Carrot Cornmeal Muffins

1/4 cup orange juice
1/4 cup raisins or currants
1/2 cup grated carrot, about 1 medium carrot
1 cup granulated sugar
2/3 cup vegetable oil
2 large eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
¾ cup Cornmeal
¾ cup all-purpose flour, stir before measuring
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon


Preparation:

Line 12 muffin cups with paper liners. Heat orange juice in microwave, add raisins or currants. Set aside.
In a mixing bowl, beat sugar, oil, eggs, and vanilla until well blended. Combine the dry ingredients and add to first mixture, mixing just until ingredients are moistened. Add raisins and carrot into the batter, fold it lightly.
Fill muffin cups about 2/3 full and sprinkle grated carrot ; bake in preheated 180° C oven for 18 to 2o minutes, or until the muffins bounce back when lightly touched with a finger.

Makes 12 muffins.

Cornmeal Cookies

I just love baking as the aroma of butter & vanilla is so heavenly. Its been long I've baked any goodies so decided to make some cookies. Last week I tried baking Crunchy Oatmeal raisin cookies. Wasn’t very happy with their shapes as they came out flat but were very crunchy and tasty. I had some cornmeal stored so my search for cornmeal cookies begin and i bumped into these Italian Cornmeal cookies, “Crumiri”. Had all the ingredients in my kitchen shelf, so without wasting any time just off to bake them. Sabu was all excited to help me with the baking. She loves to cream the butter and sugar and finally she did the whole dough. Filled the dough in the pastry bag and Sabu was already with the piping bag running down with imagination as what shapes she should make. She happily piped out some ginger man, shirt, heart and various different shapes on the greased baking sheet. Baked the cookies in a preheated oven for 15 minutes and she was right next to the oven waiting impatiently for the cokies to come out of the oven. Side by side I spooned few cookie drops in another baking sheet. Few were sprinkled with pistachio powder and few I put 1 almond in the centre.

Ingredients :

180 gms unsalted butter
140 gms sugar
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence
240 gms all purpose flour
½ tsp salt
110 gms cornmeal

Preheat oven @ 180C. Grease the cookie sheet. Cream the butter & sugar until light and pluffy, add one eggs at a time, add vanilla essence now add the dry mixture of flour, cornmeal & salt. Mix well. Put the dough in a piping bag and and pipe out V , S or any shapes you like. I made few shapes and few dropped few with a tsp and sprinkled it with pistachio powder. Bake it for 15-18 minutes. Makes 3 dozen.

Corn Meal Easy Bake Cake

My daughter Sabrina the “Little Chef” is 10 year old who loves to cook and is always ever ready to help me in the kitchen. She was all excited when we decided to make this easy cornmeal cake.







1 cup cornmeal
1 cup flour (Maida)
2 cups sugar
1 cup milk
½ cup oil
4 eggs (separate the yolks and egg white)
1 tsp baking powder


Pre-heat the oven at 200°C. Mix the egg yolks, sugar and oil. Boil the milk and mix the cornmeal. Mix cornmeal mixture to the eggs mixture. Sift the flour with the baking powder and add to the mixture. In a bowl whisk the eggs white and fold into the mixture. Grease a cake pan. Pour this into the prepared pan and bake for 40 minutes or until the knife comes out clean.