Sunayna Prasad's Cooking

  Homemade cooking involves less preservatives and more control from you. And with the coronavirus forcing people to be in their homes pretty much all the time, I have to do most of my own cooking. I do love going out, and I will admit that prior to the covid-19 crisis, I barely cooked and spent more time eating out, and a lot. However, now that dining out is no longer an option (only takeout and delivery are available in New York), and I’ve been cooking at home, I’ve noticed that I feel more energetic and am losing weight again. Okay, this is not a health post. But all of that is true. Anyway, let me talk about the brownies I made. They taste kind of like the ones made from boxed mixes. I’m not kidding. The only difference is that their textures at the top aren’t flaky, and most importantly, I know what went in them. My guess of why they are fudgy and not cakelike is that the flour ratio is sort of smaller than the rest of the ingredients. Not once have I seen that in any other ho...

  During quarantine, I missed a lot of my favorite commercial foods. One of those included white chocolate raspberry cheesecake from the Barnes & Noble café. It was super-delicious—both that and the one I made. There is a lot involved, though. You have to make raspberry preserves, crush Oreos and bake them as a crust, and melt white chocolate as well as prepare the actual cheesecake. While this particular “error” worked out in the end, I melted white chocolate chips instead of using the special kind the recipe recommended since I did not have it. However, that substitute was technically incorrect, and would have messed up the final creation. Luckily, though, my mom taught me a trick to avoid a bad cheesecake. That was to add milk to the white chocolate, but a little at a time. And guess what? It resulted in a great dessert. I would eat the cheesecake pretty much every day. Aside from the white chocolate thing, the raspberry preserves, Oreos, and cheesecake were no problems prep...

  I used to like commercial-made cream-filled cupcakes. Now I don’t because they taste artificial. There are, like, so many chemicals in them. I won’t even eat Twinkies anymore because of that. Anyway, I have baked homemade cream-filled cupcakes in the past. They didn’t turn out as well as the most recent time. That was when I went to a New Years Eve party this past winter. That is why the cupcakes say 19 or 2019. The writing there was done with commercial icing. However, the ganache on the tops was cooked from scratch. Some of the cakes were made from scratch too. But the others came from a boxed mix. Why, you may ask? I ran out of the homemade batter. So, I bought a boxed mix. Regardless of what I said in the title, the boxed mix kind of tasted better. Don’t worry, the filling was also created from scratch. It had marshmallow crème. That was probably a crucial ingredient for the texture. These cupcakes turned out to be popular at the party. Not like crazy, but people enjoyed them...