required. Add some lemon zest, right at the end, for additional flavor. This frosting was even more delicious than the cupcakes, I kid you not. You could make it with any berry you like! 

Nabeeha's Red Velvet Cheesecake Brownies

I have an instant distrust of people who refuse to share their recipes. I won't lie to you. I can't make any sense of it, you see. It's the year 2014, and, to my mind, any combination of ingredients that I can think of has already been thought of at least once before - unless I think of something absolutely disgusting which really isn't the point here. What I'm saying is, I don't think anyone can claim too many 'secret' or 'unique' recipes any more. So why should I care if xyz will make the same cake as I do? It doesn't affect me at all. It's more fun to be their source for the recipe anyway because then people say nice things about you and I love it when people say nice things about me. I'm easy that way. I enjoy learning new recipes from people I meet. The recipes I share here have been collected from my family, friends, acquaintances, books and blogs. And those people got them from some other people. Who knows how long back it goes, and isn't it fun to think that recipes too are a kind of legacy?

Now I've forgotten what my original train of thought was, but here's an amazing recipe for this fantabulous and crazily fattening dessert which is a mixture of red-velvet cake, cheesecake and brownies. This recipe came to me from my lovely friend, fellow Fulbrighter and senior here at Babson College, Nabeeha Qazi. We made this on valentine's day and it was the best decision ever. I had 1.5 cupcake sized brownies (because we made them in cupcake tins) and then had one for breakfast the next morning. We gave the rest away because we don't want to get too fat okay?

Here's what you need:

• 1 stick or 8 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup cocoa powder 
• A pinch of salt
• 1 tablespoon red food coloring
• 1 teaspoon vinegar
• 2 eggs
• 3/4 cup all-purpose flour

• 8 ounces or 200 grams cream cheese, softened
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/8 teaspoon vanilla extract

And here's how you do this:

Preheat the oven to 350 F.

Melt the butter in a medium sized bowl (we did it in the microwave). Throw in the sugar and mix well, preferably with an electric beater. Add the vanilla, coco powder, salt, food colouring and vinegar and just keep mixing it all together.

Beat the two eggs separately and add the flour to them. Then just mix the red mixture with the egg mixture and voila, your red-velvet brownie part of this thing is done! This will be very very thick, and I kept asking Nabeeha if this was right. Just seemed weird to me, not batter-like at all. And the craziest part was NO baking powder!! How do you make a cake without BP or soda? I was skeptical, I won't lie. But these were awesome so there you have it!

For the cheesecake portion, in a clean bowl, beat the cream cheese using an electric beater (wash the red stuff off it before using it for this!). Add the sugar, the egg and the vanilla, and beat well. And done.

Now there's two ways you could do this. Either use a square or round cake tin, or use a muffin/cupcake pan like we did.

Here's a tip for any cake you make: When ever possible, use a springform pan. When I was first learning to bake, you can't imagine how many times I broke my heart when I broke the cake trying to turn it out of the cake tin. Springform pans are the best thing ever. Also, with most cakes, it's smart to line the base with paper, then grease the base and sides. Also, sprinkle flour, or coco powder if it's a chocolate cake. I hate hate hate cutting out circles to line the base. It's such a stupid step, but so necessary most of the time.

Back to the recipe at hand. What we did was just grease the muffin tin (it was a great quality non-stick tin) with oil, then add about a tablespoon of the red mixture to each tin. Top this with the cheese mixture. Finally, add a smidgen of the red mixture to each tin, and swirl with a pointy knife or skewer or something. I tried to make hearts. I love hearts. It didn't really work out but still.

If making a cake, grease and line the cake tin, add the red mixture, top with the cheese mixture, and swirl. An 8 by 8 inches pan should be the right size.

