No-bake brownies

A couple of weeks ago, these two cute little Reindeers appeared in my house along with a very cute and small Christmas tree. How sweet !
These two cuties kindled me to go and work in the kitchen for Christmas celebration.

Last year I made lots of cookies, Bourbon biscuit, choco cookies, coconut macaroons, Oh the list goes long. You can find all the recipes here. This time I started with no-bake brownies.

No-bake brownies are very simple, with simple ingredients like a pack of Marie biscuit, chopped nuts, cocoa powder and a tin of condensed milk. As the name says, no need to bake or cook. All you need is patience.

I tried this recipe from 'Cooking and me' by Nags. You can find the recipe here from her site.

In addition to her recipe, I added one of my favorite ingredient which made the brownies extra special. The secret ingredient is none other than peanut butter. To the brownie mixture I added 1/4 cup of peanut butter, rest all I followed the original receipe.

Since I used the peanut butter, I think my brownies were little fudgy. But the taste was wonderful. It reminded us the taste of Ferrero Rocher. Karthik started calling those brownies as Ferrero Rocher.

You will not believe me I bought a small pack of Ferrero Rocher the day I made the brownies and I am happy to report that the Ferrero Rocher is still there in the fridge while my brownies are long gone!!

Merry chrismas to all.

Peanut butter cookies

I like to eat the peanuts only in two dishes - peanut laddu / kadala mittai and in my mom's eggplant kootu. I don't like peanuts in any other dish or in any other form. It doesn't mean that i will not eat or cook foods using peanuts, but those two are my favorite dish.

You know, I stopped eating more chocolates and Ice creams here. Some of the chocolates have peanuts and all the ice creams are topped with peanuts. But I like to see the 'Jif' peanut butter advertisements. Oh, they are very nice and lovely. The kids featuring in those ads will be very cute. Since I like the advertisement, I wanted to taste the butter at least once.

I tried this cookies from  Dhivya's Dil se... blog four days ago. They tasted delicious. The cookies were flaky and soft. Everybody certified that this was the best cookies I ever baked. I baked nearly 50-60 cookies and they were all gone in 48 hours.

Ingredients and Method :

I followed exactly the same from Dil se..., you can click here to find the recipe.

From now on, I will add this peanut butter cookies in my favorite peanut list.

Christmas cookies continues...

Here comes another Christmas treat in my cookie series.

Pinwheel Cookies

Zebra cookies

Gifting home baked cookies is the great way to celebrate these holidays. But why settle for one type of cookies when you can easily have many ?

One base recipe +   Some   magic   =    Bourbon biscuits    Choco cookies    Pinwheel cookies    Zebra cookies

Doesn't the above equation reminds you the old chemistry class or Maths Theorem class ?
This is the secret formula for my Christmas cookie treats. By keeping the bourbon biscuit recipe as my base recipe I did little variation and did 3 more kind of cookies. Thanks to Nithu's kitchen, the Bourbon biscuit now got two more little sisters, Pinwheel cookies and Zebra cookies.

For both the cookies, I used two coloured cookie dough with single recipe.

Ingredients : One layer -- the chocolate layer the ingredients same as the choco cookies. Second layer -- Plain one, except the cocoa powder and instant coffee. Preparation  : --- Prepare the two separate dough as mentioned in the choco cookies. Don't make the dough  more soft. Play with water and make sure all the crumbs are held together and knead the dough. --- Wrap both the dough separately and refrigerate it for an hour. *** Click here to find the recipe and the method to prepare the dough Method - for Pinwheel cookies --- Preheat the oven to 350 F --- After an hour, take both the dough out from the fridge, unwrap them. --- Take either one of the dough, divide the dough into two equal parts. Roll one dough to 3-4 mm thickness on a parchment paper and make approximately  10" x 8 " rectangle. --- Follow the same  procedure for another color dough and make another rectangle. --- Place rolled white dough on to the chocolate dough, press gently to make an even layer. --- From one end, start rolling the rectangle dough tightly and form a log. Wrap the log and refrigerate again for an hour. --- Follow the same step for the rest of the dough. --- Take the dough and cut 1/4 inch thick slices. Now you can see nice two coloured swirls. --- Place them on the cookie sheet and bake it for 10 - 12 minutes. --- Once baked, cool it and put it in air tight container.

I did not roll tightly the first set of dough and also did not refrigerate it. So the dough was little flimsy and I was not able to cut the log properly. This led me to Zebra cookies.

