All That Fudge

I've been looking for a good fudge brownie for ages and have tried a bunch of recipes but never really got the feel. But today, I finally found a recipe that worked wonders and yielded the best fudge brownies I've ever tasted - soft, rich and absolutely fudgy!

Ingredients
4 large Eggs
1 1/4 cups Cocoa
1 teaspoon Salt
1 teaspoon Baking Powder
1 teaspoon Espresso Powder
1 teaspoon Vanilla
1 cup Unsalted Butter
2 1/4 cups sugar
1 1/4 cups All-Purpose Flour
2 cups Chocolate Chip

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly grease a 9"x13" pan.
2. Crack the eggs into a bowl and beat them with the cocoa, salt, baking powder, espresso powder and vanilla until smooth.
3. In a saucepan, melt the butter & add the sugar. Keep heating and mixing the butter/sugar mixture. Don't let it boil. The heat will allow more sugar to mix into the butter and this will yield a shinier top top-coat on your brownies.
4. Add the hot butter/sugar mixture to the egg/cocoa mixture, stirring until smooth.
5. Add the flour and the chips. If you want the chips to stay whole, wait for the batter to to cool, about 20 mins, and then fold them into the batter.
6. Spoon the batter into the greased pan and bake for 30 mins or until the cake-testing toothpick comes out either clean or with only a few crumbs on it.

Best eaten hot with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top! :-)

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! 

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! :)

Chocolate Decadence

I've been blogging for quite a while now. But never on a regular basis. I blog consistently for a month or so and then for 6 months I totally forget about it! But for the past few months I've been thinking about this, a food (slash) perception blog. I'm always being asked by friends about where they should go for dinner or where is the best place to take their families for a quiet meal or what's the best item to order at a specific restaurant. I either have great taste or very common taste, either way my love for food and my humanitarian nature demands that I let people know where to go if they want a party in their mouth.

So on a recent stop-in at Karachi for a 24-hour stay before my flight to Dammam, I was stuffed with enough sugar to power a generator (that is IF generators ran on sugar!). There was so much chocolate that at a point I thought I would blow up and you'd find tiny nougats of chocolate instead of chunks of meat!

But the sad part about the mini trip to Karachi was that as soon as I reached at my Uncle's place from the airport and turned on the TV, someone somewhere had been shot at and Karachiites had been informed of a strike. So much for my excitement about the City of Lights!

But me being the brave and ever-resilient person that I am decided to go out the next day and me and Aunt and her tiny-tots ended up at the ever-famous Dolmen Mall - food court, to be exact!

And here's what I ate:

1. Chicken Stromboli from Lazzaro
2. Chocolate Decadence from Del Frio

The first one from the right on the second shelf - YUMM! <3

The stromboli was great, and I'm sure that was partially because it was fresh and I was as hungry as a whale on a plankton diet! But the cherry-on-the-cake was the slice of Del Frio's Chocolate Decadence. I mean, it was absolutely, doubtlessly the most wonderful slice of chocolate decadence I've had in my entire life. It was everything you'd expect a chocolate cake, chocolate cheesecake and Italian mousse bundled together to taste like.

The trip to Karachi would've been a bust considering I didn't get to see what all the fuss is about when people talk about Port Grand and I didn't get to meet all the lovely people I had planned to meet but it was saved by Del Frio's Chocolate Decadence. I just hope they can keep the quality standard maintained!

In case someone needs a recipe, here's one and here's another

Happy eating!