Quilling sampler

I wanted to do 4 small quilling samplers and hang them on the wall together. I sarted with the first one. It turned out pretty good. I used 6 by 6 inch pre stretched canvas. I will complete all 4 and post how I display it on the wall. I have trouble with the curves but I am sure with practice I will get a hold on it very soon.

Krishna glass painting

I am back again with another glass painting. I just loved the way it turned out. I was going to use glass colors but i ended up using acrylic paints. I started with glass paints at first but it was too thin and translucent, I wanted it to be more towards opaque. I gifted it to my friend at their house warming ceremony. I found this design on easycrafts blog. I am very happy with it and my friend just loved it. She has proudly displayed it in her informal dining.

Quilling ganesha

Another Ganesha! I just love doing ganesha designs. This one especially is so simple, quick and elegant. Again a lovely gift for family and friends for ganesha chaturthi!

Kundan Ganesha

I love Kundan. It looks so elegant and grand on anything from saree, jewellery to beautiful wall hanging. I was always fascinated by kundan work. Recently I discovered the art of kundan rangoli and found this beautiful design on the internet. First I made this on transparency sheet and used it as rangoli then I thought of trying it on glass and it turned out very good and also now I can hang it on the wall permanantly rather than displaying it as a rangoli once in a while. Since the first one I made 4 already as a gift to few of my friends and family. Its a great gift for ganesh chaturthi too. I used 2 dollar shop glass frame and 2 dollar shop self sticking rhinestones. I got some golden beaded chain from india that I used for the borders. It very easy art and it took me only couple of hours to complete the full picture.

Sequin art - Peacock

I was shopping at Riots arts and craft store few weeks ago and I saw someone had displayed this amazing sequin arts which were of lot of different things, size and shape. We used to work with sequins(Chamki) a lot in childhood and I had forgotten all about it. I am always fascinated by peacock designs, doesnt matter whether its on fabric or its on paper. I decided to do a peacock with sequin, next quest was to find a good design, I went around every art and craft store and couldnt find any sequin peacock art set. I found this in one of the online stores. It was a little expensive but I think it was totally worth as it came with material. It took me about 4 weeks to complete this.

Crysanthemum flower garland

The other day I was window shopping at Morris & Sons and look what I found, really cool sets of pom pom maker.

I just bought them not knowing what I am going to do with them, then an idea struck me, why not make some flower garland, so I made sample of each size of pom pom, selected the best size and finally made a flower garland. I used 2 colors for it an about 110 pom poms. I then used a thick flower wire to make the stem for each pm pom then threaded them together with green thick polyester thread. It looks like crysanthemum(Shavantke) flower from far. Looks wonderful on the photograph of lord Dattatreya. I am very happy with it.

Chomai (Rice vermicelli)

Chomai is an authentic Sankethi dish which is made using rice flour. Its a very long process. The rice flour has to be made in a very specific way. The rice is washed few times and dried, then is taken to the rice mill to be grinded to a fine flour. Then this flour is cooked in water and is made into a dough. This dough is then steamed in a cooker and then it is pressed though Chomai machine. It takes a long time but today I am showing a shortcut way to do this Chomai with fine semolina and it tastes the same anyway. Unfortunately practice makes a man perfect and it needs lot of practice to make this. Very experienced people also fail to get the right texture if it is not done properly. It took me a while to get it right, but again when I tried few days ago when some guests had come, it dint come that well even though I used the exact same recipe. I always have dragon at home as a back up.
In this recipe I have used mainly semolina but one of my friends mom uses 3:1 ratio of semolina and plain flour and she said that it came out well, I haven't tried it yet.
The best method is still the old school using washed rice flour (Tolada akki hittu).

Ingredients for the vermicelli
1. 4 cups of fine semolina
2. 5 cups of Water
3. Salt
4.  1to 2 tablespoon of olive Oil

Ingredients for the flavour

Lemon flavour
1. Lemon juice
2. Salt
3. Green chillies
4. Mustard seeds
5. Oil
6. Coriander leaves
7. Curry leaves
8. Turmeric

Method for the lemon flavour

1. Season oil with mustard seeds, chilli and curry leaves.
2. Then add salt, turmeric and lemon juice
3. Garnish with coriander

Tamarind Flavour
1. Lemon size tamarind juice
2. Jaggery (Palm sugar)
3. Red chillies
4. Oil
5. Salt
6. Coriander leaves
7. Mustard seeds
8. Curry leaves
9. Peanuts

Method for Tamarind flavour
1. Mix tamarin juice, jiggery, salt and chillies, boil them together until it thickens
2. Season oil with peanuts, mustard seeds and curry leaves and mix it to the above paste
3. Garnish with coriander leaves

Method for the vermicelli

1. Mix water, semolina, salt and oil together and rest it overnight.
2. Batter will be elastic and will be of thick consistency as shown.

 

3. Grease the idly stand with oil and steam them like idly for 30 minutes.

 

4. Once steamed, the idly will look like this.

 

5. This is Chomai presser or machine.

 

6. Now take the Idlys out immediately and put them in the presser hot and start pressing.

 

7. Now slowly mix the flavours to this vermicelli and enjoy!
8. You can make sweet flavour too by just mixing this with sugar and desicated coconut. Not many people like it sweet but I love it.



 

Musical abstract

I wanted something very contemporary for my formal lounge. I went around looking for paintings but they were all so expensive and I was wondering to myself, what if I just painted something. Then I thought about Australian Aboriginal art but then my alter ego laughed at me ha you don't have patience to do dot painting, I thought I will prove it wrong but anyway I couldn't decide on the design so dropped the idea. I was searching for on the internet for some abstract then suddenly idea struck me, I just searched musical abstract in the Google search engine and it gave me loads of results, well I selected the easiest one. The real challenge was to draw the enlarged version to the right proportion but finally I ended up with something which looks abstract and not bad at all!

