Secretly Vegan Carrot and Plum Cake- Eggless and Dairy free

 

All is quiet, the little one is fast asleep, snug between his two cousins, and dreaming of Santa. I am writing this post quickly just to share with you a quick and super easy recipe for a plum cake that happens to be vegan. But you really shouldn't label it a vegan cake and it's not really a traditional Christmas cake. It's just a really good moist cake that happens to be vegan- mahed bananas replace the eggs and most of the fat, with grated carrots and enough chopped dried plums to make it Christmassy

After complaining about my dislike for fruitcake in my guest post for Shulie, you must be wondering why I am here with a fruit cake recipe right? Well I do want to give fruit cake one more try, and also wanted my little one to get a taste of some Christmas-time traditions that his mom grew up with! Since he is allergice to dairy and eggs, I just adapted his favourite banana cake into something more Christmassy and quite healthy yet delicious too!
You can soak the fruits in brandy or rum and spices as in traditional fruitcake if you like, but as I have mentioned (repeatedly here ), I am not a fan, so I just soaked the plums in warm water to soften it and it really did the trick, making them plump and moist.

Merry Christmas!

Carrot Banana Plum Cake

Ingredients ( The order in which these ingredients are added is important):

• 4 medium very ripe bananas peeled and mashed well till no lumps remain ( the riper the bananas the stronger the banana flavour.) 
• 1/4 cup oil
• 1 cup sugar ( I have  halved this amount too and it works- just made the cake a little drier)
• 2 cups flour
• 3 TBSP water, 3 TBSP oil, 2 tsp baking powder (all mixed together in that order and kept aside for about 5 minutes prior, not much more ahead else it may lose some of the fizz require to make the cake rise)
• 1/4 tsp, baking soda
• 1/2 tsp vanilla essence ( optional) 
• 1 cup chopped dried plums or prunes ( soak the fruits in warm water or just put them in a bowl of water and heat in the microwave for 15 secons to make them moist) 
• 1 cup grated carrots 

Method:
Preheat oven to 350 F degrees or 325 F if using a glass pyrex dish 

Grease and flour a 9X5 inch loaf pan, or a pyrex bowl as I used in the photos above, to give it a traditional Christmas pudding look ( I used vegetable oil to grease the pan and didn't flour it, but lined the bottom with parchment paper, cutting the paper where it bent and creased and overlapping it to make it as smooth as possible to fit the curved shape of the bowl)

In large mixing bowl, mix all ingredients in order given ( if you don't follow the order, things may not work so its VERY IMPORTANT!). Pour into pan and bake 40 to 50 minutes. 

Let it cool in the pan for about 10-15 mins. Then run a knife around the sides of the pan.
Invert it onto a plate or cooling rack and let cool completely

You can also bake this in muffin or cup cake tins and it would be perfect for breakfast

Am sending this cake over to Simone of Junglefrog Cooking who is hosting the Monthly Mingle as well as a sparkling photo challenge

Tweet

nutella swirl steamed cupcakes in 15 minutes

This is what I made for World Nutella Day yesterday. I've been excited about it for weeks. Sooo many ideas for nutella oozing desserts to make kept buzzing around my brain. I have been happily digging into my jar of nutella all week in anticipation. Finally I was jolted out of my daydreams to realize that I had better make something or it would be too late to post even by today. It was quite late in the evening and the sun had already set so the pics were going to be quite terrible to begin with. I reached into the cabinet for that little jar to see that we were nearly out. Of nutella. There was probably a few tablespoons left in the jar. Great, just great. I had to make a nutella dessert for world nutella day  with a couple of tablespoons of nutella.

That's when I chanced upon a recipe for these steamed cakes. I loved that the recipe calls for very little amounts of ingredients so that it yields only 4 cup cakes- perfect for my current obsession for portion control and small batch baking. And all I had to do was swirl a spoonful of nutella into the batter to make a perfectly delicious nutella dessert. They take about 15 mins to make, use basic ingredients and all you need is a saucepan or skillet with a lid and a stove. No oven required. But best of all is the texture! oh the texture!- its  moist but not dense, fluffy and airy without being dry! I did find the basic cake to be a little less sweeter than I like but that spoonful of nutella will take care of that :)

This is a nutella-tised version of Mushi-pan a Japanese steamed cake. Steaming is a common alternative for baking in Asian cuisine. In Kerala we have a variety of steamed rice flour appams as part of our traditional cuisine. A lot of western style sponge cakes are also made in steamer baskets or pressure cookers in Asia because not many people have ovens. Growing up some of my birthday cakes were cooker cakes since most ovens in India run on electricity and we are plagued by frequent power cuts and voltage problems. Even during my last visit to India in December I had rotten luck with the power cuts seemingly scheduled for the exact moment that I put a pan full of batter into the oven!
Brands like Pillsbury even make cake mixes especially meant for pressure cookers in India and those were some of the first cakes I made, often for roommates birthdays when we had a stove but not even our dinky little toaster oven yet.
These little cakes brought back a lot of memories of those birthdays and they are quick and easy enough that I will be making them in other variations soon. Stay tuned.

Tweet

whipped cream cake- soft airy and cloud-like!

I am totally enjoying having my mom here. Whenever I am with her I hardly even enter the kitchen and happily relax and enjoy her delicious cooking. Everything -even things that I make all the time like dal and even coffee tastes better when mom makes it for me. Mothers have some extra special kaipunyam or magic touch, don't you think?
But I am always game to make the dessert so when she said she felt like eating cake, I happily obliged with this treasure from Rose Levy Beranbaum who is considered the Queen of cakes. This cake is apparently one of her most popular and with good reason. It is tender, airy and cloud-like. Perfect as a simple tea cake or as a layer cake underneath oodles of frosting and it is my current and absolute favourite- a definite must try for all cake lovers! 

Here is a close up shot so you can see how tender it is! Similar to an angel food cake in texture but minus all those eggs and so much easier to make! 

The main fat comes from heavy whipping cream and not butter. Yes you read that right, this unusual cake contains no butter, instead using cream. I am dying to buy a carton of cream and make this again with some simple whipped cream frosting or my favourite chocolate nutella ganache frosting with the leftover cream, or maybe slathered in some dulce de leche , or with some juicy fruit? Mmmm the possibilities! Since we practically inhaled this cake though, you can guess that it's pretty awesome on its own! 

Tweet