Chocolate Cupcakes

Chocolate Cupcakes

This was one of my impromptu attempt to bake something that turned out quite great. It had been long time since I had the frosting in the fridge so thought about baking something to use that one and these cupcakes worked perfectly well with the frosting.

Ingredients

2 Cup Sugar

2 Spoon Vanilla Essence

1 Egg

1/2 Cup Oil

1 Cup Milk

1.75 Cup Maida

1 Cup Coco Powder

1 Spoon Baking Powder

1 Spoon Baking Soda

1/2 Spoon Salt

2 Spoon Instant Coffee

Method

• Preheat oven at 325F/160C
• Mix together egg, sugar and vanilla essence.
• Add in oil and milk and whisk the mixture over medium speed.
• Sieve maida, coco powder, baking powder and baking soda couple of times to form homogeneous mixture.
• Add the sieved contents and salt in the egg-oil-milk mixture and whisk on low speed till well combined about 2 minutes
• Warm 1 cup of water with coffee in microwave for about a minute.
• Add the coffee to the cake mixture and whisk on low speed for another 2 minutes.
• Line around the cupcake pan with around 14 cup cake liners and fill them with the cake mixture about 3/4th level in each.
• Bake in the oven for 18 minutes.
• Allow the cakes to cool off for at least an hour and then serve with frosting and optionally filling

Notes

I didn't use the filling but chocolate ganache would be great option.

I used chocolate butter cream that I have made previously to frost another cake as the frosting and it went well.

Kaju Katli

Kaju Katli

I had been wanting to try this for a while now. I made this almost two years ago for Diwali when mom dad were here. After that it just slipped out of radar so this time when Ajoy asked me to make these I was not sure if I will remember what I had done and the learning's from the last time. But thankfully I had rough notes from then that I had sent to mom. So it was pretty easy to recollect. This time it came out perfectly and I did big photo session of them :) so I cannot find any excuse to not post this. This recipe has to be easiest to make and something that will get you lot of appreciation in return.

Ingredients

6 Cup Cashews

1 Cup Milk Powder

2 Cup Sugar

Pinch of Cardamom Powder

Silver Leaf

Method

• Grind cashews into fine powder in the mixer
• Mix the cashew powder and milk powder together
• Heat tawa till very hot and then take off the heat
• Add the cashew and milk powder mixture into the tawa and keep stirring till the mixture is warm to touch. Keep aside in a bowl
• Heat 1.5 cup water with sugar to make 2 string syrup.
• Add in the cardamom powder and the sugar syrup in the cashew mixture and mix well. Knead to get the soft dough.
• On a baking pan or any big plate, lay out butter paper and put the dough and press it hard and spread the mixture.
• Apply the silver leaf and let the mixture cool for atleast couple of hours.
• Cut the kaju katlis and serve.

Notes

Getting the sugar syrup right and kneading well is one key for the success.

Also when spreading the mixture into a plate, pressing it hard and then smoothing it with butter paper will get you correctly set katli.

My Top 3 Ouya Games So Far

So far I'm enjoying my Ouya.  The truth of it is that they need better quality software for it.  A lot of the games are either shovelware or unplayable and are already saturating that market.  However with free downloads I don't care about that so much.  There are however some pretty solid gems in the lineup.  Anyway here's a list of my top three personal favorite Ouya games:

Shuttle Rush is a timed platformer where the goal of the stage rests in keeping yourself alive.  You play as some type of spacefarer in an oxygenized spacesuit.  At the beginning of every stage the spacefarer's oxygen supply is punctured (in a hilarious animation) which starts your mad dash for the exit.  You can temporarily refuel your oxygen in most of the levels but you must escape to survive.  The levels require tight platforming and, for most, rudimentary stage memorization for success.

+ It's fun, levels are fast but require a lot of thought, there are plenty of levels, there's progression in the form of character upgrades such as a stun gun, tight platforming.

Vector is a 2d platform game that harkens back to the first person parkour game Mirror's Edge (in style and setting) and the old school 2d Prince of Persia games.  Your character is always in constant motion as he attempts to outrun an equally nimble futuristic law enforcer.  Throughout the level you're using buttery smooth and simplistic controls to make your character jump, slide, climb, and 'trick' his way to the end of the level.  There are plenty of hazards like pits and if your platforming isn't timed tightly enough then you'll lose precious time and get caught by the enforcer and tasered which starts you over.

The art style takes a minimalist approach with simple colors combined with black and white characters and objects.  Which is fairly cool and fits the game perfectly.  The animation in the game is top notch too, especially on the special unlockable parkour "tricks" which are actual parkour moves.  I know because I dabbled with the hobby.  There were several moments in the game that had me step back and go like "oh s***!"  A lot of the jumps and obstacles really get the blood pumping.  There is some slowdown sometimes though.

