Recipe: Ultimate Chocolate Cake with Fudge frosting

I cannot believe how long its been since I last wrote here. I knew life was going to get busy in the new year, I just didn't realize exactly how busy it was going to be!

I have so many posts in my drafts right now which eventually I hope to post up. Even before 2013 ended we did some projects around the home, reupholstering our dining chairs and re-staining bookshelves. Once I got back from my cousin's wedding in NJ we took a trip to Atlanta (right before they got hit with a pretty serious snow storm!). Then, I hosted my first get together with a few friends I've made here using some awesome Pinterest party ideas for inspiration! And last weekend we finally made a trip out to Disneyworld, where I made my first attempt at DIY Tshirt making! So stay tuned because I have plenty to share with you all!

In the spirit of Valentine's week I'm posting up this UH-mazing chocolate cake I made. My husband's birthday happens to fall on Valentine's Day, so usually I end up spoiling him with goodies rather than the other way around. Fortunately, we are both major chocoholics so its a win win! I love how moist this cake turns out, due to the Secret Ingredient.

Recipe Sourced here: Ultimate Chocolate Cake with Fudge frosting

Your key to a super soft cake!

Because you can never really go wrong with sprinkles, use them to add some pizzazz 

Enjoy!

Recipe: Zucchini carrot bread with chocolate chips and walnuts

I have a serious problem. I can't stop baking. 

This week I started intense potty training with Ali. He'll be 3 in December and I am hopeful to have him trained by his birthday. We're doing the cold turkey method, no pull ups. It's supposed to be the most effective and quick which it has proven to be, but it also is the most exhausting, mentally draining and is a likely candidate for extreme forms of torture. Let's just say I did NOT need to be baking while trying to accomplish this task. 

So despite a serious backache from all the bending down to clean and jerking out of the way to avoid being sprayed on it's been a decently successful few days. He's learned to keep his number twos in the toilet and number ones are getting better. Enough toilet talk. I know that's not why you came here. 

This recipe is a bit more involved than others I've attempted before, mostly because of the added step of grating zucchini/carrots and that probably took me longer as I did it while running back and forth between the kitchen and bathroom. Nonetheless, it came out tasting pretty delicious and my chocolate loving husband/child have already devoured more than half of it (IN ONE DAY). This is a great way to get picky eaters to have their veggies without knowing it! 

I also used baby carrots not whole carrots (gasp unhealthy I know, I like the taste of chemicals what can I say) and grating those is a torturous task in itself. I would say you could barely taste the carrot so maybe using real carrots is better? Or just use more? You try it and tell me!

Again, I like to tamper with recipes online to make my own so this is a blend of 1 2 and 3. 

Ingredients

• 1 cup vegetable oil
• 1½ cups granulated sugar
•  1 cup brown sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
• 2 ¾ cups all-purpose flour
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 tablespoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 cup grated carrots
• 1½ cups grated zucchini
• ½ cup walnuts
• ½ cup chocolate chips

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Oil and flour 2 loaf pans.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together oil, sugar, eggs, and vanilla until fully combined and slightly lightened in color.
3. In a medium bowl, stir together flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Whisk flour mixture into sugar mixture until fully combined. Add in the grated carrots and zucchini and walnuts. Stir until evenly distributed.  
4. Divide batter evenly among the loaf pans. Top with chocolate chips and more chopped walnuts, I also like to top with a little brown sugar to give it a crunch. Bake for 45 minutes on lower rack, rotating halfway through if necessary. Turn off stove and leave in oven to cool for 5-10 minutes to ensure it is cooked through.
5. Cool loaves in pans about 20 minutes before gently and carefully removing. Bread may be stored in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 4 days, or frozen, wrapped in parchment and foil and placed in a zipper bag for 4 months. 

Eggplant Parmesan

Oh and I nearly forgot to mention that I also made Eggplant Parm for dinner. Because I've totally lost my mind. Peeling the skin then slicing and bread crumbing the eggplant, its just all so much more time consuming than ordering pizza, which I probably should have done.  But the end result really was worth it. 

Attempt this when you have a solid 1-1.5 hrs on your hands. 

We bake, not fry, our eggplant slices  which makes me want to believe this is a healthy recipe but it tastes SO darn good to be called that. 

I'm too tired to write out the whole thing, but they do a good job of that Here. To add in more veggies I threw some frozen broccoli and sliced mushrooms into the canned tomato sauce. Also, while I put the eggplant slices to bake I roasted 3 garlic cloves on the side, then crushed and added them into my sauce. Wow does that pack in flavor or what! Hubs better get ready for roasted garlic everything.