Here comes the method for making these cookies. --- Since the log was flimsy I was not able to cut the dough log in proper round. So I cut the log  to 1/2 inch  plus thickness. --- Then cut the 1/2inch dough vertically, flattened it and formed a round shape. I got uneven color on the flattened uncooked cookie. --- Made some impression using the fork, sprinkled some raw sugar. Placed on the cookie sheet and baked them at 350 F at 10 - 12 minutes.

These cookies were a big hit, my husband still asks me how I made the patchy effect on the Zebra cookies and the double swirl effect on the Pinwheel cookies.

Christmas choco cookies

When I think of Deepavali, the first thing strikes my mind is the fresh smell of new clothes, next comes the smoke of crackers and different kind of sweets and savories. When I think of Christmas, it is decorations, Christmas tree, exchanging gifts and baking delicious cookies and cakes. It is just 4 days to Christmas and I like to drive through to see the light decorations in the night. It is very nice to see the houses, malls and the streets decorated with hundreds and thousands of lights.

My holiday celebration started from the Thanksgiving day. Windows are decorated with the cute multi coloured  LED lights and a kutti Christmas tree as a center piece of attraction. As a final part of the celebration, here comes the Christmas treat.

Baking cookies and cakes at home is a holiday tradition. Ginger bread, sugar cookies, butter cookies and cookies cut into various shapes related to holiday themes, fruit cakes... So many varieties.

Choco cookies

Infact, these choco cookies are ' little sister ' of the Bourbon biscuits, which I tried from Nithu's Kitchen. I used the same recipe, instead of filling the cream in between the two biscuits I used it to decorate on top of each cookie.

Ingredients : 1 cup -- All Purpose Flour 1/4 cup -- Butter 1/2 cup -- Sugar 1/2 tsp -- Instant Coffee Powder** 1/2 tsp -- Baking Soda 1/2 tsp -- Baking Powder 2 tbs -- Cocoa 1/2 tsp -- Vanilla Extract 4 - 5 tbs -- Milk ** Instant coffee powder is optional. But always try to use instant coffee are freshly brewed coffee when you are using chocolate in any recipe. This will enhance the chocolate flavour more. Method: --- Preheat the oven to 350 F. --- Mix the sugar and butter along with the vanilla extract. --- Sieve all the dry ingredients (Flour, Coco powder, Baking powder, Baking soda) except the instant coffee. --- To the dry mixture, add the instant coffee. If using fresh brewed coffee, you can add along with the sugar butter mixture. --- Slowly add the dry mixture to the wet ingredients and mix well. If required add milk half to one tsp at a time to the mixture and form a dough. --- Take the dough and roll them to 3- 4 mm thickness on a plastic sheet and cut them according to desired shape and bake it at 350 F for about 12-15 minutes. --- Once the cookies are out, cool them completely before doing any decoration on it.

This is a very simple cookie. To have a celebration touch I decorated these cookies with the store bought Icing tube, resembling the snow effects.

Bourbon biscuits

A glass of warm milk and plate of freshly baked Bourbon biscuits, Oh its great !
Bourbon biscuit is one of our favorite biscuits from the childhood. We all grew up eating this biscuit. Hope everybody agree with me. Even last week we bought two pack from an Indian Grocery and finished it on our way back from the shop. FYI, the distance from the shop to our home is only 2 miles. We can't stop eating after having one. I like the large crystal sugar on top of the biscuit.

I used to wonder how they make this biscuits. Even in my dreams I never thought of baking one by myself. 
But I did it, I baked my all time favorite Bourbon yesterday.
Thanks to Nithu, she commented in couple of my earlier posts. When I visited her space the first post I saw in 'Nithus's Kitchen' was Bourbon biscuit. Can't believe by myself, can we do these biscuits at home? If yes, then why shouldn't I try at once ?

Whenever I am trying a new recipe, always I will call my husband and tell him . About this Bourbon, I didn't give him any clue. Wanted to surprise him. Quickly went to the kitchen, took all the ingredients and started working on the biscuits. Since its our favorite one, I doubled all the measures.
Did a couple of changes from the original recipe.
**Instead of granulated sugar, I used Brown sugar.
** And I used 1/4 cup Vegetable oil and 1/4 cup butter. This is because I had only one butter stick, I needed 1/4 for cream, so...
Rest all I followed the same from the original recipe For the recipe, click here

The biscuits turned out perfect. Indeed my husband was little shocked on seeing this. He was so happy and announced that from now on he is going to stop buying outside. How is it !

Nanaimo Bars

At last I did it...

Hope you didn't forget my earlier post ' Cocoa burfi' and my experiment with Nanaimo bars. And also I promised that Hit or Flop I will share with you all.