My only hope is that with the sequel they give you more control over the movements and allow you to use the buttons to jump and stuff.  I guess what I want from it is to take a few more elements from traditional platformers but as it is it's definitely solid.

+ Cool minimalist art style, detailed animations, real life parkour techniques and tricks, ramping difficulty, cool high flying moments

ChronoBlade is an arena style beat-em-up with various rpg like items and spells thrown in.  The art style reminds me of League of Legends and so do the main champions.  The two playable characters that I had (not sure if there are more in the paid version) were very unique.  There's a small girl that uses some intricate martial arts in combination with this floating metal ball for some brutal combos.  The other guy is large and uses some sort of twin claw axe weapon and does heavy damage, he can also launch his claws off and pull an enemy towards him.  Both characters have long flowing combo sequences but I enjoyed the girl's play-style a lot more.

The game starts you off in a room full of loot and so you do what comes natural to your videogame influenced mind and reap those resources.  After that you walk to the arena and the combat begins.  It's deceptive because you get your punching bag enemies immediately but then comes boss after boss and enemies that can juggle you and attack through your guard.  It's definitely a hard ass game but the difficulty keeps you playing to win.  It's definitely unbalanced though.  Once I learned what all the spells were I was clearing out rooms of the difficult enemies until I ran out of it and got juggled which took my full health bar to zero.  As unbalanced as it is I still had a lot of fun.  There's also no tutorial here but if you're not afraid to experiment with buttons then it isn't difficult at all to hop right into the action.

+ Unique characters and fighting styles, tight and fun beat-em-up action, plenty of moves and magic

I'm hoping that the Deus Ex mobile game comes to the system.  I'd get that in a snap.

Next Gen Gaming Bonanza at E3

This year's E3 can be described in many words, the ones I choose to use are confusing, drama filled,  and distracting.  We watched as Microsoft put out a barrage of hard hitting titles and other titles that looked good but will probably disappoint (I don't think Ryse will be that good).  They were the masters of ceremony and what they successfully did, at least for a day, was pull the wool over people's heads.  Their rapid fire blast of exclusives hit hard and trumped up a ton of excitement.

I think their smartest move was grabbing up that super polished looking Dead Rising 3 as an exclusive.  Dead Rising as many of you know is a game that I have a mostly hate filled relationship with and one that I am currently analyzing to see why people like it so much.  This new Dead Rising actually got me excited to play with it's overhauled game engine, one that looks very similar to my beloved Resident Evil 6 I might add.  It looks like it might be the systems killer app to me.  Everyone's on a zombie kick and this looks like it'll be in many a household by the time it comes out.

My friends and I were bad mouthing the Xbox One for several days before Microsoft's press event but you wouldn't have known that by the way my friends were talking about Dead Rising and buying a One just for it.  This, along with the rest of the high octane trailers and the excitement on social media sites like Facebook got me thinking.  Did Microsoft just successfully distract people from their horrid gaming model (which from what I'm hearing may not even be that bad but more on that later.)  I certainly wasn't "duped."  I was as salty as ever.  From what I was hearing Sony would adopt a similar strategy for used games and so I felt like I was overall done with console gaming.  This and the Kinect and 24 hour internet check-in debacle on Microsoft's end made me want nothing to do with this "next generation" of gaming.  I felt that they had already started a slippery slope of gamer abuse with our current generation of Downloadable Content in games that weren't finished from the get go and DLC that was already on the disk that you still had to pay for.

I feel that when something gets too big that it never fails to start overreaching and that's what I felt and still feel about console gaming.  To be a console gamer (which I've always solely been) it requires a lot of dedication.  You buy a system that's expensive as hell and you shell out a quarter of your paycheck on new games for it.  Now we all pay an additional $50 or so to join or respective system's online service.  If you have both PS Plus and Xbox Gold yearly memberships then you are shelling out roughly that much for both depending on whatever hookups you may have.  You also pay for your own internet and the additional electricity that these consoles drain.  That's a lot of money.  That's a lot of money to pay for someone else to still have control over what you can do with your product.  I don't believe in that.  I also don't believe that these games that are coming out are worth all this money and effort.  I've been having more fun lately playing my PS2 than I have playing my Xbox 360, that I just got mind you.  I just don't see anything out there on the market that's worth all this hassle and hubbub.  I've preordered the Ouya and am hoping that they do something interesting with that.  The fact that it's so indie friendly and cheap makes me confident that I made the right purchase.

This article has trailed on a bit so I'll write a follow up to this in the coming days.  I need to investigate this whole Xbox debacle anyway but from what I'm hearing the Xbox One's "bad" features are not nearly as bad as we thought, there may even be a way to turn them off but I'll go into that and Sony's funny jabs at the competition and break down their statements.  Like always thanks for the browse!

