Pimp My Pastry. Back-to-back episodes.

I have a secret. It's an embarrassing one.

I spend nearly an hour each day just looking at food blogs.

Not about the commercial use of Mycophenolate Mofetil in India for Myasthenia Gravis. Not about various religious worship in contemporary culture. Not even tidbits on Dexter Season 6. Food blogs. I'm doomed. The knell has sounded.

You'd think that eye-feasting on about 40 recipes per day would have me trying new things left-right-and-centre, right? How wrong you are.

Sometimes, when you need to impress peers or you need to not feel like a failure or just have a comforting bowlful to gobble up, you make stuff from standby recipes that you love and cherish. And it's OK to make your insecurities public these days. People make a lot of money off it on television. I need to get out of my scrubs and get me a Snooki-pouff.

So. I thought I'd put up a few photos demonstrating how your trusted recipes can be jazzed up. I played around with my cocoa brownies.

Made Chocolate-chip cookie rolls out of my most-treasured cinnamon roll recipe. Thank you, Pioneer woman. Let the unadulterated parade of eye candy begin! Even though my photos never do the dish enough justice.

Dulce de Leche brownies:
(idea from David Leibovitz)

Make a batch of fudgy, gooey brownie batter. Don't bake it just yet.

Brown the butter, add dark chocolate, whatever it takes to make it happen.

Make a batch of Dulce de Leche with one can of Nestle's Milkmaid.

Pour half the brownie batter into a greased pan. Add 1/3rd of the cooled Dulce de Leche in random spurts.

Run a knife through it, creating a swirly pattern. Go on, run amok.

Add the remaining brownie batter. Repeat the same dab-and-swirl thing with the rest of the Dulce.

Bake for 5 minutes less than the stipulated time. Check for done-ness. It's good to underbake than to overbake brownies.

Cool for around 15 minutes. Cut into slices and dive head-first in.

Ooooh. Yes.

I've unlocked the secret to happiness. And simultaneous obesity.

Chocolate chip cookie rolls:

Make half a batch of cinnamon roll dough.

Roll the dough out in the usual manner.

Chop up about a cup and a half (or so) of Lindt dark chocolate into chunks. You can also use chocolate chips but it won't kick ass as much.

Dab the roll with 1/2 a cup of melted (salted) butter, coarsely ground brown and white sugar (together totalling around 1 to 1.5 cups, max) and 1/2 a cup of chopped up almonds/pecans/walnuts.

Roll it up. Makes several rolls.

Bake as you would for the normal recipe.

Top with cream cheese frosting or just scarf it down straight from the pan. The leftovers can be cooled to room temperature and frozen for up to 2 months (unfrosted). You can eat them selfishly over the course of a week.

If you have any doubts regarding the techniques and measurements, refer to the original post. God, I feel like Padma Lakshmi and my Biochemistry Professor at the same time. All this butter surely has to dull one's brain.

Eid Mubarak and Sorry. And Baklava Muhalabbiya.

It's been a week since Eid; my grandiose plans for putting up recipes for Eid dishes all over the world have obviously not fallen through. Shame on me.

To make up for the deficit, I'm going to pull out of my Toque blanche a Double-Delight! kind of recipe. I've professed my love for Greek and Middle-Eastern food, time after time. Fallen short at the dessert category, though. Blasphemy after blasphemy.

So. I give you. Baklava Muhalabbiya.

Don't X this tab just yet. I know Baklava (or anything with phyllo pastry in it) sounds scary. Especially since even the most upmarket of Madras's groceries don't stock any frozen phyllo sheets. You can do one step better. Find a friendly neighbourhood bakery and give in your order for "puff pastry", one day before you actually need it. If you're in and around Egmore, you have two options.

Hot Puffs 2010 on Casa Major Road and there's this other bakery in Chetpet (opposite McNichols Road) with extremely humble/kind/unpretentious(you know the kind) that will mix you up an extra batch of puff pastry when they make theirs fresh, each day.

However, I went around searching for it on the eve of Eid, and my luck ran out... I had come too late, they had finished baking (and selling out) their puffs for the day and won't start until tomorrow morning, they were very sorry, but the dough needs to rest and chill, but could they give it to me by noon tomorrow?

