Color me Orange! (Pix Credit: Lukas, Berlin)

Holidays are back again! Time for all things exciting and beautiful. Holiday decorations, gifts, loved ones and not to mention the cakes and bakes.

To help you kick start the baking season, here is a quick tutorial on how to make dried orange peel that goes as a secret ingredient in many yummy cakes, bakes and savories. A little secret about the orange peels is that it curbs your hunger pangs too

Oranges are in season and orange peels go into garbage. A better way is to harvest all the orange peels, sit in the comfort of your chair and make candied orange peels that you can eat right out of your tin or add to your cakes.

How to make dried orange peel
Here is a simple recipe with no hard and fast rules for measurement. You will arrive at the best quantity of each ingredient after an attempt or two. Here is my personal favorite:

• Peels of 2 big oranges (having eaten the lovely fruit)
• Sugar – Handful
• Water – Enough to cover the peels

Having eaten the orange, collect the leftover peels.

With a spoon or a knife, clean the pith. The white part of the peel is slightly bitter and can be removed. If you like a bit of bitterness in your baked goodies, you can leave it on. I prefer scraping the pith as the dried orange peel tastes sweet and tangy.

Scrape the pith for making dried orange peels

Wash the peels thorougly and cut it into thick or thin slices.

Julienne Well - Cut orange peel into thin slices

You can wash the thin slices again before you boil to ensure all the scraped pith and little bits are left behind.

Strips of orange peel ready to become candy

Boil the peel in adequate water with sugar. You could leave it on slow fire for a while for the peels to become tender.

15 minutes should suffice.

Boil - to infuse the peel with sugary sweetness

Drain out the peels, spread it on a plate or tray and leave it out in the sun for 2 days.

Sun-kissed luscious strips

After two days, take a bite of this peel to see if it is done.

If it is crunchy and crumbles, it is done and dried.

Done and Dried

Stock on this dried orange peel which can last for months. You could simply chew on them (as they are addictive), add a few into your iced tea or hot tea, dip into molten chocolate and set it to dry or simply pop in a few into the cake or cookie batter.

Whats an orange cake without a peel within?

That was yummm!!!

But even yummier are the candied orange peels that follow the same procedure as above. The moment you drain the peels from the water, roll them in powdered sugar so that the peels are well coated and put it out to dry. You could also bake these to speed up your drying time.

I’d prefer the sun-kissed peels and day. I made quite a few of these but needless to stay that they are disappearing at a fast rate. You know why!

For all the christmas cakes, apple cinnamon cakes, carrot cakes and more, this one ingredient does wonders. Did I tell you that chocolate and orange is a killer combination?

So all you bakers, make you own box of candied peel and keep adding that yummm factor to your baking escapades!

You could also gift a box of these as goodies to someone who bakes. Hmmmm, thats a very thoughtful handmade gift.

Let me know if this helped. And if you too are munching it away

Marble cake is one of the most delicious results of love-baking that looks complicated but is easy to make. Here is a quick and easy recipe to get you started on making this simple, moist, and yummy marble cake.

Ingredients for Marble Cake
225 gms flour
225 gms butter (this is going to give you one sinfully heavy cake)
225 gms sugar (can be lesser)
4 Eggs
50 gms cocoa powder (good quality – never compromise here)
1 tsp baking powder
2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp instant coffee powder
50 ml milk (for the purpose of making the batter consistent)

Set your oven to 180 degrees centigrade. Grease and dust your baking tin.
Soften butter and beat in sugar.
Whisk eggs seperatly and add the eggs to butter+sugar gradually while beating it.
Sieve in flour and baking powder into the butter-sugar-egg-vanilla- coffee-mixture. Fold in the flour gently.
Divide the batter into half. Add cocoa powder to one half.

Take spoonfuls of two batters and put them in the baking dish. Alternate the vanilla and cocoa batter heaps.
Use a skewer or something similar to insert and gently swirl it around for marble like pattern. Few swirls are needed else the mixture will become uniformly brown.

Bake for about 30-40 minutes, or till the skewer comes out clean.
Enjoy.

Long long ago I had disastrous marble cake baking episodes. And ended on the wise note that it is not worth going through the chore when all you need is a bit of vanilla cake and a bit of chocolate cake side-by-side and eat it happy. But over a period of time, with more marble cakes attempted, swirled and baked, I have arrived at the most simplest way to do it. I can call this a time-tested and repeatedly tested recipe. It calls for no fuss and no patience – just the way Rachel Allen did it.

If you are into baking regular cakes, then its no different from what you are doing all the time. Just one extra step of throwing in spoonfuls of batter and swirling it aroud with a skewer till you get the pattern light and right.

If you have mastered this cake, it calls for stepping this recipe up to another level. By using bitter chocolate, coffee, cinnamon, sour cream and more, you can get a much richer and delicious version of this marble cake. Check out my justifiably complicated recipe for delicious marble cake and let me know how your baking attempts went.

For starters, this is Stewed and Sweetened Apricots Served with Fresh Cream. But for old timers, it is an quintessential way to end a hearty and rich Hyderabadi meal – with Khobani Ka Meetha.

Hyderabadi Khobani Ka Meetha is made with Dried Apricots and is served with Fresh Cream

Call it Khobani, Qobani, Khubani, Qubani ka meetha or anything – it is one of the exotic desserts that should figure out in your ‘must try or rather die’ list. Orchardiers from India may claim that they have good apricots but the best ones come from remote areas of Afghanistan and they remain, till date, sinfully exotic.

Heirloom Recipe for Khobani Ka Meetha:
Dried Apricots – 1 Kg
Sugar – 500 gms
Juice of 1 Lemon
Fresh Cream for Serving

Soak the apricots in water overnight with just enough water to cover.
Boil the apricots in the same water.
Add sugar while boiling. The amount of sugar can be adjusted according to one’s taste. My personal preference is to lower the amount of sugar as it is already a rich fruit.
Add lemon juice. This makes the sugar’s impurities to float on top which can be spooned off and it also increases the shelf-life of the dessert.
Boil till the dry fruit becomes tender and can be squashed to one’s liking. Some like their apricots squashed to paste, while some prefer them whole and soft.
Keep the nutty seeds aside. Crack open the seed shells for obtaining small kernals. Add these kernals to the dessert before serving.

While it is a genreal practice to serve this exotic dessert with icecream or custard, it would be a better idea to stick to the original way to serving it with fresh cream.

Here is a standard way of making a good soft banana cake. Below the recipie are the tips and tricks for a healthier cake.

Wholewheat Banana Cake - A quick and healthy fix for kids

1. You can either mash the bananas to pulp or cut them into small pieces – depends on how you like your bite to be
2. Wholewheat flour is a better alternative to refined flour. Good for growing children, especially those who are fussy about eating.
3. It is a good idea to reduce the sugar as much as possible for ripe bananas bring in the much needed sweetness.
4. Reduce the quantity of butter and oil. Though these are essential to ensure the texture and moistness, the cake is still tasty.
5. Try folding the two mixures in form of “8″ figure to ensure that more air is trapped inside while mixing. This gives a wonderful texture to the cake, cooks well inside and helps in keeping it fluffy.