I left my dish in for longer since I love me some burnt cheese topping but you can probably pull it out once the cheese starts to bubble. 

And since I clearly cant sit still for an idle moment, I leave you with a depiction of what I did with most of our time spent in the bathroom this week:

Filed under things you discover in the toilet - Ali's momma is a Play-Doh artist!
 Homemade fondant cakes here I come!

Chocolate Banana Raspberry Bread

As you can tell from my previous post, while hubs was away on a work trip I had WAY too much time on my hands. Since he loves dessert I wanted to make him something special when he got back. We also had bananas in the house which were way beyond my liking to eat. Normally I've always made this amazing Banana Walnut Bread which comes out incredibly moist, but since we were out of walnuts but had an abundance of raspberries I thought I'd alter it around a bit. The outcome? Heaven, pure heaven.

Ingredients:

2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 egg
1 cups sugar

1/2 cup (1 stick) melted butter

2 tablespoons greek yogurt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 ripe medium-large bananas, mashed
1/2 cup raspberries (mashed) and a handful whole to add on top
1/2 cup chocolate chips (to preference)

1/4 cup brown sugar

All the ingredients necessary (one extra egg added by mistake, lets pretend it never happened)

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350. Grease a 9x5x3 loaf pan and dust with flour.
Blend the flour, baking powder, and salt; set aside.
Mix the egg, sugar, and butter until combined.
Add the flour mixture to the egg mixture and when blended, add the yogurt, vanilla, raspberries, and mashed bananas; mix well.
Fold 1/2 cup of chocolate chips and pour batter into prepared loaf pan.
Sprinkle the batter with remaining 1/4 cup of brown sugar and stick in whole raspberries to give it a nice look on top.
Bake for 45 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean.

Separate Dry ingredients and wet

Combine everything to a 'thicker than pancake but not as thick as oatmeal' mixture

I had more batter than could fit in my pan so I made my favorite, Muffins!

fluffy gooey fruity goodness

Happy 35th Anniversary Mom and Dad!

Mirza Clan 2013, 2 parents 5 daughters 4 son in laws and 10 grand kids. Mash' Allah

My sisters and I threw our parents a surprise 35^th anniversary party earlier this month. The thing with surprises in our family is that all five of us sisters majorly suck at them! We are very close to our mom and speak with her almost daily, which made hiding the whole planning/prep of this party a huge task. We also rely on her immensely to advise us whenever we’re doing a big event, so the lack of her guidance was definitely felt. “How many paper cups do we need? Are two trays of biryani plenty? Should we buy back up naan in case the caterers don’t provide enough? Where is soda on sale?” These are all questions Mama Mirza would have a simple answer to. So, we struggled without her a bit, but in the end we pulled it off and they were both surprised and very proud. Goal Accomplished.

Planning an anniversary party for your parents:

Set a budget and begin brainstorming early

It makes it easy to know what you can and cannot do if you know how much you plan to spend. We had a decent size budget since all 5 of us were pitching in, but still we began planning for the party about 6 months beforehand, simply because four of us are working moms and living in different states so it was a lot of late night group IChat’s where we’d hash out details. Once we were all on the same page about how much each person can contribute we were able to figure out quickly how the costs would be divided up.

 

Book the hall

The most important task to get out of the way for a big event is to set a date and book the hall. We shopped around in our area for nice places. We spoke with fancy banquet halls and also local VFW halls. In the end we decided it was best for our budget to stick with a local VFW hall where we could spend more on décor, cake, food, and entertainment. Make sure to start calling places at least a month in advance, especially if your event is around a holiday because most halls, especially nice ones, are booked up quickly.

Book the Caterer

Again this was tough without mom since she’s always the one to know which caterer makes the best nihari and which now charges too high a rate. It took a few phone calls, but we got a good deal at Nawab Grill and ended up having a great amount of food that our guests really loved too.

Our menu was: Chicken Biryani, beef Nihari, Baghare Bangan, Chicken 65, Naan, Salad, Raita, Ras Malai all for $750 which was more than plenty to feed 100 guests. 

Invite your guests

I’ve used Paperless Post in the past for my son’s birthday party. Read here how I feel about the website. I really love their designs and again, we found one that was elegant yet simple and it went nicely with our theme! 

There was supposed to be another tier of pom poms at the top, I got lazy.

