In Your Kitchen: Baking with Arosha
Arosha and I made contact over Instagram when I came across her lovely boards to use for photography. I learnt a bit about her and asked if she would contribute to Kitchen Therapy and she happily obliged.
She takes amazing photographs, bakes gorgeous cakes and breads, and is extremely creative with her work. Before Arosha had her son, she baked only a handful times, but for some reason her wandering towards the kitchen intensified after her delivery, baking gorgeous cakes and taking pictures of them while her baby boy napped – hence the name of her blog: Lil Cupcake Monkey. She and her artist husband started making backdrops for her photography as a hobby, but eventually realised that they could make something bigger out of this and so started Axl’s Little Shop, from where I have bought a few boards myself.
Learn more about this talented lady below, along with her recipe for Banana-Coffee Loaf.
10 Questions with Arosha
Day Job: I run a food photography backdrop and prop shop called “Axl’s Little Shop”
Lives in: Bangalore, India
In the kitchen, I can’t live without: Butter, sugar, flour and eggs!
Current food obsession: Sourdough!
If I could cook for anyone: Gary Mehigan
An ingredient I refuse to touch: I don’t like certain fruits like mango (I know I am weird!) and lychee, so probably those are the main ingredients I have never used in baking.
A traditional family dinner is: My son likes pasta so these days its pasta with homemade tomato-basil sauce. Traditional Lunch is generally rice, coconut curry (verum curry), fish fry and some veg poriyal and maybe an egg on the side.
Go-to comfort food: Pizza
Would love to travel to: I travelled quite a bit when I was studying and had a good variety of cuisines, maybe next would be somewhere in Scandinavia, never been there.
My motto: Eat cake for breakfast!
Arosha’s Recipe: Banana Coffee Loaf
If you follow my Instagram or Facebook, you can see the only thing I love to do is bake... be it cakes, cookies, breads, cupcakes, pies, literally anything to do with baking sweet things! I am a total sugar junkie, I know it sounds bad, so sometimes I do simple bakes to not over indulge in the sweet section.
This banana coffee loaf is perfect for tea time or as breakfast! Also since there are bananas it is naturally sweetened.
Serves: 6 | Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 25 minutes | Total Time: 35 minutes
Ingredients:
120g all-purpose flour
100g brown sugar
100g butter at room temperature
2 large eggs
3 bananas, very ripe
1 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp instant coffee powder or 125 ml espresso shot
50g walnuts
Method:
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius, grease and line the loaf tin with parchment paper.
In a large bowl, mash 2 of the 3 bananas into pulp.
Add butter and brown sugar and whisk well.
Add one egg at a time and beat.
Add the coffee into the mixture.
Sift the flour and baking powder into the wet mix and fold the batter until its completely incorporated.
Chop the walnuts and fold into the batter.
Pour the batter in the load tin, slice the last banana in the center along the length and place it on the batter.
Sprinkle some more chopped walnuts onto the batter.
Bake for about 25-30 minutes, check with a wooden skewer to see if completely baked.
Once baked, let it cool on a cooling rack.
Slice and enjoy…
You can follow Arosha and her baking and creative adventures at:
http://www.lilcupcakemonkey.com/ | Facebook: Lil Cupcake Monkey | Twitter: @shalini_aro
Instagram: @aroshaliny | Pinterest: @arosha_liny
To buy her food photography backdrops and props:
Facebook: Axls Little Shop | Instagram: @axlslittleshop | Etsy: Axls Little Shop
