Banana Nutella Cranberry Cake

So, I had some overripe bananas, nutella and some cake flour. So, time for a Banana Nutella Cranberry Cake. I added the cranberries coz I had recently tasted a nice cranberry bread from target and they were great and some nuts coz I am nuts about nuts.

The recipe is adapted from here.

Warning, the cake will be big and good. How much you eat of it is your own problem.

I also wanted to use brown sugar, so was a great opportunity for that. I was able to bake a cake in a 13X9 inch glass pan.

INGREDIENTS:
3 cups cake flour
1/4 cup/50 grams brown sugar
2/3 cup butter
1/4 cup peanut/other oil
3 tablespoon plain yogurt
2 ripe bananas mashed
2 eggs/2 tablespoon ground flax-seed
2 huge tablespoons Nutella, slightly melted over very low heat or more

I also used mixed in some cranberries and nuts at the end.

Preheat oven to 325°F, that’s what my cake flour said. Blend brown sugar and butter in a mixer. Scrape side of bowl. Separate the egg whites and whisk them till they froth. Add yogurt, banana, yellow of eggs and beat until smooth. Add the flour mixture  from the box and blend until just combined. Make sure there are no lumps but do not overmix. There is a fine line here, my dear friend.

As an FYI, over-mixing causes the gluten to come out which off-course shouldn’t be a problem but what it does eventually is make the cake hard and not moist. Gently fold in the melted Nutella and stir just until a marbled pattern develops.(I was going for the marble pattern but that didn’t happen. It still tasted good though).

Pour the batter into a pan sprayed with cooking spray.. Bake 35-40 minutes at 325°F or until a toothpick comes out clean.

This also gave me an opportunity to click some snazzy pics with Instagram. Loving it lately. Another pic.

WordPress Featured Posts and Images

Let me tell you in advance that I love wordpress and all its themes. WordPress also has a steady fan following who after trying WordPress.com for a while move to the self-hosted WordPress.org. The best feature perhaps is the uncluttered look which makes a reader look at the content rather than the many ads that are usually displayed on the blog. 

Pinterest interest

This is a quick post on pinterest. It has greatly helped me in organizing the pictures I like. I can create picture sets or boards using my pictures or pictures of others.

I stumbled across another blog and saw a pinterest badge displayed and really liked what I saw. Using this website,  I was able to display pictures I like in one place while crediting the original owner for it. It has a fun way to arrange the pictures and categorize them into different groups.  You can use “Pin” which is a browser bookmark like “Press This” feature of WordPress. You could also “Pin” your pictures on your website and they are displayed in pinterest . You can pin your favorite photos on the internet by logging into pinterest and pinning the images you like on the page . It’s as simple as that.

It does look like tumblr’s reblog feature. You can also follow others and share your pictures with friends on Twitter/Facebook.

Here is my complete pinterest photo board now.

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To make your own pinterest, visit pinterest landing and ask for an invite. It might take a few days before you receive an invite since it is still in private beta state but it’s worth the wait !!

Best photo display…

Here is a read for all those photo up loaders. I was recently checking out this website called photobucket. It is really quick website for uploading pictures. And the photo display is quick.The UI was just about ok but there were themes and that made it nice.

The reason I noticed this was because I have seen picasa and flickr as the most commonly used photo albums. Personally, I think Picasa is the most used website to upload pictures. However, the view is not large enough and its slow compared to other websites. It basically lacks drama. In picasa, video upload is possible on through picasa software.What a waste! that is..huh..Flickr is comparatively better. The display is beautiful, captioning is available, photo search is possible and photos of friends with picture options exists and they have a cute feature that says hi in different languages on your logged-in home page. I was not able to find the video upload on this site. There is a lot of restriction on that as I remember.

So this made me search up many free photo uploading sites.

One of the first ones i tried was smugmug. It had an amazing UI with the pictures on the landing page changing constantly (ohh so beautiful pictures !!). But its a paid website. It has a small 14 day trial, thats all.

The next on the list was http://www.pbase.com …Mannn I was floored…This is the kind of website that is in your face. The way the pictures can be viewed is beautiful. There is a huge base picture at the top and the rest are below in smaller sizes(can be seen in enlarged mode.) One of the best things was being able to go other albums from any album .After all this when i tried to register, I found out that it was paid and had a 14 day trial period(whats with the 14 day trial !!) .But it is still damn good for viewing galleries.

Kodak gallery and snapfish are also irritating photo albums .They actually require you to create an account to view someone else’s pictures. Who does that anyway?!! As to viewing, the loading time isn’t fast.

Also tried a few other websites but the ui itself disinterested me.
The latest fad in photo viewing and displaying seems to be is captioning or writing a story for each pic. Tumblr seems to do a good job of that. Most photo blogs are found there. Another option would be to create your own website and customize it so that it does seem like another website. More on this at wordpress.com .More on this….Coming hmmm…later .