Whole Wheat Biscotti

Biscotti - I love them and I have tried many different recipes with limited success. Finally after lot of permutations and combinations I have finally mastered the basic recipe.

Ingredients
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
Pinch of salt
1 egg
6 tbsp of sugar
Few drops of vanilla essence
Crushed nuts (optional)
Chocolate chips (optional)

Mix the egg, sugar and vanilla essence and whisk it till the mixture becomes light yellow. If you have a hand mixer, it will be a lot easier
Slowly add the dry ingredient (wheat flour, baking soda and salt) into the egg mixture and mix it into a dough.
The mixture is very sticky. Add nuts and chocolate chips.
Place the mixture in a baking pan in a single mound and flatten it. Be careful the mixture is very sticky.
Bake the mixture at 350C for 15 min. The mixture will bake and should have a slight brown color on the outside. Afterwards remove from the oven and cut the baked mixture into biscotti. This recipe makes about 6-8 biscotti.
Now you can keep the biscotti back in the oven and let it rest to make it crunchy. I just use the residual heat in the oven for this part.
If you want soft biscotti, do not keep them back in the oven.
That's it, you will be done in less than half an hour!

Caramel Custard or Flan

Whenever I have limited dinner options, I end up making some dessert. :) My go-to dessert is Caramel Custard or Flan. All the ingredients are easily available and it is easy to make.

Ingredients
3 eggs
4 Tbsp Sugar
Pinch of Salt
Vanilla essence
1 1/2 cup Milk (I used 1%, but you can use any other type)
10 Tbsp of Sugar (for Caramel)

Warm up the Milk and add salt and vanilla essence. Keep it aside to cool
In another bowl whisk together the eggs and sugar till sugar dissolves.
Prepare caramel by heating the Sugar in a pan till it slightly changes color. Be attentive as the caramel can burn quickly. Pour the caramel into  the ramekins or molds. Be careful with the caramel - it is hot and it cools and hardens pretty quickly. I learnt that the hard way!!
Now mix the milk and egg mixture, whisking it. Then pour it in the prepared ramekins.
Heat the oven to 325C and place the ramekins in a water bath (a container filled with hot water in which the ramekins are placed) and cook for 30 minutes or until the custard is done. To check insert a knife and it should come out clean. Even if the custard is done, it is still jiggly. So no worries.
Cool the ramekins and then place them in the refrigerator.
Once you are ready to serve, de-mold the custard. It comes off easily.
As you can see from the picture, the flan looks great and is tasty!!
Some of the other recipes use condensed milk, but I prefer simpler, healthier recipes and this ones tastes as good as any other. So definitely try it!

Breakfast Muffins

This morning, I wanted to try a different take on standard breakfast. So I combined the breakfast ingredients to make these awesome muffins. I love baking with minimum measurements, no butter (as far as possible) and less sugar. You can imagine that most of experiments are not crowd favorites. But these muffins turned out really good!

The recipe is easy

3/4 cup Whole Wheat Flour
1/4 cup Instant Oats
pinch on Nutmeg
pinch of Baking soda
1/3 cup Sugar / Brown Sugar (whatever you prefer)
1 egg
1/2 banana mashed
1/2 carrot grated
1/3 cup milk (I used 1%, feel free to use whatever you want - skim, whole)
1 tsp of olive oil
Nuts, Chocolate Chips (optional)

Mix all the ingredients and pour it in a muffin tray. Bake for 15min at 350C.
You will have great breakfast muffins!!

 

I had some leftover icing, so also decorated some of the muffins!!

 

Valentine's Day Breakfast.. :)

Thinking of a Valentine's day gift was a herculean task for me. I searched on Amazon for days but did not find anything that I really liked.
So I just ended up making -

The process is same as used for making a normal pancake, only difference is that you pour the batter in a heart-shaped ring. :)
You have to be careful not to fill up the mold to the top otherwise bottom of the pancake is overcooked and top is undercooked.

Next: Heart shaped omelet.. :D

Whole Wheat Pizza

Recently I got a packet of yeast, so I was waiting for an opportunity to make bread / pizza or something similar. But I don't really like All-purpose flour, so when I found out this Whole Wheat Pizza base recipe made from 100% whole wheat, I immediately sprung into action.

I made half the quantity and it made a decent size flatbread enough for 2 people's lunch.

I made this for lunch so I had to be quick, the trick is when the dough is resting you can make the tomato sauce and save yourself some time. Below is the recipe of the quick tomato sauce. It is nowhere close to a Marinara sauce, but tastes great and when you can have a healthy, home-made pizza for lunch, I am not complaining.

Tomato Sauce
2 tomatoes diced
3 cloves of garlic
couple of basil leaves
salt and olive oil for taste

Dice the tomatoes and add the garlic, basil, salt and olive oil and make a paste in a blender
Then transfer it to a pan and cook it till it thickens into a sauce (you can add some rice flour if the tomatoes are too watery)

Once the dough was rested, I rolled it on a cookie sheet which acted as a 'pizza stone'.

Then with the base rolled out, spread the sauce, put some mozzarella, tomatoes and basil on it and done. Just toss it in the over at 500F for 15 - 20 min and it is done.

Once this initial experiment was successful I tried out various different toppings - pesto, bell peppers and they all tasted amazing!