With as much politeness as I could muster up, I turned them down. The Baklava Muhalabbiya were meant to be delivered by 10 the next day, and you need to let the baked pastry soak in the sugar syrup overnight. So I took on the herculean task of making my own phyllo pastry.

I can say that I succeeded... somewhat. It won't be as thin as store-bought phyllo and requires a little arm-power, but very worth the effort, I think. The recipe I used gave me around 17 sheets, which I didn't think were enough at all. But I ate enough of the muhalabbiya filling during prep-and-cooking so the recipe got into decent proportions somehow. How could I not stuff my face with a creamy, cinnamon-scented phirni/kesari type thingy? I'm a sucker for most things dairy.

And one last thing I need to tell you about this is that it is kind of a sugar bomb, not unlike a Gulab Jamun. The flakiness of the pastry gets a teeny bit overshadowed by the muhalabbiya, but I could stop shoving the wonky bits that couldn't go into the box,  my mouth. It was Eid, people. Calorie-counting is against the law on Eid.

Baklava Muhalabbiya:

Recipe source:
For the Baklava: Desert Candy
For the phyllo pastry: Daring Bakers' challenge

Making the phyllo pastry *:


1 1/3 cups (200 g) all-purpose flour
1/8 teaspoon salt
7 tablespoons water, plus more if needed
2 tablespoons vegetable oil, plus additional for coating the dough
1/2 teaspoon cider vinegar (I used regular white)

*Defrost around 20 sheets of readymade phyllo pastry if buying

Making the muhalabbiya:

1/3 cup semolina (Rava)
1/4 cup white sugar
2 cups milk
1/4 tsp each, cinnamon, nutmeg
pinch salt

Making the syrup:

1 1/2 cups sugar
1 cup water
1 tbsp rose water
1 tbsp orange blossom or lemon juice
A stick of cinnamon, 1-2 cloves

Method:

Making the phyllo pastry:

Combine flour and salt in a bowl.

Mix water, vinegar and oil in a small bowl.

Beat it into the flour until it's combine.

Change the paddle attachment to a dough hook.

If you don't have a dough hook, you can knead with your hand.




This is a wee bit dry. A tablespoon of water can be added. Use your discretion!

 
Knead for 10 minutes with a dough hook or 20 minutes by hand. A smooth ball should form.

Coat the ball and the bowl with a tablespoon or so of vegetable oil. Put the oiled dough into the bowl. Cover with cling film. Let it rest at room temperature for around 2 hours.

Rolling out the phyllo sheets:

Divide the rested dough into 18 equal-sized balls.

Flour a smooth surface generously.

Roll out the dough as thin as possible with a rolling pin. The sheets should get almost translucent and see-through.

 It's OK if a few of them have holes in them. The top two sheets have to be perfect because that is what the eye sees.

Making the sugar syrup:

Place sugar, water, flower water and spices in a saucepan. Bring to boil, stirring to dissolve. Let it boil for a couple of minutes, and take it off the heat. Cool completely before using.

It should be as thick as Gulab Jamun syrup, but not as thin as Rasagolla syrup either.

Making the Muhalabbiya:

 Place milk, sugar, spices, and salt in a sauce pan, with the heat set on low heat. Stir the mix, bringing it a simmer. Add in the semolina slowly, stirring to combine. Let it continue to simmer for around 6 minutes, just make sure it doesn't become too dry. It'll continue to thicken up as it cools.

Set it aside at room temperature to cool completely before using in the Baklava.

Assembling the Baklava:

Preheat the oven to 350 F or 180 C

Melt the ghee or make your own clarified butter.

Grease a 9 inch baking dish with ghee or clarified butter. Place a phyllo sheet. Brush on melted ghee using a pastry brush. I used my fingers to dab the globs of ghee over the sheet.

Repeat with 9 more sheets, brushing with ghee for each one.

Pour in the muhalabbiya (completely cooled) on top of the 9th sheet. Smooth the top.

Continue adding the remaining sheets, adding ghee to each sheet.

Brush the final sheet with ghee.

Cut the baklava into pieces, either square or diamond-shaped.

Bake until the top is flaky/crispy for about 30 minutes.

Pour the cooled syrup over the piping hot baklava. This is the only way to get crispy baklava.

