How to make a Lion Cake

It was my son's birthday and I had to bake a cake for him to cut in his playschool. As I was pondering on what cake to bake/make, I decided to go for an animal cake. And as I sat talking to him, I found out that he would like a lion cake or a fish cake. I figured a lion cake is much easier than a fish cake so I went on to make one for him. He and his little friend's in school enjoyed the lion cake!!

Update - I made this cake again for my daughter's birthday this year. Check out the video link below for a glimpse of that Lion cake. For my daughter I used a vanilla flavored cake.

I wasn't too happy with this Lion Cake! I think it would have looked more like a lion, if I had used the appropriate colors for the lion. But I did not have orange and dark brown colors and I was too hesitant to use a lot of yellow and light brown that I did have, as I did not want the little kids with colored tongue! So there it is! A lion that looks yellow!! But hey, the kids recognized the Lion and loved it too! 

I also made a Garbage Truck Cake and a Victoria Sponge Cake for the other birthday parties we had at home for him.

Watch the video in English 

Watch the video in Tamil

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Homemade Oat Flour

If you make a lot of oats recipes then this flour will come very handy to you. I make oats idli, oats uthappam and many other oats recipes that require oat flour and hence I find it better to make this flour and store it. It saves times. 
Also if you have babies or toddlers at home, you can use this flour to make oats porridge. You can also add a tbsp or two to smoothies or to curries to thicken it. I have also used this flour to add it to raita's!

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Dairy Free Beetroot Halwa | Easy Beetroot Halwa

Beetroot halwa is one of my most favorite sweet dishes ever! The first time I ever tasted beetroot halwa was in a hospital!! I know it sounds crazy but after my second delivery, one of my hospital meals had beetroot halwa for the dessert! (I was in a hospital that served excellent food for the patients!) I remember I absolutely loved it and enjoyed it! I should say, I have never tasted a similar beetroot halwa ever after that but this recipe came very close to the tasty one I had at the hospital.

The other thing that I loved about this recipe is that, it is so fuss free to make it. The effort is only in scrapping the beetroots! There is no dairy added to it and still it tastes and looks gorgeous! 

I found the sweetness of this dish to be perfect but my mum and my husband felt it was a bit too sweet. I simply loved it! After all, a sweet dish is supposed to taste sweet right?! I hate a beetroot halwa that tastes like a slightly sweet beetroot poriyal! But if you too prefer a less sweeter version, check the notes section.

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Brown Rice Pulao

My husband has found a sudden liking towards brown rice so he bought a packet and asked me to cook with it. I went onto the internet and looked at many blogs to see how to cook brown rice and followed the instructions but it never worked as the water they mentioned and the time taken did not work for me! Then I started making brown rice curd rice and brown rice pongal and brown rice bisibellabath where the amount of water added need not be perfect.

And then I decided to follow the instructions given in the packet and it worked beautifully! It is very important to soak the brown rice for atleast 1 hour and then use the amount of water mentioned on the packet. For the brand of brown rice I had, it required only 2.5 cups of water! My brown rice pulao came out perfect!

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How to make Ginger Garlic Paste | Homemade Ginger Garlic Paste

Ginger garlic paste is one of the essentials in every Indian kitchen. Almost all Indian recipes require ginger garlic paste and it's best to stock this up. There are so many brands of ginger garlic pastes available in the market, however it is always best to make it at home. My dad says, while making the store bought ginger garlic paste, they make it without peeling the garlic or scrapping the ginger, which is not good. 

We always make the ginger garlic paste at home, the only difficulty is peeling the garlic! You can make a large batch and store in the refrigerator but we always make just enough for a week. We prefer to make them fresh each week.

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Pidi Karunai Kizhangu Kuzhambu

I don't know the English name of Pidi Karunai Kizhangu. Many people confuse this with senai kizhangu which is also known as Elephant Yam. But no one in my family knows the English name for Pidi Karunai and google also doesn't seem to know!
But what we do know in my family is that, this is a very good vegetable and my mum makes this kuzhambu quite often at home. This veggie is supposed to be very good for people suffering from hemorrhoids. 

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Vanilla Milkshake | Easy Milkshake Recipes

Do you know why there are so many milkshake recipes in my site? It's because I can't stand the thought of drinking milk! My mum says I stopped drinking milk since I was 3 months old and apparently troubled my mom a lot!! As a school going kid, it was a rule to drink milk in my home so I drank it like as if it was poison and always preferred to have it flavored! I have never in my life had plain white milk! Now that I'm old enough, no one can force me to drink milk so occasionally I make myself some milkshake and have. But I should say, as much as I hate drinking plain milk, I just love drinking milkshakes with lots of ice cream!!

