Passionate Flavours

Our friends, Jeshu and Shwetha, celebrated their first wedding anniversary last weekend. As a little gift from us I baked and decorated this peach and passion fruit cake with self made marzipan flowers, chocolate hearts and chocolate bars. It was a hit and disappeared in a matter of a few minutes!! Creamy, fruity, soft and delicious.

Happy Anniversary Jeshu and Shwetha! Our wish to you is that your marriage blossoms into a beautiful garden of love, trust, happiness and excitement!

Just by chance!

Yea, this is a product of an accidental discovery when browsing through Youtube videos for sewing projects. Canadian smocking is what the technique is called. I am so much in love with it. For starters a pretty table piece. Am sure am going to be smocking up lots more.

Step 1: A square piece of cloth. needle, thread, sequins/beads. Mark the grid.  

 Step 2: Sewing the flowers.












Step 3: Decorating with flowers.

Step 4: Adorning the bar table.

DIY: Table Mats

A week ago I was grounded at home because of cold and body pain. While I 'rested', I dug into my craft basket and the crafty side of my brain, and crafted out some really nice projects. Here's one of them. A simple technique and some simple materials gave me simple, pretty, economical table mats.

Earlier that week I had bought 4 yellow, 1 red and 1 orange felt sheets from a Euro store. Make sure they are the thick variety. Then I got some yellow thread, scissors and a needle from my sewing kit.

Using the yellow felt sheets as the base, I cut simple shapes from the red and orange sheets and then sew them on the base as in the pictures below. 

Nature's colour treat

Autumn is my favourite season. It's that time of the year when nature exhibits the most beautiful colours. Shades of red, orange, brown, maroon, yellow and green. Truly a visual treat in all its glory! That time of the year is back again. I guess it is nature's way of compensating for the sun's guest-like appearance and the gloom created by the haze, dark clouds and dropping temperatures and eventually naked branches.

I had gone for a walk recently when I picked up some leaves of different colours to decorate MIRAKEL, our home. Since I chose yellow and orange as the colour theme for this years autumn home decor, this collage suits perfectly. I'm simply following nature's law of compensation inside our home.

Pizza party

I love to cook! I love to eat! AND I love to feed! Quite a deadly combination in the kitchen I'd say :D And the result of that could sometimes be as deadlicious as this!

My husband and I invited one of our newly married friends home for dinner, drinks and sleep over. I wanted to keep away from the traditional rice, roti and curry combination. Since our friends are vegetarian and we wanted to keep the TGIF mood, I said a Pizza party is what we deserve!

I had baked a Pizza a couple of weeks ago but there was still something not so perfect in the bread. I looked up a couple more recipes online and then settled for this one. (I used butter instead of olive oil.) It turned out to be the perfect choice.

After you've left the dough to rise for at least 2 hours, roll it out on your baking pan and again leave it to rise for another 2 hours.

For the Pizza sauce with an indian touch you need:
1 tablespoon oil or butter
1.5 teaspoon chopped garlic
2 x medium sized onions chopped
1 x 400 gram tomato puree
3 green chillies slit
pepper and salt to taste
half teaspoon each of dried oregano, basil and parsley

Ideas for topping: For best results marinate overnight
1. Paneer (I used homemade paneer with 2 litres of milk), red capsicum (cut into rings) and onion: Marinate the two with 1 tablespoon curd, and salt, pepper, chilly powder, garam masala powder, coriander powder, jeera powder, turmeric. Also sprinkle some fresh chopped coriander.
2. Pineapple, mushrooms and capsicum: Marinate the mushrooms with chinese red chilly sauce and garam masala.

Assemble the pizza by spreading the sauce, then the topping and some Pizza cheese. Bake at 180 degrees for 20 minutes.
You'll refuse to order from a Pizza place again....!!!

Chocolate Truffle Cake

The truffle cake has been my all time favourite. I remember every birthday celebration at home meant a rich, moist, googy chocolate treat that we enjoyed with a scoop of vanilla ice cream or some potato chips. I decided to recreate that old time magic in my own kitchen and boy... I couldn't have been happy with the results!

We celebrated one year of moving into our own home MIRAKEL on the 28th of April and we treated ourselves to this piece of magic!

First get the following ingredients ready for the half kg sponge cake. Bake in a 6 inch baking tin at 190 C for 35-45 minutes depending on your oven. Let the cake cool on a wire rack.
Flour - 100 grams
Powder sugar - 115 grams
Egg - 2
Margarine - 90 grams
Baking powder - 1/4 tsp
Vanilla essence - 1/4 tsp
Milk - 1/3 cup
Cocoa powder - 15 grams

While the cake is baking prepare the icing and the decor.
You could use either black or white chocolate icing. The icing is known by different names, most commonly chocolate ganache, but also as chocolate fudge icing and chocolate truffle. Most recipes I found on the internet suggest more or less equal quantity of chocolate and whipping cream. I experimented with the following which gave me the perfect taste, shine and texture I was hoping for.
235 grams of dark/milk chocolate (I had a lot of chocolate bunnies and eggs from Easter, so I used that too)
200 ml cream
30 grams of butter
In a microwave proof glass bowl melt chocolate and cream for 2-3 minutes. Mix well till you get a homogenous mixture. Now add the butter and mix well. The icing will still be very thin. Leave it aside to cool. It will thicken gradually. You could also put it in the fridge.

Cut the cake horizontally into two parts. To moisten it further prepare a sugar syrup and sprinkle it over the cake that forms the base. You could also flavour the syrup with rum or orange essence. Once the ganache reaches a spreading consistency, layer it between the cakes. Sprinkle some more syrup on the top of the cake. Now pour the ganache over the top and sides and decorate as per your taste.

You might be curious to know more about the dolphin and hearts on the cake. Its simply melted white chocolate spread as shown in the picture on butter paper. The shape is guided by cookie or marzipan cutters.

For the dolphins I actually used coffee top decorators.

Ol turns new!

I love recycling things... And if that makes old stuff look like something new and different it should be good not just for the environment but also for the wardrobe! ;)

Last week my ol' pair of jeans were reincarnated into..... a trendy handbag!

For a video tutorial check here.

Cut the pair of jeans and stitch as shown in the video. I then used a belt from an old shirt and tied it to a loop to look like a bow. Using fabric paints I then painted a red and yellow flower on one of the pockets. In my sewing kit I had a few colourful cloth flowers which I hand-stitched on the rim of another pocket.
If you like you could use velcro, a zip or buttons to close your bag.

pingu key chain

A non-working day plus public transport strike results in this cute Pingu keychain.

All you will need is black felt cutout as body, yellow or orange felt for the beak and feet, white for the tummy and loop. These will look like this...

I had saved an old keychain ring for this project. Get two little beads to look like eyes.

Once I had cut the felt, I stitched the white piece of felt for the loop on the back side top end of the body. The eyes, beak, feet and stomach were stuck using craft glue. 

This took approximately 20 minutes to complete.