If there’s one good thing that has come out of the Covid-19 lockdowns, it is our collective love for cooking at home. Remember the sheer joy of whipping your first perfect Dalgona coffee or nailing the perfect cheesecake in the first lockdown? Cooking and baking became a therapeutic exercise for most of us; taking our mind away from all the chaos outside, even if it was for a brief moment.
While homebound, I had developed a penchant for baking, and because my OTG oven was in very bad shape, most of my baking escapades involved my microwave or a cooker. That’s right, it is possible to bake cakes in a cooker too and once you get a hang of it, it does not seem tedious at all. You can also bake so many kinds of cakes in a pressure cooker apart from your standard chocolate cake.
Now that you can also make cakes in cookers, there is always a temptation to bake one without any rhyme or reason. I know it, because I have been there. I was frequently running out of maida, which made me realise how unhealthy this obsession was starting to become. My search for alternative flours got me to semolina. The good old suji, which never failed to satiate me in the form of Suji ka Halwa, could also be used to make cake. And not only was this cake super scrumptious, but also much healthier in comparison. Here’s how you can make Suji cake in a saucepan.
Ingredients:
- 2 cups of fine rava
- ½ cup curd
- 3/4th cup sugar
- 1 ½ cup milk
- ½ cup oil
- Pinch of salt
- 1 tsp baking powder
- ½ tsp baking soda
- ½ tsp cardamom powder
- ¼ cup milk
- 1 cup mixed nuts and tutti frutti
Recipe:
- In a mixer grinder, grind rava or suji to make a fine powder and keep it aside
- Take a large mixing bowl, add oil, curd and sugar
- Now, add sugar and whisk until sugar dissolves completely
- Add milk and mix well
- Then add the powdered rava, a pinch of salt and mix well
- Give everything a nice mix, and make sure everything is well combined
- Cover the batter and let it rest 10 minutes
- Take a saucepan and grease it with oil; line with baking paper
- Go back to the batter and mix well; make sure the rava is absorbed well
- Add baking powder, baking soda, milk and cardamom powder
- Add nuts and tutti frutti and mix well
- Now, transfer the batter to the saucepan
- Place the saucepan on the stove, keep the flame low
- Cover the pan, seal all the openings; you require steam for this cake
- Simmer for 60 minutes or until the cake is cooked; insert a toothpick, if it comes out clean, the cake is done
- Take it off the stove; let it cool for 10 minutes and unmould