That's why it's taken me so long to post a vanilla milkshake even though there are so many many milkshake recipes here and even now with the ice creams added to it, I couldn't bring myself to drink the plain white milk! So I gave this milkshake to my kids and they enjoyed it and I guess it was very tasty!

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Keerai Poriyal | Greens Stirfry

Keerai (or greens) is one of the most healthy green leafy vegetable full of iron and vitamins. It is essential to include keerai in our daily meals. As a child, I never used to eat greens but as I grew older I changed! 

I remember, when I was little, my father's friend a naturopath, had come home and as he was giving us a diet chart, he asked my mum to include keerai 4 days a week! At that time, it was too much for me since I hated keerai! Now we regularly make keerai atleast 3-4 days a week, when it's available.

You can make a keerai masiyal or make a poriyal with this vegetable. You can follow the same procedure for any of the keerai variety you find.

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Mint Chocolate Milkshake

Now a days I'm feeling quite lazy to write up long posts but unfortunately my draft is filled with biryani and pulao recipes, which takes forever to write and edit the step wise pictures. So I'm procrastinating and writing all the small ones!

Milkshakes are my favorite! If you are a regular visitor to my blog then you must know that I'm quite in love with milkshakes! I have a large collection of milkshake recipes! I'm always looking for new ways to spice up my milkshakes. 

This time I tried the mint and chocolate combination and this is the first time I have ever made a mint and chocolate combination and I was quite taken by surprise by how well they paired together! The subtle flavor of mint enhanced and complimented the chocolate so much!

We don't get peppermint extract where I live so I used some peppermint candies! Worked well! I plan on using the same trick to make some other mint chocolate desserts later!

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Eggless Tutti Frutti Cake

Somehow tutti frutti cakes are associated with Christmas in South India. Maybe because of the colorful tutti frutti! I'm not a big fan of tutti frutti but occasional do add it to my bakes.
This cake, I made it specially for our help at home. I could not give him any of the other Christmas cakes that I baked as it all got over soon! So I made this specially for him and for his family.

This is a very delicious super moist and soft cake. You cannot and will not miss the egg! I already have an eggless vanilla cake recipe which uses oil and vinegar but I wanted to try an eggless recipe without vinegar but yogurt. You can check out this recipe here - eggless vanilla cake with yogurt. My verdict, both cakes are absolutely delicious and soft.

Some other Christmas Cakes

• Christmas Cake - Boiled Fruit Cake
• Christmas Cake - Chocolate Fruit Cake
• Christmas Cake - Dundee Fruit Cake
• Christmas Cake - Eggless Christmas Fruit Cake 
• Christmas Cake - Kerela Fruit Cake | Plum Cake

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Chocolate Milkshake | Easy Milkshake Recipes

Chocolate Milkshake is the simplest yet the most tastiest milkshake ever loved by both kids and adults! This is the most common milkshake I make for myself, except I don't add ice creams most of the time. But when ever you do add ice creams or whipped cream, it makes a simple ice cream even more yummy! 

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Suvarotti Soup | Munneeral Soup

Suvarotti or Lamb spleen is one of the highest source of iron content. This soup is mostly given to people recovering from major surgeries, who have lost a lot of blood or to those whose haemoglobin (Hb) is extremely low. 
Recently my father in law had an Open Heart Surgery and his Hb levels dropped to 6 and the doctors suggested blood transfusion and we gave him this soup for 10 days and his Hb levels rose up to normal without any blood transfusion! Mind you, my father in law is a strict vegetarian but still he had this soup and it worked really well. 

Years ago the same thing happened to me. After a major surgery my Hb count came down to 7 and my doctors also suggested blood transfusion but my parents gave me this soup and my Hb rose to normal without any transfusion.
This is such a wonderful soup so full of iron and very good for health.

Other Non Veg Soups

• Crab Soup
• Aatu Kaal Soup
• Indian Chicken Soup
• Aatu Margandam Soup

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Paneer Mushroom Biryani | Easy Biryani Recipes

Here's a simple and easy biryani recipe that everybody will love. Paneer and mushrooms are one of my favorites and putting them together in a flavorful biryani rice is just awesome! My kids and me enjoyed this biryani and my husband who doesn't like paneer, picked them out for us and enjoyed the biryani!

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Avarakkai Poriyal | Broad Beans Stir Fry

Broad beans is one of the healthiest vegetable full of fibre, vitamins and minerals. I have posted a recipe on avarakkai masala and this is another avarakkai dish that we make at home. This is easy and simple to make and goes very well with sambar or rasam rice.

