BENGALURU: A man once said, ‘Knowledge is knowing tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.’ Let’s just say, he wasn’t wrong! How about adding tomatoes to cakes then? Before you go ‘what?!’, head chef at Araku Coffee, Rahul Sharma decided to bake one to do justice to the tomato, after several rounds of trials to find the right way to use tomatoes in a cake.
Talking about the technique, Sharma says he brings the skin of tomatoes under the spotlight. “It’s a sun-dried cherry tomato cake topped with tomato skin crisp, tomato jam, kachampuli vinegar, chewy sun-dried cherry tomatoes, mascarpone and tomato powder. They enhance the flavour of the cake and add a nice balance of textures to it. The tomato cake is one of our bestsellers this season,” he adds. For Sharma, a dessert should not feel like a slap of sugar. “It should make you feel happy and not guilty. It’s important that the vegetable we start with has natural sugars in some form,”he explains.
City-based nutritionist Gauravi Vinay experiments with vegetables too. Vegetable cakes are just like fruit in cakes, she says. Her favourites are lauki (bottle gourd) brownies and zucchini cakes. “These vegetables are very neutral and soak in any flavour you give to them. I bake for my family and the flavour is always appreciated. No one can tell unless you tell them what’s in there,” she says, adding the next vegetable she’s going to experiment with is eggplant.
Another vegetable cake-lover and home baker Chaitali Raizada, who calls herself a ‘witch at baking,’ grew up eating moong dal (green gram) halwa, lauki, and pumpkin kheer and did not think twice before baking the beetroot and sweet potato cakes. “Because I started as an untrained baker, I was completely fearless and had no dos and don’ts in my head. I thought of cakes with vegetables as the first thought instead of an afterthought,” she says. Raizada founded Taantraa, an organic hand baking company, and introduced vegetable cakes for women and children.
“Beetroot provides a huge iron supplement for the women who lose a lot of blood during their period cycles, and sweet potato is known for its flavourful and edible fibres, leading to perfect digestion. Isn’t it a great idea to get nutrition through desserts?,” she says.