Party Décor 

This is where your budget can go out of hand since it’s all about how extravagant or simplistic you want to be. Nothing a few trips to the dollar store, amazing savings and Costco along with a creative mind can’t solve though. My little sister was in charge of this area for our party and she did a wonderful job. We had an elegant theme of Grey & Coral Pink for the party. We made the centerpieces at home along with the banner found via free download here.  Mariam created these great programs to place at each table with a love quote on the cover. I loved the Mr. & Mrs. sign for their chairs but we just didn't have time to put together the ribbon, so we stuck it on the door where they entered from and it ended up being a cute addition!

 Order the Cake

This was my first time working with Piece of Cake by Saba Mendha. She did a great job bringing my ideas to life. I wanted a simple white cake with a thin grey ribbon on each tier and a big coral colored flower on top with some stylish yet simple piping work one each tier. She did just that. We had one layer vanilla with fresh strawberries and another with chocolate cake with chocolate ganache. Both cakes tasted great! My only critique would be that I imagined the flower being larger than it turned out, since it was the only ‘pop’ part of the cake I wish it was a bit bigger. Also, the piping work wasn’t totally clean, but I understand that she’s still a new cake artist and it wasn’t a big deal to me. Taste and look overall were great. She was on time with delivery and very open to my ideas for the cake design. I loved her professionalism and great taste of the cake! 

Write a Speech

This was tough because I’m a sap. Also, I never have a spare moment to collect my thoughts. I would start thinking of things on my drives to work but usually I’d be a mess of tears by the time I got to my desk. So it took some time, and some Googling of wedding speeches, which I found were all quite useless. So here, use mine and put your own creative liberties on it, I’m glad to help since Google, for once, was inept:

Sab se pehle mein kehna chahoungi ke aap saab humare ammi aur abu ke aziz dost aur rishtedaron mein se hain, aur humme bahaut khushi hai ke aap unki zindagi ke iss ehem din ko celebrate karne mein humare saath shamil hosake. Humari dua hai ke Allah tala ammi abu ko 35 aur khushiyon bhaare saal ata farmein. 

 “Firstly, I would like to say thank you to all our guests. You all are mom and dad’s most dear friends and relatives and we are very happy that you are able to join us in celebrating this special day in their lives where we honor their marriage. We wish that God grants our mom and dad with 35 more years filled with happiness.” 

Abu and Ammi, your marriage has always been an excellent example for us five, in every aspect of life. Every child thinks their parents are the best, but the real truth, sorry to tell the rest of you, is that my parents truly are the best. You two have taught us many lessons through our lives. But the most important one you taught us is that it is your ikhlaq, manner, generosity, your ability to be a good friend and a helpful neighbor that makes one a better person. And you both have shown us that a big part of being a better person means to be an ideal spouse. A spouse who shows respect in public and in private, who cares for not just one another but for each other’s families. Seeing the amount of patience you both have had in the past 35 years with all the situations that life put you through is what inspires me when I know I’m losing my patience! 

Mom, to us you are the ideal woman. We call you a Spartan because you are a warrior. You are the ideal standard by which we measure all our life goals. I cannot imagine the difficulties you went through coming into this new country without your family and very few familiar faces. But you did a great job at everything that came your way. you raised 5 children, worked full time, had numerous house guests and random visitors popping over all the time and never once did I see you struggle. I only saw you open your doors and your heart to others, you always told us that Allah puts barqat (blessing) in a home that has its door open for loved ones and that no situation is difficult if you keep in mind the blessing that come with it.  

Dad, you are our hero. It’s true that every girl’s first love is their father and I can speak for all five of us when I say you are definitely ours. You have an unending amount of patience and love to offer us. You have taught us what it means to be an excellent son, father and husband.  

I have learned from seeing you both that no human and no marriage is perfect, only Allah is perfect. But Allah (SWT) gives us a spouse to complete us so that their strengths make up for our shortcomings, and together we are whole. We pray to always see you two being whole together with a long and healthy life iA. 

we gift wrapped as shoebox and had paper/pens for guests to write down memories for our parents to read later on as a keepsake from the party.

Prepare a Slideshow

Everyone loves looking at old pictures of themselves in the '70s with crazy hairdos and stylish bell bottoms. Just don't go crazy, remember that people can just browse at a lot of these pics on a Facebook album too so keep it short sweet and add some sappy songs to pile on the nostalgia.

My happy child in front of the Slideshow area

Cake cutting

Global 25th-Anniversary Utility Knife, 4 1/2" (Google Affiliate Ad)