Put it in the oven, and let it bake! It's done when it seems to pull away from the edges and a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean. Let it cool in the pan for a good twenty minutes, then loosen the edges before trying to turn the brownies out. 

p.s. That one white cheesecake you see in the collage is because we had mixture left over so we put a little bit of the red mixture and topped it with a thicker layer of the remaining cheesecake mixture. It was delicious.

Mango Coconut Lime Cake!

Sounds crazy, doesn't it? I literally made up with recipe, along with the help of some awesome ladies who are my dorm mates. You should see the dishes they come up with. So fancy! Someday soon I'll share some of their recipes too. =)

Today, I present to you this delicious Mango Coconut Lime Cake!

Anyway, I happen to be very competitive. I was never tempted to make a mango cake - never even thought of one - until I heard about this amazing mango cake that this aunty makes, and I realized I had never tried Mango cake. Luckily enough, I had a bag of dried mangoes lying around. This cake did destroy my weight-loss diet plan, but it was worth it!

Here's what you need:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour 
• 1 teaspoon baking soda 
• 2 teaspoons baking powder 
• 1 cup sugar 
• 2/3 cup oil  
• 2/3 cup buttermilk 
• 2 eggs 
• 1 teaspoon vanilla essence 
• 1 cup mango puree 
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts 
• 1 lime (or 1 large lemon OR about 3 small ones) 
• Mango essence - optional 

 Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Prepare a spring form cake tin by oiling the sides and base, and sprinkling well with flour.

Whisk together the flour, baking soda and baking powder (or sieve all these together)

In a large bowl, using a hand mixer, beat together the oil, sugar,  eggs, vanilla essence, buttermilk, and lime zest! Doesn't this step sound like fun? I always enjoy recipes where I can just throw things in and mix. For some reason, I find the whirr of electric beaters almost therapeutic =p

Anyhow, once you've done the mixing, the next step is to fold in the dry ingredients, mixing well. 

Now for the mango. I had dried mango, so I just cooked it in a little water until it was completely soft and rehydrated, and then pureed it. If you have fresh mango, I'm guessing you can just puree that. 

Mix the mango puree into the cake batter, mixing well. I didn't have essence, but if you have it, a couple of drops of that should add to the scent and flavour. Then mix in the walnuts. 

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin, and bake until skewer inserted into the center comes out dry.

The BEST things about this cake, however, was the frosting. The sad but fun thing is that since I made up the frosting recipe too, I don't have exact measurements. But these are the general ingredients:

• Unsalted butter
• Icing Sugar
• Coconut flakes
• Mango puree
• Lime 
• Cream cheese

I started off by beating softened butter with icing sugar to make a nice butter cream frosting. But I didn't have enough butter to be able to fill and frost the cake, so in order to increase the amount of frosting, I threw in all the cream cheese I had ( about three tablespoons). Mix in the coconut flakes, and then add lime zest. I also beat in a few tablespoons of puree, just to give color and some flavor. If you have it, you can replace the puree with a few drops of essence and some yellow food color.
  
Assembling:

Since I didn't have enough frosting, once the cake was cool enough I sliced it in half and used mango puree to sandwich it together.  If you do have enough frosting, put some in the middle too. Then just use the rest of the icing to decorate the top and sides.

1

Blueberry Cake

I had never had blueberries, and someone got me a box of them from a farmers market as a present. Now those of you who know me may rememeber that I am not very enthusiastic about eating fruit, but I tried blueberry muffins when Babson was serving free breakfast during orientation fee, and they were so good! So I decided to bake a blueberry cake, and gift it to the hostess at a dinner I was invited to that night. Thankfully, it turned out absolutely beautiful! Here's the recipe I used, which is originally from Elise of SimplyRecipes. So far, no recipe of hers has ever disappointed me. <3 br="">

You have to know, I never try a recipe exactly the way it is given. Firstly, I don't like using butter too much. It's because back home, oil is so much cheaper. When I was first learning to bake, a lot of my cakes would be absolute disasters, and I hated using expensive ingredients and then having to feed the mess to my pets. Now I'm just used to it!