My plan might actually work.

After spending a day looking at so many maps of Ann Arbor that I feel like I already live there I can honestly day that I am about halfway prepared for my little excursion there in the coming days.  Why am I looking at maps of Ann Arbor you ask?  Well I'm looking to move there soon and it looks like I finally caught a lucky break.  Today I was called up for a job interview there at Briarwood Mall.  Very excited about that and I have been preparing for it all day since its such short notice.

At the start of the year I had planned to move there but couldn't find work or apartments in my price range.  Hopefully it all works out now and I can finally get some alone time to write all these great novels that I've been planning and maybe get to know a few local writers and artists.  Wish me luck!  I think I'll do some fun stuff while I'm there too and write about it.

Focus is hard to find

I had plans for this week but have only barely accomplished any of them.  First and foremost on my list was to write some chapters on my nearly complete book Average Joe and the Extraordinaires which can be previewed here.  Then I wanted to work on the characters and AI ratings for FlubberKnuckle's game Flipz.  I wanted to finish the latest Story of K chapter and finish my latest analysis of Guardian's Crusade for my A Closer Look series.  None of that was done and I blame it on my wavering levels of focus.

I did have plenty of distractions such as video games, my friend Will, The Young Turks on Youtube, my friend Will, Facebook, my friend Will, and just generally forgetting about everything that I wanted to do.  Now to be honest it's totally not fair to blame Will for my lack of concentration, that was my own doing.  It is indeed tough for me to find a groove to start any sort of writing that requires concentration as long as I'm distracted but that's something that I definitely have to work on and I also have to work on saying no which strangely enough has become a lot harder lately especially since I'm becoming more tolerant of other people's desires.

I did manage to plot my story out to its end over the last few days which I am glad of.  Writing for me is weird like that but I notice that I can definitely do more of it and better quality while alone which is why my next move must be a singular one.

I'll have to either learn some meditative concentration techniques or hope that this move happens sooner rather than later.  If anyone has any suggestions please let me know because other than having fun this week has been disappointing as far as productivity.

Rediscovering the Joys of Video Gaming

With all this newfound time on my hands I have been able to do the one thing that I haven't been able to really do lately and that's play video games.  I have truly experienced a gaming renaissance not unlike the one that I experienced when I first started buying games for my PS2 years ago.  For the past few years all I've been able to do is play a game here and there, get a major ways through it and then drop it because of some other life priority but now I'm actually actively juggling about 5 or 6 games.

Let's see where to start.  I guess we can start with the games that I have decided to analyze and post here like Guardian's Crusade which I finally beat and am actively analyzing to post soon (bear with me please), Dead Rising, Condemned 1 and 2 which I finally beat, Castlevania Aria of Sorrow, Shining Force, Dragon Warrior 3, and Shin Megami Tensai 3: Nocturne.  Most of the games on this list I actually did start playing for fun but then realized that they were so cool and "different" that they warranted a closer look.  Though I beat Condemned and Nocturne I'm still "collecting" in those games.  I play SF and C:AoS on my laptop's GBA emulator and am having fun and learning many gameplay "tricks" from those.  I beat DW3 years ago as a kid but picked it up again because (Nostalgia mainly) I remembered it had such original ideas in it.  This is one of those games that needs to be remade.  Dead Rising started as me telling myself that I was about to have fun and troll around in the game but it looks like I was trolled and that game frustrates me to no end.  I added it to the Closer Look analysis queue because although I hate it so much I am still compelled to pick it up and challenge it again.  My friend Ryan shares my same opinions of the game and yet he loves it while I hate it.  I find that dynamic interesting.

Beyond playing to learn I am ecstatic that I can also play just to -- you know -- play.  I was able to play and beat both Onimusha 1 and 2 in only a few days and then started the third one.  I am delightfully enjoying this series but have decided not to put it in my Closer Look series.  Some things should just stay fun.  I had a nice run at Dungeon Fighter Online until the makers, Nexon, decided to shutdown the North American servers in June.  I'll be sad to see that go but oh well.  I'm always playing Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown and thanks to my friend Will have improved my technique at that.  I started a game called Dust for the Xbox but watched my friend Will run through it and was exhausted by the end of it.  I've even started playing the Indie Game Dreadmor and am having a blast (and high blood pressure) playing that.

So I can honestly say that I feel like a kid again, getting lost in so many worlds and exploring all these characters and situations and gameplay types.  It's a good feeling and even better because I'm both learning and playing for fun.  It's great because beyond all that I still manage to write, hang with friends, help out my mom, make a little cash, and live life the way I want.  I won't be able to keep this up for too much longer but I will remember this time and I will remember it fondly as a golden period.

(Belart)