Recipes | Eggless Coffee Cake, Cocoa Brownies and CBC Meets

The rapid increase in the number of groups on Facebook is a menace if you are one of those unfortunates who have been added blindly every other day by their admins without your consent and with no relevance to the subject of your interest.
I was added to this particular group almost a year back and I ignored it with the pretext of just another FB group where bloggers drop in to give a shout out for their new blog posts or share the pictures of their cats.
But to my surprise, this small group has come out as one of the most active, focused and close-knit family of bloggers from Chennai on Facebook.
This is Chennai Bloggers Club or CBC, a bundle of young, enthusiastic and talented bloggers from Chennai.  This group has made me realize the mighty powers of pen and to think about writing beyond food.

I have been to a few CBC meets and the more I attended the meets and interacted with these gifted bloggers the more I started appreciating the group and its activities.
I could feel the energy and positive vibes whenever I attended the CBC meets. The dedication and responsibility with which this lovely admin & blogger Susan Deborah keeps everybody engaged is unmatched.
Well, coming back to the boxes of goodies in the picture, these were baked a few weeks back for CBC friends in a recent meet at Zha cafe.

1. Coffee cake

Ingredients; 

• 1 1/4 cups refined flour
• 1/2 cup yogurt/curd
• 1/2 cup milk
• 3/4 cup powdered sugar
• 1/4 cup melted butter
• 1 tbsp instant coffee powder
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• A pinch of salt

Method; Grease a cake tin and pre heat oven to 180 °C for 10 minutes.

Take a large bowl and add flour, baking powder, baking soda, instant coffee powder (I used Nescafe’) salt and mix well with a fork.

In another bowl add meted butter, powdered sugar, milk, yogurt/curd and beat it for 5-6 minutes.

Add wet ingredients into dry ingredients and fold gently to mix all the ingredients.

Pour the batter into greased baking tray and bake at 190° C for 25-30 minutes or till done.

Take out from oven and cool the coffee cake completely before slicing it.

2. Cocoa Brownies 

I baked and packed about 50 brownies and 40 coffee cakes the same morning. Brownies need a couple of hours of resting time before unmolding and slicing to avoid cracks and breaking it into pieces. But with non stop baking of 4 hours I could not get perfect Brownie slices.

Ingredients; 

• 2 cups refined flour
• 2 cups powdered sugar
• 2/3 cup cocoa powder
• 1 cup water
• 1/2 cup melted butter
• 1/2 cup chopped nuts
• 1/4 cup chocolate chips
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• A pinch of salt

Method; Grease a rectangular baking tray and pre heat oven to 180°C.

Melt butter in a pan, take off from flame and add cocoa powder, vanilla extract and sugar in it, mix well.

Add baking powder, chocolate chips, salt in the refined flour, mix well and add to the wet ingredients.

Pour the batter into grease baking tray, sprinkle chopped nuts (I used almonds) and bake at 180°C for 20-25 minutes or till done.

Remove from oven and let it cool for an hour before slicing the brownies.

The CBC meet is always a mix of fun, food and wonderful blogger friends. But for CBC and Charan Sarvanan who added me to this group I would have certainly missed meeting some of the amazing bloggers from India. Banu Gomes, Ramaswamy, Ganesh Puttu, Karthikeyan, Jothi, Prason, Anand Arun, Ashwini, Mahesh, Rajiv, Clement, Kalyan, Gitanjali, Sowmya, Prashanth, Vinod, Aravind, Aarti, Deepa, Bragadeesh, Sriram, Ganga, Sashi, Vid....and the list goes on....

With these multifaceted bloggers writing on subjects as varied as politics, social causes, music, humor, technology, photography, architect, history, food, travel, philosophy to poems...I would love to see CBC to be a strong force of Indian bloggers to reckon with in the years to come.

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