I also had oranges, and I love oranges! So I threw in Orange zest, and instead of lemon juice, used the juice from half an orange!

You've also got to remember, here in the US the normal sugar is what in Pakistan is 'fine' sugar. Not icing sugar, but just somewhere in between. So if you have normal, large crystals of sugar in Pk, give it a few zings in the grinder.

• 1 cup all purpose flour plus 1 teaspoon of flour (plus more for prepping cake pan)
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 4 oz / 1 stick / 8 tbsp unsalted butter, softened, or 6 tbsp oil
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon vanilla
• 2 large eggs
• Orange zest. Or not. 
• 2 cups blueberries, rinsed and drained (if using frozen blueberries, thaw and drain first)
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice OR the juice from half an orange
• Powdered sugar for dusting

Preheat oven to 350°F. Lightly butter a 9-inch springform pan and dust with flour. Or use a 9-inch round cake pan, butter and dust with flour and line the bottom with parchment paper.

Combine 1 cup of flour with baking powder and salt, and whisk together. Or sieve together. What ever you feel like doing. 
Using a mixer, beat the butter on medium high speed for 2 minutes. Then add the sugar and vanilla and beat until light and fluffy. Throw in the eggs and beat some more, until well incorporated. Also add the orange zest, if you're using it.

Beat in the flour mixture, with the electric mixer or a spoon/spatula.

Pour the batter into the prepared baking pan. It's going to be quite thick, and you'll think you've made a mistake and re-read the recipe. That's what I did. But just spread the batter in the pan using a spatula or spoon if you have to. It will be fine. At least it was for me.

Combine the berries with the remaining teaspoon of flour and the lemon juice (or orange juice) in a bowl. Spoon the berry mixture over the batter.

Bake on middle rack in oven for 1 hour at 350°F, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Remove from oven and let the cake cool in the pan for 10 minutes. Carefully slide a thin knife around the edges of the cake to release it from the pan. Transfer the cake to a platter, berry side up. Dust the cake with powdered sugar before serving.

I had to keep it in my room all day before I took it to dinner in the evening. It smells SO good, it was hard not to just cut out a slice for myself! 

Pavlova

You have a recipe you've read over and over again, but never tried because it just. intimidates. you. so much? This was mine. Or at least one of mine, since I read a lot of recipe books and... I digress. Back to the one at hand. Traditionally Pavlovas are smothered in cream and then covered with fresh fruits ( in an effort to make them look healthy?) but me, I'm a straightforward kind of person (and I hate most fruits) so it's just your basic eggs, sugar, whipped cream and supersweet canned pineapples at play here. Sounds sinful, doesn't in? Next time I'll add some chocolate shavings too. ;)

Preheat your oven to 150 degree Celsius.

Here's what you need:

4 eggs
250 gms powdered sugar [icing or even castor works]
2 tablespoons cornflour
2 teaspoons white vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence 

Separate the egg whites from the yolks, taking care not to get even a single bit of egg shell or yolk. If you do, your meringue will fall. So refrigerate your eggs before hand and then separate each in different bowls so as to minimize risk. Sounds serious, doesn't it? It is. =P Also make sure your bowl is spotless and completely dry. 

Now that the difficult part is done, here's the easy stuff. Start beating your egg whites preferably with an electric beater since doing it by hand will KILL your hand. Electric beaters are godsend. So yes, beat until they become frothy and then soft peaks form. 

Start adding the sugar a few tablespoons at a time, beating well between each addition. By the end of this step the mixture will be very glossy, like white satin. 

Then add in the cornflour, vinegar and vanilla. Substitute your electric beater with a whisk and mix gently, in a folding motion. The mixture will start getting thick and stiff, so that it holds it shape when you lift the whisk and let some drip off into the bowl. 