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Aatu Kaal Soup | Lamb Leg Soup

This is another healthy and delicious lamb that my mum makes. Apart from this soup she also makes aatu margandam soup and aatu kaal paaya. All these lamb soups are high in fat content hence very healthy for kids. The adults in the family don't like to have this soup because of it's high fat content so we make this soup especially for the kids. My nephew likes to drink the soup as it is but my fussy kids don't drink soup so I mix with rice and give them soup rice!

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How to make a Garbage Truck Cake

For some reason both my kids are obsessed with garbage trucks! I don't know why and I don't know how this obsession started! Every time they get in the car, they have a competition to see who spots the most number of garbage trucks! They also have a number of garbage truck toys!

So when it was time to celebrate my son's 3rd birthday, I was oscillating between making this garbage truck cake or a soccer ball cake and finally decided on this cake. I reckon this obsession with garbage trucks will not last long and pretty soon he will move on to sports so I can make the ball cake later. I also made a Victoria Sponge Cake for the family cake cutting and a Lion Cake for him to cut in his playschool!

And boy did I make the right decision!! He was so so SO excited to see this cake! I made a very simple garbage truck cake and I was wondering if it even looks nice or if it even looks like a garbage truck but seeing the excitement and joy on his face made up for all the lack of detailing in the cake!
My daughter wants the exact same cake for her birthday too!! I don't know to use fondant (yet!) so this is the best I could do with whipped cream.
I also made some chocolate cupcakes for the party!

For the cake, I made a chocolate pound cake and then carved the truck from that cake. This is the same pound cake that I used for the Hidden Heart Cake too.

Cakes I made for his previous birthdays
1st birthday -   Double Chocolate Cake
2nd birthday - Gravity Defying Cake
                           Eggless Strawberry Mousse Cake
                           Perfectly perfect Chocolate Cake

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Kuska Biryani | Easy Biryani Recipes

I pack lunch for my kids and whenever I ask them what they want for lunch, they always say biryani! Although I don't pack biryani everyday, I do make some kind of variety rice for them. This kuska biryani, which is nothing but plain biryani, is a big hit with my kids since it's just plain rice without chicken or mutton or vegetables and they enjoy the plain biryani!

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Cucumber Raita

Cucumber raita is my most favorite raita out of all the raita I make but unfortunately no one else in my family prefers the plain cucumber raita. They all like the onion raita or a mixed raita. So I get to make this very rarely but once in a while I do make this raita for myself and enjoy! Sometimes I make this raita to enjoy with my morning oats porridge! Just too yum for me!!!

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Eeral Varuval | Lamb Liver Roast

Lamb is the only red meat we eat and this liver is very nutritious, full of viatmins, iron and protein. Growing up I was a very fussy eater but still this eeral varuval was one of the things that I would eat. This dry curry that my mum makes is quite tasty and we love it at home!
One of the things to remember about eeral is that, it needs to be cooked fresh. If it's old or if you've bought and kept in the freezer at home, it gets very rubbery after it's cooked. So always buy fresh eeral and cook it fresh too.
This dish is similar to the mutton pepper fry and the chicken chukka varuval I have posted already.

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Kuthiraivali Mushroom Biryani | Millet Biryani

This is a delicious and favorite combination for me and my husband, we love mushrooms and millets are our latest favorite and who doesn't like the flavor of biryani! It was such a pure joy to make and eat this dish! Seriously! I know it sounds silly but I really really loved this combination and was very happy with the outcome. Out of all the millets, kuthiraivali (barnyard millet) is my favorite so I tried with it.
I'm obsessed with mushrooms, I have already posted lots of mushroom recipes and millets are becoming a favorite dinner too. I cook any of my favorite millet recipe atleast 3 times a week. So you can imagine how much we loved this biryani among all other biryani recipes!
The taste is delightful! If you love millets then this is a must try!

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Coffee PannaCotta

Panna Cotta is an Italian dessert where the cream is cooked and any flavoring is added to it along with a thickening agent like gelatin. This dessert is super delicious since it's made with cream, I always prefer using full cream for my panna cotta desserts but you can also make this dessert with half cream and half milk.

I have already posted strawberry panna cotta and mango panna cotta and both are one of my favorite desserts! This time I tried out coffee panna cotta for my brother and his wife and they both loved it! You can easily double the ingredients mentioned for a larger quantity.
If you're a coffee lover, try the coffee ice cream and coffee cake too!

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Indian Chicken Soup

There are plenty of recipes for chicken soup but this is one recipe that gets done most often in our house. It's simple, easy and tastes delicious and soothing especially when you have a cold.
I also make this soup for my children. They don't like drinking soup so I make this and give it to them along with rice just like the margandam soup and the aatu kaal soup. You can start giving this soup after one year.

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