TROPICAL MANGO PUDDING CAKE

The weather is so good right now in Minneapolis. It's perfectly warm during the day and cool during night.The Spring has sprung all over and we are enjoying this beautiful weather before Summer hits here. We get extreme temperatures so we are really not sure which season are we actually looking forward to! Anyhow, when I decided to make this dessert, I thought of sticking to one of my current favourite colours, Yellow!

So for the pudding cake, I stuck to mango as  it is definately the top choice at the moment for colour & taste and since I had a big can of puree with me, I did not see a reason why I shouldn't be using it! Plus, it's the best thing to use when you are not sure about the sweeteness of the mangoes you get in stores in Spring.That way you are sure to have a consistency for your recipes every time you need to make one!

This was meant to be a birthday cake for my relative who is also a grown up like us. So I made it less fancy and kept it simple. The cake was baked in a jiffy with the recipe that's engraved on my brain which is also the same recipe I used for the Mixed fruit Swiss Roll,Coffee - Chocolate Triangle Cake,Checkerboard Cake etc. The pudding hardly took any time to make and once it was layered up, I left them in the fridge to set. It's a quick cake - dessert if you have things handy.

I baked this cake having a totally different plan in mind but in the end, it was cut out into circles and got stuffed into my little cake rings. I love using cake rings because it gives you  your personal share of the dessert which clearly means...no sharing! It was a birthday gift  from Jobin 2 years ago and I've not been using it much as he would love me to. Mocha Marble Cheesecaklets were baked in it but other than that, none of them have appeared on the blog :-)

If you don't have the puree, you can always use the fresh ripe mangoes and puree them with sugar to taste. I usually use that but this time,like how I mentioned before I had a tin full of pulp with me which I bought a while back to make some Mango Lassi. Talk about that lassi,it's the most popular flavour in stores here and I love it!

TROPICAL MANGO PUDDING  CAKE
Recipe source for the cake : Amma
Ingredients for the cake:
1 c flour minus 2 tbsp
2 tbsp cornstarch
1 c sugar
5 eggs
1 1/2 tsp vanilla

Method: Pre-heat the oven to 180C/350F and line a jelly roll pan.
In a clean, dry bowl beat the sugar and eggs on high for 12 mins. Add the vanilla and beat for 10 secs. Fold in the flour and cornstarch, carefully without deflating it. Pour the batter into the cake pan and bake for 15-18 mins or until the top is pale brown and is springy to touch.
As soon as it is out of the oven, loosen the sides if need be and invert the cake onto a kitchen towel which was sprinkled with some sugar before. Remove the parchment and let the cake cool.Brush the cake with some water just to moisten it. Cut out rounds to fit your small cake rings.

Ingredients for the Eggless Mango Pudding
My own recipe
1 1/2 c heavy whipping cream
1  c sweetened mango puree
4 tbsp sugar or to taste
1 tbsp gelatin dissolved in 3 tbsp water

Method: Whip the cream to stiff peaks along with sugar and then fold the puree in. Melt the gelatin, cool it for a minute and then fold  it into the pudding / mousse.

Assembly: Place a round of the moistened cake in the cake ring and pour some mousse over it, cover it with another piece of cake and repeat. The top layer should be the mousse.Decorate as you wish. Refrigerate till set, for about 4-5 hours. Serve cold.

After the circles were cut up, there were some odd shapes left behind. So Jobin & I slathered some pudding over it and popped them into our mouths. It was seriously yummy! Infact I do it all the time to know how the end product would taste like :-) Try this quick dessert for your next party and make sure you eat the scraps too!

MY LEMON YOGURT CAKE

Ibaked my very own cake,for the first time! When I say that, I mean, I didn't use anybody's recipe but my own proportions to bring it all together.Don't ask me how I got till there...it was a long bumpy ride on a very dull Thursday. Fortunately the end result was mind blowing that being sad the whole day didn't matter after all! All the thoughts, worries and confusions yielded in an awesome sauce lemony cake!
OK. I have to tell you that long story and I am not going to cut it short :-)

Last Thursday was quite eventful at home, on the lines of baking. I tried my hand at baking a piped cookie whose dough was just not pipe-able so I rolled them into small balls and baked it. It came out just OK and not so good as the recipe stated. It was a butter cookie and there was a lot of butter in it. I cannot waste butter even if I have to waste the rest of the ingredients. Yeah! I'm like that.

