An Anniversary Attempt

Yes, it was for our 7th Wedding Anniversary. :)

I'm happy!! After a long list of terrible failures I finally succeeded in baking a good cake. And this was my first attempt of icing..I know the decoration doesn't look that much nice, but for a first trial this is ok. I could have waited till the green icing on top to set, but my daughter was so impatient to cut it. She was looking so eagerly and was trying to bunk her dance class just to cut this cake , i finally decided to make things fast. I just poured the red jelly and it too didnt come as a nice heart, at least in this picture it has a slight resemblance of a heart right :)  Yeah , it is my heart full of love to my man,forget about the shape and those holes in between, this is only a model ;)

All cakes i baked till now were always hard, and almost i withdrew from my efforts of making cakes. Why should i waste all these time, flour and other ingredients. And to increase my disappointment my sister showed me the beautiful cakes she bakes.. hmm i gave up, baking is not my area.

May is my month, My birthday, husband's birthday, our wedding Anniversary , so which other month i have to celebrate and  above all  my cuitie's desire for home made cakes, so this time i refereed all blogs and decided to have one last attempt. May be due to my prayers or what this turned out well. I didnt beat the cake flour with my hand mixer, instead i just used a spoon to mix it..Does it make a difference..I dont know.. Anyways the cake was soft and it was almost brown at the top too .. I forgot to take a photo of the cut portion. Hmm.. i have to give proper attention to my photography skills, or at least to generate a skill :)

Karimeen Mappas

Just tried to make some Karimeen Mappas and it was not that bad. I have very nostalgic memories of karimeen and other backwater fishes. In our childhood, one guy brought fresh backwater fishes  in a small pot  exclusively to our house. Though i hated that guy, his fishes were really good. We (or mostly amma) always had a tough time to clean and prepare those fishes. They were still alive, so amma had to kill them with the back side of the knife, it was hard. And cleaning was old fashioned, we have to run the halfly cleaned fish on a rubble and tried to remove the scales. Though this cleaning process was tiring, the taste just removes all frustrations. We always had kappa(tapoioca) along with this fish curries and fries.

I have another embarassing memory with this backwater fishes too.. Just when i reached kuwait, in our honeymoon time, i found some varal in lulu and forced my husband to buy that. He was confused whether i know to cook that and i proudly declared i am a master in all these fish items. We bought a long varal and came home. Next day after he left to office i slowly took out the varal and stared at it, it was such a long and large fish and slowly it resembled like 'Anaconda' to me. I was alone in the house and i had watched anaconda very recently, though i told my mind to be calm , i couldn't control. The fear and loneliness just killed me and i became so scared and jumped out of kitchen.Soon i called my hubby and told him that im so scared because of that anaconda in the kitchen.. hmm ...later whenever we see this fish, my husband starts laughing and teasing me :)

We get Kerala Karimeen from our local store on thursdays and also the frozen one's. Sometimes it will be good and sometimes very bad. Initially i had too much difficlulty in cleaning the scales and however i cleaned, it always had some smell..Later i learned how to remove the skin. Its tricky and it takes away the majestic look of karimeen, but the taste comes good. So now a days i always remove the skin.I always think about karimeen pollichathu in a vazhayila, but never tried it..