Happy New Year!!

Here's wishing you all a Very Happy and Prosperous 2010!! The last year was filled with a lot of wonderful memories and the new year comes with promises of even better ones. We have a lot to look forward to this year, most importantly the birth of our baby in early March. Life is full of excitement and anticipation right now :).

2009 ended on a beautiful note, we had a wonderful trip to Mount Shasta with friends and I had my first White Christmas, it was breathtaking. Here's a picture of the view from my window on Christmas morning....

Here's a picture of the cake I baked for Christmas, more about that later in another post.

Some more pictures of my trip...

Our backyard...

A cute little tree...

Eskimo Hill...

Burney Falls...

Lake Shasta...

Have a wonderful year.....

Marble Cake

Marble cake has always been my favorite, what's better than a combination of chocolate and vanilla. This recipe is from the book, Baked - New Frontiers in Baking, and what's interesting is that it uses dark chocolate along with cocoa powder. I had to try it and it makes such a difference in the cake. The chocolate flavor was really intense and just irresistible.

Shortbread Cookies

It's getting cooler by the day, the late sunrise and early sunset are just making me so lazy. Most of my days are spent curled with a book and I get up only when I have to. That's the only excuse for my long absences from blogging, plain laziness. Though I love winters, being from Mumbai since I'm not used to very cold weather and it sometimes gets a little unbearable. I'm so grateful for being in California where the weather is not so extreme and I thank God everyday, just thinking of a white winter gives me the creeps:).

I'm not cooking anything special nowadays, but I do miss baking a lot. Last week it was one of my friend's daughter's first birthday and I made these shortbread cookies by Ina Garten, that I had seen in Food Network a while back. The recipe is here.

Just cut them into different shapes...

Fresh out of the oven and of course I've already had a bite...

The cookies were incredibly buttery and delicious, just as she promised. Will surely be making this often.

Butter Chicken

Butter chicken is one of my favorite dishes and the best I've had is at Grand Central restaurant in Chembur. I've never been satisfied with what we get at the restaurants out here, so I've just stopped ordering the dish. Last week we had dinner at a friends place and was I excited when I saw butter chicken on her table. It was really yumm, so of course I had to get the recipe. Noted it down and tried it today. It turned out great, was rich and delicious and was perfect with some parathas.