Don't flood the whole thing too much... I found the sugar syrup a teeny bit more than I'd want. 0.4 cm above the level of the pastry, maybe?

Let it soak the syrup in, overnight (8 hours minimum). Do not refrigerate.

Sprinkle chopped pistachios or almonds over the top.

This keeps for about 2-3 days, maximum. And yes, you can refrigerate after the soaking-in process... you have no choice with the notorious heat here in Madras/Chennai.

Would I make this again? Maybe if I find someone who likes scented, syrupy things. The muhalabbiya I'll be making very many times on the rare rainy nights. Like I need more comfort (albeit fattening) things in my life.

Sigh.

Trysts in the rain.

I know I haven't blogged in a while. My day job is famous for its crappy hours, pitiful pay and hard work the likes of which will only make us sicker than the patients we treat. And to get there, you have a fun (!) obstacle course in the form of the Post-Graduate Entrance Exams. Think TNPCEE times 100. IIT-JEE times 20. USMLE times 10. The only thing I can say about it is that it's a joke, and it's over. Whee.

I've hit the kitchen with the vengeance (how I wish I could say the same about my EFX). The backlog of places I've eaten at keeps growing. It's going to be an interesting week here. Get ready for plenty of Mmms.

I must be out of my mind for posting this on a Tuesday. ECR is reserved for the weekends (for most people), no? Before you get to your destination, ECR can be a little 80's looking; more rural than suburban. And the rain might force you to stop driving. Worse, you may not have eaten in two whole hours. Somewhere I'd recommend you to stop is at Tryst Cafe at Neelankarai.

A Gatsby iniative, Tryst Cafe is tucked away at a nook behind the store. Walking in (running in, actually, seeking refuge from the rain), I couldn't help letting out a little self-pleased "Oooh!" I love discovering new places that are good; how rare those instances are.

The cafe is lit up softly, furnished classy-without-being-posh-ly (they also sell furniture in another cranny of Gatsbyland) and has a couple of counter-tops with amazing, AMAZING looking pastry. Cakes, macarons (macarons at Madras!), mille-feuille, baguettes, all of them French and formidable, lest you call them a bakery. This is a patisserie if there could be such a thing at Madras.

And while being surrounded by pastry is the best possible (and sometimes the only) way to be, we chose to sit out in the rain. Rain, in Madras, sometimes even trumps chocolate. At least, it did before the Freakish Astonishing Winter/Monsoon of 2010. See for yourself.

That's the view from where we sat. Omar Sait, a part of the Gatsby family, happened to be at the cafe that day, and he very kindly obliged, setting up a little sidewalk-style table. "You can't expect everybody to pander to your whims," W complained. Well, it was my birthday weekend. Enough said.

Birthday weekend it being, I'd overindulged in cake(tiramisu!); cake instead of breakfast, cake at 3:00 AM, and plenty of times in between. The rain demanded hearty, hot food with the obligatory mug of coffee.

The burger we had was called the Nawabi burger; an amazing concoction of galouti-type lamb kebab, with a side of THE best wedges I've had here. When you have lamb mince instead of a cutlet as a burger patty, you thank God for small mercies. Especially when they're served with wedges that are chunky, have a crisp skin outside and are tossed in grains of salt. It cost either 120 or 140 bucks. I would have paid more, sans complaints.

The baguette sandwich was a chicken Caesar salad stuffed between an in-house baked loaf of french bread. Chunks of tender chicken and the lettuce I loved, the crusty bread worth becoming fat for, but the mayonnaise overload, eh. Mayo-fiends would give it a double thumbs-up I'm sure, but it's not easy to convert a buttermilk-ranch girl.

And the coffee. I'm from Madras. We don't serve bad coffee even to our 'til-death enemies. We are who we are, and all that.

The coffee I had there, I'd gladly serve to all the lovely people who visit and say the nicest things about the blog (and I didn't even have to pay them in food!). It did all the things a good brew does on a rainy evening. Strong, scalding, the bitterness cut with a little swirl of chocolate sauce. I only said I was tired of cake.

I haven't been to the Gatsby patisserie opposite Citi Centre, on R.K.Salai, but a visit is in order; those Parisian macarons look divine. But if it's a tryst that needs to work in your favour, summon the rain gods and drive down the East Coast.