KID’S BIRTHDAY CAKE

This is a fool-proof recipe. We have used this to make all sorts of birthday cakes over the years: trains, castles, jungles, ponds, harry potter worlds, various football clubs emblems, t-shirts, cakes with candy and sugared pictures...you name it.  You can either decorate the cake with butter cream and royal icing of various colors  or cut it into different shapes and glue them with butter cream. It is a tough yet not too heavy cake so it stands all sorts of icing (when we did a jungle we used 500 g of green royal icing and it did not collapse even a tiny bit)

You need:

325 g self raising flour

150 g plain flour

325 gr sugar

325 gr soft butter

1 teaspoon of vanilla essence

5 eggs

Preheat the oven at 180 degrees.  Mix the butter and sugar with an electric mixer until it becomes pale yellow. Separately mix the flour (sieve them if you are not going to use a lot of icing; also, if you are going to cut the cake into shapes then don't bother with the shifting) Add one egg, then one table spoon of flour, then another egg and so on until you use all the eggs. Add the vanilla essence and then add the rest of the flour by folding it into the butter mixture. Bake for 50 minutes (we have done this in all sorts of tins and frankly it always comes out well).

Calories in Cheesecake Versus Regular Cake

Cheesecake	Regular Cake
A 250gms baked cheesecake contains 804 calories from 436 amount of fat.	A 100gms of chocolate cake contains 358 calories
A 250gms of no bake cheesecake contains 684 calories from 285 amount of fat.	A 100gms of Black Forest cake contains 264 calories
Nutritional value of Cheesecake: Besides the fattening cream cheese, cheesecake is a good source of vitamin A, followed by selenium, riboflavin, phosphorous and calcium. It also contains small amount of iron.	Nutritional value of cake: Since regular cakes are largely made with maida and sugar, there are not many nutritional values attached to it. But cakes do contain small portions of protein, calcium, iron and carbohydrates.
Benefits of Cheesecake: Baked Cheesecake uses natural or healthy products like cream cheese, crackers and eggs with far less sugar than a regular cake. But if you compare baked cheesecake and no bake cheesecake, the later contains less fat, therefore lesser calories.	Benefits of Regular cake: Generally cake is a great comfort food to soothe anger, get you out of sadness and cake is a good mood booster. But there are interesting recipes that use healthy ingredients for the healthy conscious folks.
Healthy Version of Cheesecake: There are several recipes that use low-fat hard cheese like ricotta, curds, coconut cream, tofu or paneer to prepare cheesecake. You can also use pumpkin or sheep's milk yoghurt.	Healthy Version of cake: Carrot cake is extremely common, if you want to make a healthy cake. You can toss in some dried fruits, dates, nuts. Banana cake is also popular with the healthy conscious.

Cheesecake Recipe without Cream Cheese

Ingredients

200g of walnuts

100g of cashews

200g of dates

600ml coconut cream

200g unrefined sugar

2g of agar-a 5cm X 7cm piece

400g of tofu

250ml of soy milk

500g of bananas

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tbsp vanilla essence

date syrup

Method

For the base

Grind the nuts into a fine powder. Chop the dates finely and kneed them with the nuts. Press this into the base of a spring-form cake tin approx. 30cm in diameter.

For the filling

Heat the coconut milk and sugar in a heavy based saucepan. When it nearly reaches boiling point add the agar broken into bits or powder if available and simmer for 10 minutes. Turn off the heat once all the agar dissolves and allow it to cool slightly while preparing the rest of the ingredients.

Blend the tofu into a paste by putting it into the blender and adding the soy milk in small amounts at a time until the tofu forms a smooth cream. Similarly blend the bananas with the cinnamon and vanilla and a bit of soy milk into a cream and then combine this with the tofu. Whisk the coconut milk into the mixture well. In order to check if the amount of agar is ok, place a spoonful of the mixture into the freezer for a few minutes and see if it sets. If it does not, add some more agar in a bit of soy milk or coconut milk by heating the mixture and then this can be added to the original mixture, until the right consistency is obtained. Pour this into the cake tin. Refrigerate for at least 12 hours.

With Sugar on Top @ Orderyourchoice.com

“I’m not from Italy or Spain, where you can talk about the food for hours,” Jasmina Bojic said, her cooks darting into the refrigerator beside her. She’s the executive pastry chef at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York, where she makes extravagant cakes fit for oligarchs, but, she said, “my country is small. It’s homey, nothing fancy about it, so I’m nervous to tell you about our food.” She was referring to Montenegro, a rough diamond set on the Adriatic, surrounded by Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo and Albania — more borders than I thought a country the size of Connecticut could have.

Jasmina came to New York when she was 17, on vacation, and fell in love with an American boy. Her parents brought her back the following year for the wedding, return tickets to Yugoslavia nestled in their luggage with their finery. But this was the summer of 1991, when civil war erupted. The family decided to wait here, to see what happened. They heard about the violence. They heard about the new borders. They never went home.

Over a lunch of juicy kebablike cevapi in Astoria, where Croatians, Bosnians, Serbians and Montenegrins have settled for generations, Jasmina told me all those new borders have never meant much for her community here. For proof, she asked me to talk to her friend Anita Boneta, who was a resident of Astoria for four decades.

“A lot of people in Belgrade and Dubrov-nik, husband and wife, would break up,” Anita, a Croatian, said. “I thought, This is crazy! Everybody here, they were O.K. with each other. When I was working at a restaurant, there was a captain from the area where Jasmina is from. He said, ‘You know, we shouldn’t even be friends!’ But he was one of my best friends.”

So many immigrant stories are marked by loss, by what people miss. Yet, talking to people from a country that no longer exists, I also realized that sometimes they have a chance to reconnect what’s severed when they get to their new home. Without the baggage of borders, the estranged can become bedfellows — Indians and Pakistanis buying the same spices in Jackson Heights, or Ukrainians and Russians eating the same fish in Brighton Beach.

It’s a lesson Jasmina showed me in the hotel’s kitchen. Sampita, a treat she has been making since she was a girl, is a plank of yolk-rich cake piled with glossy meringue, a kind of open-faced marshmallow sandwich. At first glance, it could be any white-topped European layer cake, until you cut into it and see that it’s mostly a riot of rich sugar. It’s a simple pleasure, sweet and gooey and compelling with strong coffee and rigorous dental hygiene. When I asked why we were making this dessert in particular, Jasmina said: “Well, our country is big on things like baklava, but when I was talking with my mom, she said that’s not really us. But this, I know, is our creation. I haven’t seen it anyplace else.”

Jasmina poured hot syrup into the egg whites, whipping them to a spectacular height. I had noticed that she used much more sugar than called for in a typical meringue. When we ate it, she noted how moist the cake gets after you let it rest; the extra syrup in the meringue slowly seeps into the base. This is crucial, she said.

It’s an unusual technique, and something about it kept nagging at me, until I went back to the map. Yugoslavia — with Montenegro near its center — sat directly between Central Europe and the Mediterranean. Or, in dessert terms, precisely between the lofty cakes of Austria and the syrup-soaked baklavas of Greece and Turkey. Jasmina’s sampita might be “nothing fancy,” as she put it, but it speaks to her people, undivided by borders.