I've found the perfect recipe for an eggless sponge cake...yay! Coming up soon, disguised as an upside down pineapple cake.

Upside-down Cranberry Cake

Oh well, so the tea-cake turned out pretty good, except I used Earl Grey tea and didn't like the way it tasted at all - such a strong flavour of bergamot. Yea, I should've thought of that. But I'm going to try it again sometime with regular tea and will post more details then.

But here's more about what I did bake this weekend - the upside down cranberry cake! It's a beauty of a cake - I'm a sucker for anything red and this just takes the cake - literally.

Here is a collage of some pics - I didn't bother getting out my camera, just used the husband's Lumia 920 - pretty good picture quality for a phone :

Don't the cranberries look delicious in the pan? I loved the jammy gooey quality they had on top of the cake.
It isn't at all difficult to make, prep time was about half an hour, but cooking time was around 40 mins. It's tarty and quite yummy. The cake was more dense than fluffy - I took the original recipe from here - but I replaced the eggs with an equivalent amount of yogurt, maybe that made the difference, but it still tasted good.

Do try it sometime :)

Ingredients:

For the cranberry topping:
1 cup fresh/frozen cranberries
1/2 cup raspberries
1/2 cup sugar

For the cake:
 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour(maida)
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup cooking oil
1 cup thick curd
1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2  teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons vanilla essence
A pinch of salt
A tablespoon of butter- to grease the pan

Grease a 9-inch cake tin with butter, so there's a  nice thick layer all around. Or you may use a baking sheet and get away with lesser butter. Set aside.
Pre-heat the oven to 200C.

The topping :

• Take a wide pan (non-stick preferably) and add the cranberries and the sugar, and cook over medium heat until the berries pop and the sugar has dissolved completely. 
• Remove from heat and stir in the raspberries. 
• Pour this into the cake tin, and spread it into an even layer. This will be the top of the cake once you upturn it, so make sure you don't leave any gaps. 
• Set aside.

The cake:

• Powder the sugar and add it to the curd in a wide mixing bowl. Make sure the sugar dissolves completely.
• Now add the baking powder and baking soda. The mixture will get frothy. Keep it aside for a minute, and in the meanwhile, sieve the flour three times and keep it aside to be added later. 
• Add in the oil and the vanilla essence to the sugar-curd-baking-powder-soda mixture. Mix the ingredients gently, we need the air-bubbles to make a nice fluffy cake. 
• Finally, fold in the flour, mixing gently, to get a nice consistent batter. It shouldn't be too thick, and not runny either.
• Now, pour the cake batter into the tin, over the layer of cranberries. Make sure it is evenly spread. Give the tin a light tap to make sure the batter has settled in well. 
• Slide it onto the oven rack and bake for 30-35 mins. Insert a toothpick at the centre of the cake to check if it has baked well - it should come out clean.

I've baked this twice so far - the first time I added a bit of ground ginger in the batter, and the second time I tried a bit of coffee decoction. You could also add in some sliced almonds like the original suggests, but without any of these too, the cake will taste good.

Have fun baking!

Hello!

Growing up, I hated stepping foot into the kitchen, except for stealing lumps of jaggery and stuffing spoonfuls of Complan and Boost into my mouth when mum wasn't looking. I never ever thought I'd ever like cooking. But well, turns out, I actually do! I'm not fantastic at it, but I love the process for making a complete dish. The aromas, the procedures, the subtleties that can completely make or break a dish...I love it all. I don't cook very frequently, but I really enjoy trying out new stuff. I'm a vegetarian for most parts - I do make and have omelettes (I hate the "clever" word eggetarian - why does one need categories all the time? OK, I know why, but still...) and very rarely some seafood, but mostly still a vegetarian. I bake without eggs and don't cook meat, fish or otherwise. Anyway, so this is just going to be a food journal of sorts - places I've eaten at, dishes I've loved, food I've cooked and the baking I've done.
I'm going to bake a tea cake this evening. As in, a cake with tea in it, not a cake to be eaten with your tea. Well, you could do that too with it if you wanted to, I wouldn't stop you. Later!