Fruit pie

Ingredients:
Ready made biscuit crumb pie crust,
Vanilla cook and serve pudding,
2 kiwi,
1 apple

1. Peel the apple and chop it into very fine tiny pieces.
2. Peel and slice 1 kiwi thinly and line the base of the pie.
3. Cook the vanilla pudding.
4. Add the chopped apple into the pudding stirring it in well.
5. Pour the pudding into the pie crust.
6. Decorate the top of the pie with the remaining kiwi slices.
7. Keep outside for 2 hrs to cool well. Then refrigerate overnight.
Serve cold.

Time taken : 1/2 hour + overnight to set.

My cake creations

For the past 1 year I have been hooked 24X7 on Food Network..... especially Ace of Cakes, Challenge and Cake Boss on TLC. I often caught myself staring open mouth at the amazing cakes they made..... Now finally, after seeing almost a million episodes I have started turning my small kitchen into my own little Carlos Bakery / Charm City Cakes :-)

Here are my cakes :

3 layer Vanilla and Chocolate cake with chocolate whipped cream and chopped fresh strawberries filling. Covered with chocolate whipped cream frosting and marshmallows.

A wedding anniversary cake for 4 friends sharing the special occasion.

Looking at the cake I realize that my cake writing skills are really pitiable :-) hehe

Chocolate brownie cake covered with chocolate ganache.

A birthday cake for my husband.

Semiya Payasam

Semiya payasam

Ingredients

Milk, cashew, raisins, semiya, cardomom, sugar, ghee

1. Boil and cool milk. stir to make sure it does not birn and stick.
2. Roast cashew and raisins separately in ghee
3. Roast the semiya in ghee.
4. Add the milk to the roasted semiya. Stir it continuosly.
5. After it thickens a bit, add sugar.
6. Add nuts and raisins.
7. Add smashed cardomom.
8. If it thickens too much after cooling, add milk and reheat before serving.

Total time: 1.5hrs

Biscuits

This is what i have been upto in the weekend :-)

You will need:
Maida 2 and 1/5 cups

Butter 3/4 cup (melted)

Sugar 1 cup (finely powdered)

Eggs - 2

Essence - 1 tsp (vanilla, rose flavour or any of your coice)

Baking powder - 1/2 tsp
Process:

1. Beat the eggs, sugar and melted butter together to get a fine paste. It should not have any lumps. Can even be mixed using a mixer. Add the essence to this.

2. After the loose paste type mixture is very smooth, add in teh baking powder and slowly mix in the maida a bit at a time . Even this can be mixed the same way the butter and sugar was done. Pat and knead the whole mixture into a very soft and smooth dough.

3. After it is done, refrigerate it for abt 3 hours. Later When we take it out, the dough will be more stiff.

4. Preheat your microwave in convection to 175 deg cent.

5. In the meantime, roll out the dough and cut out into shapes which you would like to have your biscuts. I just did it simply with a knife to get square biscuits.

6. After the pre-heating is done, put the cut out biscut dough pieces on a baking tray which is buttered or on a baking sheet and bake for about 10 mins.

7. Let it cool. It will harden more after it cools down. The biscuits are done.

8. Chocolate biscuits can be done in the same way if about 2 heaped spoons of cocoa powder are mixed into the mixture in step 1.

Check out this funny page of biscuit proverbs!! :-)

http://www.borderbiscuits.co.uk/biscprov.html