Cakes

I learnt baking cakes from my mom, who was an expert in making several at once. The favourites were banana (some times with walnuts) and chocolate. Carrot cake was my grandmom’s speciality and my aunt recently recreated the recipe and I have posted it here.

Last week I baked a chocochip cake and made a very quick blueberry cream sauce as icing. However, this was not really the cake that I set out to bake, it was the best out of the things that I had at home. I had some blueberries that were going bad, so I made some blueberry sauce by heating them up in a pan with sugar and lemon juice. Later, for making the icing, I just mixed the blueberry sauce with some cream and stored it in the refrigerator to cool down.

For the cake:

Ingredients:

• 3 eggs
• 3/4 cup oil (the cup that I use is about 150 ml)
• 1 cup sugar (the same cup)
• 1tbsp baking powder
• 1 and 1/2 cups flour (the same cup)
• 1/2 cup cream
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• a pinch of salt

Processs

1. Whisk the eggs, sugar and oil
2. Add the flour, baking powder, vanilla essence and cream to the above and mix well to form smooth batter. I added chocolate chips in the batter, one could experiment with all kinds of flavours, if it is banana, just add mashed ripe banana. For an orange cake, my friend Aimée added 1/2 a cup of orange juice and some orange zest.
3. Pour the batter in a cake tin and bake in the oven at 180 degree celcius for about 40–45 mins. You may check if it is cooked well by poking it with a toothpick and see if the toothpick comes out dry or has some batter attached to it. Also keep note of how the cake looks, a nice golden colour is great.
4. Serve hot or cool based on your choice. I poured the blueberry cream after the cake was a bit cool and then let it stay in the refrigerator for a few hours before eating.

Note: Oil can also be replaced by butter. That gives the cake a different texture and makes the crust crispier. For chocolate cake, cooking chocolate can be melted and added to the cake. Adding a pinch of salt at the top, just before putting the batter in the oven gives an interesting salty taste to each bite.

I am not great at measurements when it comes to cakes because I cook more with intuition, that’s also what I enjoy doing best. So if that is also your style, you could play with the quantities within a certain range and work out what taste works best for you.