Nutella hot chocolate coffee

       I love to have coffee in the mornings. During the afternoons, its tea if I have the time and patience to make it or its coffee made in the microwave in a hurry.Nutella is so popular nowadays. I bought a huge bottle too planning to make something or me and my son can always gobble down scoopfuls of nutella without trashing even a bit of it!!!So this recipe was a kind of experiment for my afternoon tea. I found it a bit too sweet for my taste, but can occasionally have this filling drink on some lazy afternoon especially when I run out of cookies to go with my tea.I am sure kids will love it!!!

Recipe partly adapted from  brewed daily

Brinjal Chutney/kathirikai thuvayal

         Making thuvayal as called in tamil for chutney, has always been a welcome change from the usual vegetable side dishes. I have always made thuvayal with different vegetables and the method of preperation is always the same. We made for the first time with brinjal and hence decided to post this to the blog.There are different ways to make brinjal chutney. I have seen another version in Meenakshi ammal's cookbook which I will be trying soon.This one was quite spicy and delicious and we had it with our vennpongal for dinner. Not a classic combination, but made a fantastic meal!!!

Ingredients-
Brinjal- 1 big chopped into cubes
Onion- 1 chopped
Tomato-1 chopped
Grated coconut- 1tbsp
Udid dal- 1tbsp
Channa dal-1tbsp
Dried red chillies- 2-3(Add more depending on how spicy you want)
Tamarind- small lump
Salt to taste
Sesame oil- 1tbsp

Carrot Cake

     I did not bake anything for almost a year and now I have a huge number of bookmarked recipes in my list. I have been longing to bake the classic carrot cake and looking for a good recipe. As I am not too keen in using butter for my cakes, I decided to follow the recipe in my mini cookbook.I really loved the flavour of the spices added to this cake. The cake was very spongy, light and very moist.The usual cream cheese frosting would have been really good, which I plan to do the next time I bake this cake.

Badaam/Almond Halwa recipe

      I had tasted this halwa at a restaurant for the first time when I came to Singapore and absolutely loved it.I then tried at home. It was good and then we totally forgot about it for the last five years. It was our wedding anniversary yesterday and I had already decided to make this sweet couple of days ago. I found a good recipe for this at Raks place and followed the method to the core with slight modification only in the measurement of the ingredients.The result was fantastic.Infact I was quite proud of making the traditional dessert without any hassles!!It also showed a big improvement in my culinary skills in the last five years!!A special thanks to Raks for a perfect recipe.

Banana oats cake

           It was almost a year a ago when I baked this cake and then I stopped baking due to my busy schedules and health.I was longing to bake something again one of these days especially when I saw some lovely bakes in other blogs and even bookmarked them. Finally my son also started asking me to bake a cake for him. I saw this recipe in Ria's space. She had actually made them into cute muffins.I loved the recipe which included oats, wheat flour and bananas. The cake was just yummy. My son had this for his breakfast before leaving for school. He gave me a thumbs up which gave me a big relief and immense satisfaction!!
            I just wish I had added some chopped walnuts too. So if you do have them add a handful to the batter.Walnuts and banana does makes a wonderful combination.