So after a so-so butter cookie, I thought I'll do something to get me going.It's been days since I've been longing to eat a lemon flavoured cake. The hunt was on for a good recipe but seriously, I couldn't get one. During our many e-mails throughout the day, Jobin mentioned he was going for out with his colleagues after work and will be late to get back home. I got that email right after that stupid cookie and when all my search for the perfect lemon cake came to a full stop.

I whined. I wrote back saying 'I'm sad.I want to eat a nice plain lemon cake.I cannot find any recipe.Tried baking a cookie. Flop aayi. Sad.' I mean, seriously...when there are so many food blogs and recipe websites, how is it that I cannot find one recipe which sounded good to me??? Most of them had some sort of a topping going over the hot cake and I didn't want that extra sugar going into our bodies, if I could help it. So I thought I'll compromise and start on with Amma's recipe for her famous cake. That was the beginning...just the beginning of everything!

I took out my brand new digital weighing scale that I was sent for a review and started off measuring butter and sugar. I dumped them into my Reddie to do it's work. Then I moved onto measuring the flour and I painstakingly realised that I was short on it! The butter and sugar was busy creaming up and I don't have enough flour! Ok, let's move onto Plan B...I shall make do with some wheat flour then. Hmph! Ok, now grab the eggs...and for some strange reason, I knew there were not  many eggs left in the fridge. Sadly,it was true.I looked back at my Reddie and couldn't even think of dumping that butter!

Seriously, that was not my day! I am usually very careful and pull out all the ingredients before I start baking and I have no clue what was going on with me that day! I was so let down that I couldn't get a simple cookie right and finally this cake too? Like I said before, the end result changed everything! :-)

RIA'S LEMON YOGURT CAKE
My own recipe

Ingredients:
180g unsalted butter, softened
240g sugar
3 whole eggs plus 1 egg yolk
Zest & ( 3 tbsp ) juice of  1 lime or lemon
200g maida/all purpose flour
40g whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
5 tbsp yogurt

Method: Pre-heat the oven to 180 C/ 350 F. Line a 9 inch baking tin.
In a bowl, whisk together flours, salt, baking powder & baking soda.In another large bowl, beat together butter and sugar till creamy,for 2 mins. Add the eggs one by one and beat for 30 secs after each addition. Add the lime juice and zest and beat for 30 secs. The mixture will curdle but it doesn't matter. Add the flour mix and beat to incorporate. Add the yogurt and beat on high for a minute or two. Pour the batter into the tin and bake for 1 hour 10 mins. Your oven timings maybe different, so keep checking from 45 mins.

*Updated on 26/4/2020 - Over the years I revised the method for making the cake batter. Add all the ingredients into a bowl and beat it on high speed using a hand mixer for 2 minutes.

• My current oven bakes the cake in 45 minutes.
• You can use 4 whole eggs instead.
• You can use 240 grams of maida/ all purpose flour instead.
• My 1 cup flour measures 120 grams and 1 cup sugar 200 grams. 

I always dreamt about creating my own cake recipes and never did I even dream that it would be through an accident, a very careless accident! I've actually had a successful accident a while ago and it grabbed me 1st place at a competition too! So, no complaints with accidents! ;-) Don't worry, this cake wouldn't stick to the bottom of your pan as you saw in a photograph above, I was just piling up the crumbs into the tin after I got the cake out of it.

This cake was so so soft that I feared it would crumble in my hands when I unmoulded it. The lemon taste was spot on and the cake was so buttery & incredibly moist! I am so proud of myself ! :-) It really is a wonderful delicious lemon yogurt cake!