Decorating stairs

Whenever I climbed upthe stairs at home, I felt that the walls were very plain and I have to do something there. I did not want any family photographs as most people have on the staircase wall as it is a small area. I wanted something contemporary and lots of colors. I thought that I will do small canvas paintings but then I found these beautiful square glass paintings on the internet and decided to do them. They came out very nice and I am quite happy with it. At first I had trouble finding square glass frames, found them in dollar shop. They were plain yellow wood but I painted them black. I also got couple of packs of glass paints in there which is a bit weird as I havent seen glass paints in dollar shops before.

World famous architecture glass painting series

I was quite fascinated by the art of glass painting. It looks like its impossible to produce beautiful art work on glass. It looks harder than it actually easy, infact its a lot easier to paint on glass than on canvas :)
I tried few small glass paintings before I took up the challenge of doing something big such as world famous buildings. My first big one was world famous Taj Mahal. I found crystal art blog very useful. It has so many variety of glass art and techniques are explained very well in detail along with the material required.
It took me quite a while to find the right frame. Its not easy to find glass here and framing is very expensive. Finally I found the right photo frame and started with the first one with gold, unfortunately after two, I ran out of gold so thought that it would be good if I missed silver so restarted the third one with silver. I ran out of silver too, so I did the statue of liberty with gold. I quite enjoyed doing this, I completed this in 3 week nights and I am quite happy with the final product.


 

Aaloo bun

Aaloo bun (Potato bun) is one of the most delicious snack invented in Bangalore bakeries ever. Anyone living or lived in Bangalore will know what I am talking about. When I was working in Bangalore whenever it rained, I would go straight to one of the bakeries near by and buy this aaloo bun and have it with a cup of ginger tea and its heavenly! There is a bakery in almost every street of Bangalore. We miss these buns a lot especially during monsoon season. My sister bought me a bread machine couple of years ago and I started experimenting various different things with it. I used to make aaloo buns before, using conventional oven but now since I have this Bread machine, the things are much simpler now and easier. I tried various different ways and finally selected the best one.

Ingredients for the cover:
Water – 100 ml (I added onion and other herbs which has some water content and hence reduced to 100 ml, if no onion or herbs added then 280ml of water is required)
Oil – 2 tablespoon
Salt – 1 Teaspoon
Sugar – 1 Tablespoon
Bread flour – 500 grams
Bread improver – 1/2 teaspoon
Milk powder – 1 tablespoon
Yeast – 1 packet (1.5 teaspoon)
Butter – 1/4 cup
Cumin seeds – 1 teaspoon
Dil herb – 1 tablespoon
Onion – 1/2 cup
Red pepper – 1/2 cup
Red chilli powder – 1 tablespoon
Garam masala – 1 tablespoon

Ingredients for filling:

Oil for seasoning
Musturd seeds
Cumin seeds
1/4 cup Green capcsicum
Chillies to taste
4 large onions
About 15 to 20 medium sized potato
Salt to taste
1 spoon dill
Chilli powder to taste
Coriander leaves to garnish

Method for the cover:

1. Add water to the bread machine tumbler.

2. Add oil

3. Add salt

4. Add sugar

5. Add butter

6. Add bread flour

7. Add cumin seeds

8. Add dill

9. Add bread improver

10. Add milk powder

11. Add yeast

12. Add finely chopped red pepper

13. Add finely chopped onions

14. Add chilli powder

15. Add garam masala

16. Now put this tumbler back into the bread machine and sleect the option 'dough only' and start ther machine.

17. Keep watch when its mixing to make sure the water content is enough, if not just add a little more water else if water is more and dough seems to be sticking, then add little flour to make it consistent.

18. While the bread machine is preparing the dough (usualy it takes 125 minutes, different machines have different settings), we can make the filling.

Method for the filling

1. Take a kadai/non stick pan and add oil and heat it

2. Add mustard and cumin seeds

3. Once they splatter, add green chillies.

4. Add capscicum

5. Let it cook and then add onions

6. Add herbs such as dill

7. Add chilli powder and garam masala and mix well

8. Add salt to taste

9. Boil the potatoes and mash them well

10. Add the mashed potatoes and mix well

11. Now add coriander to garnish

Method for the bun

1. Once the bread machine beeps, the dough is ready, here is what it looks like

2. Filling is also ready

3. Now take little dough and roll it to palm size

4. Add the filling and cover it, you can seal it with little bit of water

5. Make plate full of these buns

6. Bake these in a 160 degree Celsius oven for about 20 minutes or until golden brown

7. This is how it looks like once done

8. Enjoy with a cup of ginger tea!

Eggless vanilla cake

You can smell the freshly baked cake from the 50 meter radius of any Bakery in Bangalore. I just love them and since we do not eat eggs, its hard to get the fluffiness that you usually find in the cakes with eggs.  I tried various versions of the eggless vanilla cake and finally found Madhuram’s recipe was close to what I would like, I made some modifications as it wasnt sweet enough.

Ingredients

• 2.5 cups of self raising flour
• 2 Tablespoon of custurd powder
• 2 Teaspoon Baking powder
• 1 Teaspoon Baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup Powdered Sugar
• 1 Can condensed milk (395 gram can)
• 1 Cup water
• 2 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
• 2 caps vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup melted butter (75 grams)
• 1 Cup milk

Method

1. Mix all the dry ingredients and sieve them through

2. Add all the wet ingredients and mix well

3. Now mix the dry ingredients to wet ingedient spoon by spoon and mix well

4. Bake at 160 degree celcius for 50 minutes or until golden brown

5. Cut and enjoy!