I tried Nanaimo bars yesterday and here is the result. My first two layers were perfect, had a little difficulty in the third layer. Yet it was a big hit.

Nanaimo bars are rich in taste. No simple words can fully describe the taste of it, unless you try one. Nutty bottom layer filled with lots of Walnuts, Coconut, wafers, sweet and cocoa. Middle layer with soft custard Icing and the Top layer with rich chocolaty taste. Want to try this recipe at once, pls click here for the recipe with clear steps and photos from Chef in You.

Thus comes to frutition, one of my long pending chocolate dreams.

Tried and Tasted - The week that was

Its exactly a week since my in-laws came here. To showcase my newfound culinary talent I am doing different dishes in the evening. We usually do normal South Indian food for our meal. Since they haven't fully recovered from jet lag ,while they are asleep during the afternoon, I silently sneak into the kitchen and finish up everything before they get up.
So everyday its a sweet surprise for them.

One day I did 'Coconut Raisin Oats Cookies'. Its my husband's all time favorite. My cookie box will never go empty. This cookie is a must item when we go for a long drive. I tried this recipe from the Madhuram's eggless cooking . For our PA trip, I did oats cookies - 4 times of original measure.

Whenever I see any stew recipe in Food network channel I like to try it once without the meat. I was waiting for an opportunity to do a colorful vegetable stew. The time has come to try it. Oh yes, I did last week for dinner. It was so colorful and rich in taste, here and there the stew had the Indian touch.

Aren't these cut vegetables looking cute ? Similarly, my stew looked very colorful. Since I was in over excitement I didn't take the picture of my stew :(

Tuesday morning, I received my new Mandolin Slicer from Amazon. Can't wait to try that, wanted to slice something to know how it works. My husband warned me before leaving to office not to play with that. I wanted to surprise him also. Without making any noise, took some potatoes, did a thin slice and baked it in the oven for 400 Fahrenheit for 20 - 25 mins. That's it my Potato Chips were ready. I tried this baked chips from Divya Vikram's 'Dil Se'... This is again a recipe where I was waiting for a nice slicer to try it.
Unfortunately I didn't click this too, this all because of my husband. He didn't gave the chips bowl to take a snap :))

Yesterday, I did a very new recipe, which I didn't heard before at all. Want to know what ???

Tadaan, Its Mango kesari. When I was looking for a sweet recipe in Mango, I got this Mango kesari recipe from Priya's 'Easy N Tasty' recipes.  The original recipe had a pinch of food coloring, but I didn't add any, since the natural colour itself looked nice. Bright warm yellow !!!

I am rocking in my kitchen. Thanks to all food bloggers.

Cookies

To celebrate the launch of Preethi Bhojan I did cookies and cupcakes yesterday

And also to start with a sweet entry :)

Cookies and cakes : Just by varying some ingredients in the base recipe we can do wonders in baking.

For your convenience, here's Brief History about Cookies - mostly gathered from Wikipedia.

The cookies were originated in 7th Century in Persia (now Iran).

And in 16th Century Dutch and English immigrants introduced cookies to Americans.Since people started to explore all places, cookies were the ideal food. They stayed fresh for long periods (for an year), when stored in right conditions.

In 17th and 18 th Century, due to lack of sugar and more labour cost, cookies were considered as a spl treat. In Europe to become a baker one must undergo years of training (We are so lucky in this !!!)

During 19th century cookies developed tremendously because of Industrial revolution which lead to invention of Ovens, chemicals like Sodium bi carbonate (Self raising chemical)

Each country has its own name for cookie :

-- 'Biscuits' in England and Australia,

-- 'Galletas' in Spain,

-- 'keks' or 'Plätzchen' for Christmas cookies in Germany,

-- In Italy there are several names to identify various forms of cookies including ' amaretti ' and ' biscotti ' and so on.

The name cookie is derived from the Dutch word koekje, meaning "small or little cake."

Biscuit comes from the Latin word bis coctum, which means, “twice baked"

Talking about cookies, though I bake varieties here and try out many cookies when ever I hit grocery shop, my all time favorite is Bar-bone and Good Day biscuits.

But nothing will beat my home town bakery biscuits. We will get lot of freshly baked biscuits like coconut macaroons, salt biscuit, butter biscuit, Herb biscuits and so on. They will be always fresh.

I was a regular customer of the corner bakery shop.

One of my favorite here is Mint fudge cookie. Wish I could try to bake soon :))

I would like to go on and on about cookies but will reserve rest for a later post.