Carrot Corn Salad

This carrot and corn salad is a favorite at our home as it's tangy and sweet too. It's also a kid friendly salad as most kids love corn as well as carrots and is not spicy. This is my entry to Manjula's Kitchen contest for April 2012  - this is definitely a healthy, colorful spring salad. 

Ingredients:

• 2 carrots 
• 1 11 oz can of whole kernel sweet corn
• 1 tomato
• 1 cucumber
• 1 tablespoon roasted peanuts (for garnish)
• 1 tablespoon cilantro ( for garnish)

Salad Dressing:

• 1 tablespoon Olive Oil
• Juice of 1 lemon
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp honey

Method:

1. Peel the carrots and grate them.
2. Drain the liquid from the can and wash corn well. Place the corn in a bowl with water and heat for 2 minutes in the microwave. (I prefer to use Green Giant Extra Sweet Niblets as the corn is juicy and sweet.). Let the corn cool.
3. Chop the tomato. Peel and chop the cucumber.
4. Mix the carrots, corn, tomato and cucumber together in a bowl.
5. Mix the salad dressing ingredients together.
6. Pour the dressing over the vegetables and mix well. Refrigerate for 1/2 an hour before serving.
7. Garnish with roasted peanuts and cilantro and serve.  

Suggestions: 

• You may also add 1 chopped green chili and 1/2 tsp black pepper to the dressing to make it spicy.

Wilton's Cake Decorating Basics - Class 4

The final class of the Cake Decorating Basics course....and I actually had fun! The preparation of the cake and the icing was not fun though. I baked a cake from a mix and iced it the day before the class. Awful! The cake had so many crumbs and it did not look professional at all. I made another cake from scratch with a recipe I found on the web. I was much happier with it and the icing looked good too. In the class, we learned how to write on the cake and we learnt to make ribbon roses. Then we spent the rest of the time decorating our cakes.  I was quite happy with my final results. Here they are.

Final cake

I baked 2 cakes and this was my daughter's final cake.

Mehendi

My daughter N loves to decorate with Mehendi or henna on her hands. My hubby S made his first attempt decorating with these today and we had fun. I bought these ready made Mehendi cones at an Indian grocery store and she left it on for 2-3 hours and then washed her hands. This will stay for about 2 weeks. Here are the pics.

Wilton's Cake Decorating Basics - Class 3

I felt that I did better in the third class than the second one. I made a couple of batches of cupcakes and I learned a lot from my mistakes. The first cupcakes I made from a mix and they came out pretty flat and that was probably because I needed to fill the cupcake pan at least 3/4th full. Then, I tried making cupcakes in the toaster oven. These were good but the baking was uneven. Finally, I made vanilla cupcakes from scratch in the oven range and they came out beautifully. We learned how to decorate using drop flowers, swirled flowers, rosettes, shells, pompom flowers, leaves, shaggy mums and icing cupcakes. I enjoyed baking and decorating the cupcakes more than the cake and will probably experiment more with them later. Here are the photos from Class 3.  

Cupcakes decorated with different flowers: Pompom Flower (center), Shaggy Mums (top and bottom right), Mini Rosettes and single Rosette

Wilton's Cake Decorating Basics - Class 2

The second class proved to be as interesting as it was time consuming and nerve racking ( at least for me). I am a total novice when it comes to baking, so when the instructor said we had to bake a cake and bring it to class I had my fingers crossed. Let's just say that we've had some interesting experiments at home. I didn't risk baking a cake from scratch and I used the yellow cake mix from Duncan Hines. I followed the instructions carefully and the cake turned out quite well surprisingly. In class we actually practiced leveling, torting, filling and icing the cake which took up quite a bit of time. Then we practiced pressure control for icing and how to pipe a curving line, tight zigzag as well as dimensional decorating. Finally, we colored our icing which we had made at home and transferred the cupcake pattern to the cake with piping gel. As we ran out of time, I came home and finished the rest of the cake decorating. My daughter chose the colors to decorate the cake. I would probably keep it simpler if I had to do it over but I hope it's not too bad for an amateur's first attempt.

Cupcake Decoration with a cherry on top and a heart

My sis said this looks like a Chef's Hat...I sincerely hope not! :-)

Cutting the cake for my son V's 6 month Bday

Wilton's Cake Decorating Basics - Class 1

I have been wanting to attend the Wilton's Cake Decorating Classes for a very long time. Somehow, if I had the time it would not fit in my budget and when I had the money I never had the time. Finally, my friend (M.R.) and I decided to try it out at our local Michaels store. We attended our first class yesterday and it was quite interesting. It was a session for 2 hours and the instructor began by discussing various details about baking such as choosing the right pan, how to prepare your pan, etc. Then we were taught how to prepare the Buttercream icing which we would use to decorate our cakes. She then demonstrated how to level, tort, fill and ice a cake. We had very little time left over to actually practice decorating the cookies we had brought to the class. I managed to do only one of them in about 10 minutes. Today, my 5 year old daughter N was so excited and we both had fun decorating our cookies. Here are some pictures of our practice sessions. I was surprised at how well they turned out.

My daughter decorated these with my help

My first attempt at decorating cookies

My daughter wanted her age 5 years on the cookie

Snowflake

My daughter's initials NIS

Vegetable Hoagie Rolls

Krishna Jeyanthi Special - Uppu Cheedai and Vella Cheedai

Morkuzhambu & Pitlay

Angel Hair Pasta with Veggies & Baby Corn

Vegetable Omelet

Broccoli & Baby Corn Fried Rice

Another simple variety of fried rice with broccoli and baby corn.

Breakfast - Bread Jam, Bananas and grapes

Simple breakfast that N loves. She made this herself by spreading Kissan Jam on bread. The grapes as well as the bananas were added to make this healthy.