It’s getting hotter day by day and though this is the norm of things every year, it does not stop us from crying over it every summer and stating the obvious ‘it is sooooo hot’. There are times when the tea is also not fun anymore and coffee just makes you even warmer than you would like to be. In Summers I save a lot of milk almost every week and keep looking for ways to get rid of it or else the packets of milk just increase traffic in my refrigerator.

I usually boil the left over milk and make ‘khoya’ or ‘mawa’ out of it. I tried looking for an English equivalent for mawa but could not as its not ‘evaporated milk’ and definitely not just ‘thick milk’. It’s much denser and has the consistency of cottage cheese by the time I finish ‘evaporating’ it. I have to assume that the Western World is still not familiar with the delectable mawa made barfis and sweets.

This mawa can be deep freezed till needed and I thaw it to make mawa cake. Now it sounds slightly off beat to anyone who has not eaten the ‘Kayani Bakery’s Mawa cake (at Pune) But those who have tasted this Bakery’s mawa cake are just short of kissing the hands of chefs who made it. I could never muster courage to ask the chefs of Kayanis how they baked the mawa cake, but I have come up after quite a bit of experimentation, my own version of mawa cake. Try baking it…the preparation takes barely 15 minutes and is much easier than making gulab jamuns and other sweets out of mawa. -

Ingredients

Mawa                   100 gms

Butter                   200 gms

Sugar                     250 gms

Eggs                       6

Plain Flour           300 gms

Baking powder  1 1/2 spoons

Milk                       2-3 tablespoon

Preheat the oven to 200°C. Line the cake mould with silver foil as the bottom may stick due to mawa.  Take butter in a bowl, add sugar and whisk together till light and creamy. Add mawa to the butter mixture and continue to whisk.  Put Plain flower and baking powder into a strainer and sieve the mixture into the butter mixture

Break the eggs into another bowl and whisk with an electric blender till frothy and should become 4 times in volume.