Pineapple Coconut Birthday Cake

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The tropical flavors of pineapple and coconut in this pineapple coconut birthday cake are sure to please family and friends and make any occasion special.  

Pineapple Coconut Birthday Cake

I have been facing writers’ block for a while. There is so much going on that I don’t know where to begin. This space has always been snippets of my life and a recipe. While I have recipes to share, its difficult to put down in words what all has been going on. I have been sitting with this post for a couple of days, and since nothing is coming to me, I will start this post by talking about this pineapple coconut birthday cake and leave it at that.

4th July was my dad’s birthday and since I was home for his birthday, I wanted to make a cake for him. I decided on a soft, fluffy coconut cake I had made for one of his previous birthdays, this time with a crushed pineapple filling and a whipped cream cheese frosting.

I worked on the cake recipe when I was working on my home based baking business, The Pink CakeBox. The recipe is adapted from here. The coconut cake is soft and fluffy because it uses a mix of oil and butter, and mildly flavored with coconut extract which gives the cake a lovely coconut flavor. The pairing with pineapple makes it a pina colada sort of cake, which is what I love about this pineapple coconut birthday cake.

A lot of people are not particularly fond of buttercream frosting. While I love buttercream frosting with a rich chocolate cake, for more tropical flavors or fruit based cakes I prefer either a simple whipped cream frosting, or my current favorite this whipped cream cheese frosting which is made from cream cheese and whipping cream. Its light, with a slight richness from the cream cheese. Its not sweet at all, and is great for piping too.

To decorate the cake, I used a small star tip and made 9’s all across the cake. Its a simple technique with beautiful results.

Pineapple Coconut Birthday Cake Pineapple Coconut Birthday Cake

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Homemade Dinner rolls/ Pav Buns

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Soft and fluffy dinner rolls made using the Tangzhong method. These dinner rolls make great pav buns too, and are eggless.

The best homemade dinner rolls/ pav buns

There is nothing like hot fresh dinner rolls from the oven and today I am sharing a recipe for homemade dinner rolls/ pav buns that uses the Tangzhong method.

I had read about the Tangzhong method and always wanted to try it. Its a bread making technique that originated in Japan (and popularized by a Chinese cookbook author), where the flour is first mixed with water, cooked to make a roux, cooled and then added to your bread dough ingredients. The result is a soft and fluffy bread that remains soft for longer than the one made the regular way.

The chemistry behind the tangzhong method is interesting and one that Jenni from Pastrychefonline.com explains very well. She explains in the post that the bread is moist because of the water content in it. By cooking the flour with the water you help the starch molecules hold on to the water, and at the same time keep a portion of the flour in your dough from strengthening their gluten bonds, giving the resultant bread a slightly tender crumb. That doesn’t mean that your bread will lack structure. Since only 5-10% of the total flour used in the recipe is used in Tangzhong, you get the structure from the rest 95%, and yet get a tender and moist bread.

The best homemade dinner rolls/ pav buns

The other day when I was trying to look for pav buns/dinner rolls recipe and saw that Gayathri from Gayathricookspot.com used the tangzhong for her pav buns, I knew I wanted to make it. I have a good whole wheat dinner roll recipe on the blog, but you know how much I love trying new recipes, so decided to give this pav bun/dinner rolls recipe a try. Even though I always try to make my breads more whole wheat, this time I decided to not substitute any of the flour with whole wheat. I was making pav bhaji and wanted it to be exactly street style, where the pavs are never whole wheat, but the less healthy maida/all purpose.

The dinner rolls came out so perfectly soft and fluffy. The tangzhong method also yields bread thats remains softer for longer, unlike most homemade breads that become hard in a day or two. Unfortunately or fortunately, there was nothing left of the dinner rolls for me to test that theory. My dad who had been out of town and only arrived at dinner time to eat the pav bhaji, didn’t realise till I told him that the pav is also homemade. He thought they were store bought pav buns.

In case you are wondering how I served the pav buns, here it is. Click on the picture for the recipe for pav bhaji.

The best homemade dinner rolls/ pav buns

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New York Cheesecake

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New York style baked cheesecake with a rich yet light cream cheese filling and a buttery biscuit crust.

New York Cheesecake

Whenever I think of cheesecake I think about the episode from the TV sitcom Friends where Rachel and Chandler discover the most luscious and creamy cheesecake they have eaten. And ever since that episode, I have wanted to get my hands on a cheesecake that would make me feel how they feel while eating a piece of that cheesecake.

The recipe that I am sharing today is my answer to that episode. The recipe yields a baked cheesecake that has a rich yet light cream cheese filling. I have made this recipe a couple of times now. Each time I have made it for guests, and after baking and letting it cool, I never found time to photograph it, even though it always came out really good. Its good that I didn’t photograph it then because the more I made it the more I gathered on tips and tricks that will help you get the perfect creamy baked New york cheesecake.

New York Cheesecake

New York Cheesecake

The original recipe doesn’t have a crust, but my mom likes crusts, and I have realized so do a lot of other people. Graham crackers are not easily available in India. While traditionally, one would use graham crackers in crust, digestive cookies are a good substitute for using in cheesecake crusts In India, you get McVities digestive cookies which can be used to make the cheesecake crust. I sometimes like to mix in a packet of Unibic’s Honey Oatmeal digestive cookies as well and am always happy with the results.

The recipe is adapted from here and I am so grateful for Katy to have posted it. The original recipe as is was perfect, but required a little tweaking to suit my and my family’s liking.

A few tips I have learnt from the original post (do check it out) as well as baking it a couple of times now, is to make sure all your ingredients are at room temperature. It is very important to keep that in mind if you want a smooth, creamy filling. Although its a vanilla cheesecake, I like the slight tang from lemon and recommend you using both the lemon zest and lemon juice. A 2-hour bake in my oven gives the perfect texture to the cheesecake. Cooking in a bain-marie helps the filling cook slowly and evenly, yielding a creamy cheesecake.

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