Egg free, nut free, dairy free cup cakes

Today is my little ones birthday and I have to send cup cakes to school. There are kids in the school with so many allergies and when I spoke to the teacher she said, the cup cakes had to be egg, dairy and nut free. Egg free isn't a problem as we are vegetarians and don't eat eggs anyway but I couldn't find anything in the store that were also nut and dairy free. The bakery people told me that generally its not readily available and it had to be pre ordered. So I decided to make it, I dint have time to test it, I had to make them yesterday. I visited over 100 sites and wasn't very sure of any recipes until I found Sweetrosie's blog. I decided to give it a ago and it turned out really good. I hope kids enjoy them too. The only changes I made to the recipe was, I used olive oil instead of sunflower oil and used apple cider vinegar instead of lemon juice. Thanks Sweetrosie for such a wonderful recipe.

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.



 

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!