On Spot @ Chaaye Khana

In my experience, chocolate cake is the most simplest of delicacies. Yes, very few people tend to get it right. Especially if it's Chocolate Lava Cake.

But the people at Chaaye Khana know exactly when to turn up the heat and when to turn it down. Because their Chocolate Lava Cake was diviiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine!

I've always loved Chaaye Khana, for its variety of teas on the menu and also for the ambiance. Sipping good tea sitting among a shelf upon shelf of books, there's never a dull moment. And talking about tea, whoever is planning on a visit to Islamabad or whoever lives here and still hasn't been to Chaaye Khana, I urge you to drop in and try their Caramal Pear Gold Rooibos or their Strawberry White tea - both are amazing!

Plus, for the early birds, they have a wonderful breakfast menu to choose from - which I'm itching to try.

The prices are reasonable, the ambiance is great & the menu is worth more than a few visits.

Happy dining! 

Attack of The Baking Bug (Part 2)

One fine day, I opened the door to the fridge and there were carrots, carrots, CARROTS everywhere! It was as if Bugs Bunny had been put in charge of the groceries. I couldn't figure out what had happened at first. But then I started raking my mind for all the things I could do with a bunch of carrots. And I made the first thing that came to my mind...

Carrot Cake!

I love food, but there's something about carrot cakes which makes my drift off to a Winter Wonderland, with my sitting in a glass covered veranda, watching the snow drift down from the sky in its beautiful white perfection while drinking cinnamon-spiked coffee and munching on an ooey-gooey carrot cake. Sigh

*drools*

Check out the recipe. The only things I changed about it were;

1. I used AP Flour and added a teaspoon of baking powder.
2. I didn't have walnuts so I threw in some raisins instead.

Ingredients

For the cake:

• 2 cups self-rising flour
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 2 cups white sugar
• 1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
• 4 eggs
• 3 cups grated carrots
• 1 cup chopped walnuts

For the icing:

• 1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese
• 1/2 cup margarine, softened
• 1 pound confectioners' sugar
• 1 cup chopped walnuts
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 

Directions

• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease two 9 inch round cake pans.
• In a medium bowl, stir together the flour, cinnamon and sugar. Add the oil and eggs, mix until blended, then stir in the carrots and nuts. Divide the batter evenly between the two prepared pans.
• Bake for 25 to 30 minutes in the preheated oven. A toothpick inserted into the cake should come out clean. Cool cakes on wire racks before removing from pans.
• To make the frosting, use the second set of ingredients. In a medium bowl, cream together the butter and cream cheese; add the sugar and cream well. Stir in the nuts and vanilla. Use to fill and frost the cooled cake layers.

On Spot @ Roaster's

[On Spot will be a series of reviews of all the different restaurants that eat at & I'm hoping there's many of those. Happy eating! :-)]

Birthday's are a grand affair, especially when you're a university student and birthday's are just another excuse to party.

On a recent birthday of a friend, we decided to take the party to Roaster's, a cafe, bar & grill in Islamabad - which we later realized wasn't one of our best choices. Firstly, we couldn't figure out whether we were at the right place or not because there was no electricity and there was some issue with their back-up generator because of which most of the place was in the dark and their sign board wasn't lit up either. When the light finally came back on and the food was finally delivered, everything tasted the same even though it looked pretty. (Yes, I tried everyone's food!)

Steak # 1

Steak # 2

The steak I ordered was the Monterey Jack, which individually gets 4 stars out of 5 because it tasted good enough. But all the other steaks were just OK, nothing special.

What saved the day was the cake that we got from MJ's Bakery, a chocolate bundt cake...

...with a chocolate cupcake placed in the middle!

"Make a wish, deary!"

So, if you're planning on going to Roaster's, I'm sure the coffee is better than the steaks.

Ambiance: 4/5
Presentation: 3.5/5

Serving Size: 4/5

Taste: 2.5/5

Overall: 2.8/5

The one thing I loved about Roaster's though was that the lighting was perfect and with a new DSLR in hand, a friend took some of the most amazing shots of the whole gang and also the food. Check out his page on Facebook! (I would like to apologize to him because I picked probably the worst pictures of the food, probably because I didn't enjoy it a lot. lol)

The Attack of The Baking Bug (Part 1)

Every time I'm bake home in Saudi, I feel so full of energy and since there isn't much else where I can put it, I channel all that energy to one of my all-time favorite hobbies - baking. I started baking about a year or so go, and by that I mean I started to really bake, make my own cakes and cookies as compared to the cake-mixes I used to throw together and put in the oven before that. I still use cake-mixes (thank God for Betty Crocker!) but there's a certain sense of accomplishment that comes from taking a bite out of a cupcake that you've made from scratch!

So, on my current, almost at its end winter break that I'm spending at home, I've been baking my ass off, literally! My siblings are over-their-heads in love with me because of all the cupcakes and the cookies that vanish almost as soon as they come out of the oven.

The first item that I baked when I got home were a batch of plain Vanilla Cupcakes, a no surprises, no labor task that I took over because I was feeling too timid for an over-the-top dessert and also because my Mom doesn't like chocolate as much as I do.

Yes, they were as yumm as they look!

My Mom loved these cupcakes. She declared them to be one of my best cupcakes yet, even though I wasn't particularly excited about them. But well, "mother knows best!"

If anyone is planning to make these, here's the recipe I followed. The only changes I made to this were:

1. Replaced cake flour with AP flour because I didn't have any.
2. Used Hershey's chocolate syrup as topping instead of making the dark chocolate icing.

Happy baking! :)