Wanderberry Tales

And it is a year already! This blog was born with little or no idea how long it would sustain but here we are - Our first milestone! And we intend to attain many more. It has been a tremendous learning experience all along. We confess that we are not the experts, we experiment, trial and errors along the way and happy successes too. We have presented our successes to you and learnt from our failures to better the food we present to you in every way. My gratitude to all my family, friends and everyone of you for the encouragement through your constant likes and comments! Cheers to one year of happiness through food blogging! Lemon Cake with Honey Lemon Drizzle - that is our latest fad. Here is the recipe for you - Ingredients For the cake -  All Purpose Flour - 2 cups Sugar - 1 cup Vegetable Oil - 1 cup Egg - 3 no.s Vanilla essence - 1 tsp Baking powder - 1 tsp Lemon zest - 2 lemons Lemon juice - 2 lemons salt - 1/4 tsp For the drizzle -  Ho...

Christmas is fast approaching and I am so excited. It is vacation time, a wedding in the family and a lovely festive get together. It is the best time of the year in so many ways this year and I have begun my countdown! 5 days to go for Christmas and 5 days for me to shop, pack and catch the flight.  It is another wonderful season and like I said in my previous blog entry, I hope you are enjoying the season to the full. If not here are some perfect movies to watch this week -  Santa Claus trilogy, a perfect family entertainer to watch with your family. 12 gifts for Christmas, reminds you that festive season is the time for your loved ones. Deck the halls - a comedy that keeps up the spirit of Christmas. Have you put up your tree yet? If not, what are you waiting for? Hurry, put up your tree and star. hang your stockings, adorn your door with wreath, finish your Christmas shopping, let the baking begin and let the carol bells chime all the day through - because i...

It is the best time of the year again. I may be a little too early.  Nevertheless,the weather is too tempting and the carols playing are just so joyful that I cannot let it go unnoticed. That is how I came to bake today after a long day at work. The aroma from the hot oven is tickling palates around here. Shibin ( that is my husband) and I love Christmas. Perhaps that is what drew us close - our love for Christmas. I remember how endlessly we could chat about Christmas and the holiday season earnestly before we were married. This is our second Christmas together and we vow to make this Christmas even more beautiful than our first one together. Carols to wake us up in the morning and Christmas movies that make our evenings! I would be doing a grave injustice, if I forget to mention CBN radio - an American radio station that plays carols round the year. That is what is playing right now, giving me the Christmas spirit. For those who love Christmas as much as I do, google up CBN ...

Chocolate Coffee Cake was one of the first cakes that I baked for my husband. We loved to share a piece of cake over a cup of coffee on the evenings after a busy day at work. Baking is all the more fun when you do it together with your family. And, we did it together. Responsibility divided between the three of us - my husband , my cousin and myself.  My cousin made his debut at baking a cake, me the actor and my husband the director. The cake definitely fared well at the box office:) Here is my recipe - Ingredients All purpose flour - 2 cups Sugar - 1 and 1/2 cup Cocoa Powder - 3/4 cup Baking Powder - 1 tsp Salt - 1 pinch Milk - 1/2 cup Oil - 1/2 cup Vanilla essence - 1 tsp Coffee powder - 1 and 1/2 tbsp Eggs - 4 Hot water - 1 cup Method Prepare coffee decoction in a cup of hot water and let it cool. Sieve the all purpose flour, cocoa powder,salt and baking powder to avoid lumps. Separate the egg yolk and the egg whites. Beat the white until fl...

Jam roll always reminds me of the summer vacations while we were still at school -a long two month hiatus in Kerala along with my cousins. There was a routine established for the four of us and the most important of it all being the 5 pm wait on our balcony for my aunt to get back from work - for pouncing on the goodies in her bag. She never failed us.  Jam Roll was my favorite, it always intrigued me. Sometimes I would just bite into it hungrily and sometimes I took the time to unroll it lick away the delicious mixed fruit jam and then dig on the cake. The 'little me' never would have imagined that she would actually be making jam roll one day. The idea of trying out something like this popped up when we brought orange marmalade. I was tasting it for the very first time and it did not fascinate me much. I had a bottle full of it and did not absolutely want it to rot away. That is when my hubby told me why not try a Swiss roll? I was clueless how this was done. Ye...

It all started for Christmas in 2012 when a colleague gave me a cake recipe. The very same day I purchased all the ingredients and made my very first cake. I did not have an oven and resorted to baking the cake in a cooker. ( you need to be careful, you don't use water and gasket and the cooker gets mighty hot). Since then, I have tried a lot of cakes in the cooker. It did turn out tasty but often a little too hard with the bottom and the edges burnt, I have also tried the traditional method of baking where the cake tray is inserted into a vessel with hot sand generally kept over the traditional chullah. The vessel is then covered with a lid with burning coal on top as well so that the cake gets evenly baked. I was too scared to handle that and it was my mother who was a master in that and me just a by stander. It was only post marriage in 2014 that I learnt to use an oven to bake cakes. I had no idea about the right temperature nor the timings .After a few burnt and also...