Line your baking tray with waxed paper, and draw a 7" circle in the middle. With a spoon drop the mixture in the middle of the circle, piling it high instead of flattening it as it will flatten somewhat when it bakes. Then pop it into the oven and let it bake for about 1 hour. 

You can adjust the heat setting according to your oven. The end result should be a light egg-shell color, a crisp exterior, and a skewer inserted into the center comes out almost dry. 

Turn off the oven, and leaving the door open, let your pavlova dry and cool for at least 30 minutes.   

Take it out, slowly transfer to a serving dish. Make a dent in the middle, top with whipped cream (whipped without sugar) and fruits such as strawberries, kiwi, pineapple etc!

'Potato Cake'

Love love love this recipe, shared by my beautiful friend Momal [also the source of a number of other recipes on this blog!], which combines some of my favorite ingredients, simply and efficiently, to give a show-stopping dish which serves fantastically well as comfort food!

This is not an exact recipe, but it's easy to muddle through:

Ingredients:

2 Eggs
1/2 Cup milk [plus or minus some cream to make it richer]
1/2 Cup shredded cheese [ or more - cheddar, mozzarella, Parmesan, whatever!]
4 large potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced

Sesonings:
Salt
Black pepper
Oregano seeds [Ajwain]
Oregano leaves
Thyme
Parsley
Crushed garlic/garlic powder [If you like garlic]

Additionally:
Sliced sausages
Shredded, cooked chicken
Sliced mushrooms
Sliced olives
Washed, whole spinach leaves

This is obviously a very vrestaile recipe, and you can dress it up which ever way ou want it!

First, crack those eggs in a bowl, throw in the seasonings, milk and cream, and beat together well.

Prepare all and any 'additionals' you like.

For the potatoes: I was in a hurry today [decided I wanted this two hours before iftari!] so I cut short on the baking time by boiling a large pot of water, and throwing in the sliced potatoes for about ten minutes [or less], until half cooked. If you have time, you dont need to do this.

So layer the katchay or adhay-pakkay potato slices in an olive-oiled baking dish [I like to sprinkle some ajwaein on the base, just for luck =D] along with your additionals and the egg mixture and your cheese. Until it's all in there.

Put in your oven to bake. I can't say at what temp or for how long, because I'm not any good with calculations like that. I put it in my electric oven for about one hour, at a medium setting [both top and bottom grills], and just kept checking. Don't dry it out too much. Check with a knife or a fork or something. In the end, if the top is too white, grill for a few minutes till golden.

Have fun!

Noodle Omelet

Things you need:
 1. Knorr noodles - Lemon Chili or Chicken Sizzler flavour
 2. Eggs
 3. Olives
 4. Chicken (can be boiled and shredded or fried)
 5. Cheddar cheese slices
 6. Green onions (optional)
7. Mushrooms (optional)

 Okay. For every one packet of Knorr noodles, I use three eggs. So, you boil your noodles until they are cooked. Then you drain the water. Take a bowl. Add the noodles, add eggs, add olives, add mushrooms and add the chicken. Now sprinkle the taste maker packet on top. Now mix the batter until everything is incorporated into the batter.

 Now, take a non-stick frying pan. Ad a generous amount of oil, not too much and not too little. Pour the mixture on VERY LOW FLAME. Spread the mixture and cook it from one side for at least 7 - 9 minutes. Cover it! Helps cook it evenly. After 7- 9 minutes...shake the pan and if you see that the mixture isn't moving and seems fairly solid, flip it!

 Now lay your cheese slices on the top! And cover again. Cook for 7 - 10 minutes or until the egg is completely cooked! Sprinkle oregano on top. And enjoy!

 Serve with chilli garlic sauce. It's breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. My family is NUTS about it!

 -Bree

This was for my sister Manal!

You can shape it what ever way you want! 

Best summer breakfast in the world!

We had this breakfast with fresh mangoes and cold macaroni and potato salad. EPIC!

For my brother Osama!