Cekodok Pisang (Fried Banana Cakes)

One common trait shared by all Malaysians? Eating. We eat breakfast, lunch and before dinner look for kuih-miuh for tea and then sometimes after dinner, look in the fridge or stand in front of the 24-hour mamak stall, thinking what to have for supper! :)

The thing that I miss most here in CA is the splendor of tea-breaks. In Malaysia, at around 2pm, from nowhere you would suddenly find a makcik and her daughter put up a foldable giant umbrella under the big, shady tree of the right side of the pavement and set up several trays of homemade cakes on a table. And on the left side of the pavement, another 'uncle' and his wife set up a big vessel with gallons of oil and start frying up crispy vadais and bondas and samosas. Beside his set-up, another 'uncle' arrives and opens up the container attached to his motorcycle and sets up his fruit rojak ‘stall’. And this is just on the left and right sides of one of the several the pavements, mind you!

Ahh…teatime is Malaysia is really celebrated. No makciks under umbrellas or 'uncles' and 'aunties' to get teatime treats from here. Somehow I have lost the interest in tea-breaks after coming here. It’s all good too…counting all the calories I can save ;) But sometimes on a breezy day like this, it’s just so comforting to eat hot cekodoks with a hot cuppa coffee :)

Cekodok is a type of fried cake made of flour and flavored with a varieties of things from dried shrimps, dried anchovies, onions and ripened bananas – making it good savory as well as sweet.The cekodok featured here is sweetened with ripened bananas. I made it even simpler fr me by I adding mashed up ripened bananas into a cup of my favorite store-bought pancake flour (Krusteaz)and then fried up the thick batter in hot oil.

The result: cekodok pisang – crunchy on the outside and soft and fluffy on the inside!

Butter Cake with Lemon Icing

The satisfaction of eating a slice of homemade cake is heightened when it comes with a big dollop of homemade icing. I for one learned this through a very sickly sweet experience!

My favorite thing to bake is the basic butter cake because of its versatility to complement almost any type of icing…and my usual best choice of topping for my butter cake……. chocolate ganache…yum-o! I first learned making this basic butter cake in Malaysia several years back using a recipe from my mom's cookbook by a well-known Malaysian chef, Rohani Jelani. I have to admit that I learned a lot of good baking from her cookbook. Also when I prepare the cake batter, I usually use half of it for making a dozen of mini cupcakes, as seen in this pic, too for a convenient and cute treat :)

 

Back to my sickly sweet experience....For hubby’s birthday a couple of months back, I baked the wonderful butter cake but instead of using the regular chocolate ganache, I planned to use some lemon icing. The reason for this lemon-mania was that just a couple of weeks prior to that, hubby treated me to a delightfully enriching slice of lemon-raspberry cheese from the Cheesecake Factory restaurant and I had been craving for more lemony cake since then! There’s just something divine about tasting fresh lemon in a plate of desert…. a subtle yet pleasing sweetness.

So seeking convenience, I got a tub of store-bought lemon icing to decorate his birthday cake. But what a disappointment it was when we couldn’t really enjoy eating the cake as the icing was too very sweet…the kind of sweetness that and to top that displeasure, there was merely a hint of lemon in it.

This time, still craving for the lemony sweetness, I baked a basic butter cake and searched for a simple lemon icing recipe online. As usual I tweaked the ingredients to suit my needs and created the most beautiful lemon icing to satisfy my palate. The recipe calls for 3 cups of confectioner’s sugar but I used just 1 cup (this is fine because the cake has sugar and is already sweet); 2 tablespoons of fresh lemon juice but I used 4; and I added the zest of two whole lemons for that extra zing!

Adding ½ cup of butter to the above items, I whipped the life out it and came up with this fluffy, light and satisfactorily zesty cake topping!

Bellam Garelu – Sweet Vadais

I am sure my fellow Malaysian Indian friends would go “really?!” reading the above title. Believe me when I first heard of this, I too went “hmmm….” rather doubtfully. I mean vadais are so popular among Malaysians – the Malays, Chinese and Indians alike - and we like it hot, crispy and with extra green chilies at the side, please!

There are basically two types of vadais – the ones made with chana dhal (paruppu vadai) and the ones made with urad dhal (methu vadai: crunchy on the outside but soft and fluffy on the inside). Methu vadas are also ‘lovingly’ called the vadais with the hole by some ;) But bellam garelu (Telugu) takes your love for methu vada to a different, sweet level.

Three years plus into my marriage and learning about the varieties of Indian sweets, I can say we Malaysian Indians no nothing much about the real Indian sweets! If laddoo, jelebi, halva, kesari, athirasam, paal kova, Mysore pak were (among few others) the most regular sweets we indulge in during Hindu festivals in Malaysia, in India the above are the most basic selection of sweets!

Well, first stop during my marriage in Andhra, there was a host of unfamiliar looking and tasting Indian sweets that were served but, I was the bride then: I wasn’t too interested in trying out the different types of sweets, if you know what I mean :) The second time I was in India was for my bro-in-law’s wedding in Bangalore early this year. I got acquainted to even more varieties of Indian sweets and this time they were all different from the ones I already knew during my marriage in Andhra! Phew…I couldn’t help but think how India is the perfect place for a person who loves Indian sweets (like my sweet-toothed cousin) :)

This dessert happens to be a traditional, festival favorite in Andhra where my hubby is from. For this dessert, unlike the regular vadai-making, no onions or green chillis go into the batter - just whole urad dhal soaked (overnight) in water, drained, ground to a fine paste with salt, beaten till fluffy and white, shaped into vadais (no holes necessary- like mine), deep-fried till crisp and golden brown and dropped immediately in warm syrup till they absorb the syrup. I used simple syprup for my sweet vadais: 1 cup sugar dissolved in 1 cup water. The traditional recipe actually requires the use of jaggery (palm sugar). I add a pinch of cardamom powder to enhance the aroma of the simple syrup.

Biting into a crunchy vadai, bursting with the sweet syrup is…hmmm….crunchy, salty, sweet all in one big, juicy bite!