Panfusine

 Its sad that 99% of New Years resolutions go bust on Jan 2nd. Thankfully this group resolution went on until the year end. Cannot say how thankful I am to Aparna Balasubramanian and her motivation & enthusiasm in guiding the lot of us through a dozen delicious yeasted confections. I admit, I missed out on one assignment - The crunchy salty pretzels (which no one in my family cares for)  while on vacation in India, but got a personal face to face exemption from Aparna herself! And so here is yeasted confection # 12: The Bee sting Cake, known as Bienenstich Kuchen in German. Couple of anecdotes behind this unusual name  -  The baker who came up with this recipe was shooing a bee away from the sticky almond topping when it retaliated and stung him.  another story - The inhabitants of a village drove away hostile invaders by flinging beehives at them and celebrated with this victory cake, which they christened Bienenstich Kuchen. But whatever the reason, this luscious  custard

 Got your attention with that sacrilegious sounding title on this post, didn't I? Well, I'm as spiritual as the next person out there, and never in my life will I ever commit that variety of Blasphemy, so nothing to fret about. I still wonder why these curious looking citrus entities (other than the obvious visual reason) were called such. It turns out that these fruits are used as a religious offering to the Buddha. My neighboring Whole Foods Market (which is quite some distance away, in Princeton) had a stock of these weird looking citrus and I must have been the oddball customer who immediately went cuckoo on spotting them. Since I had never seen one before, I immediately went for the biggest fruit with the most tentacles (since they were sold as individual units rather than by weight) The first three 'tentacles' were peeled off for their zest, dried in the oven and went into making a citrus salt for my Food52 Secret Santa .     Making

Sometimes, there is no excuse, the brain just does NOT want to sit down and get down to writing a post. And I believe in giving myself that luxury. As much as I enjoy whipping up dish after dish, getting the ingredients ready, Taking notes down to the last pinch, tweaking, trying to make it presentable even within a low maintenance 'plonk & shoot' configuration. There are recipes that linger on in a rough copy format, chicken scribbles that only I can make sense of. This recipe is one of those comfort food dishes that finds a place on my table multiple times (Perhaps the familiarity of the dish is the reason why It hasn't found its way to the blog). The dish by itself is one of those elegantly easy dishes that defies being categorized into any one particular cuisine, a touch of Mujaddara from the Middle East, spiced with Harissa , a generous chunk of Indian Paneer cheese, and the star ingredient and the chief flavor: Traditional American Pumpkin puree. I pa