Homemade Sooji Rusks

I am much more of a coffee person than a tea person. As a kid I never drank

either and when I was slightly older, I tasted cold coffee in the hot

sweltering summers. And my love for coffee was born! Of course back then, it

was just a very tiny dose of instant coffee powder in a sugary milk solution,

chilled down nicely to beat the heat. When I first moved to South India, I fell

deeply in love with the Indian filter coffee. Oh the aroma and smooth

taste! And then I tasted my first cappuccino .... and I knew that this was

a love to last a lifetime. And all this while I was never tempted to have a

single cup of tea!

When I got married, it was mother-in-law who would ask me to join in her

afternoon tea ritual. She would ask me to not have a full cup but just try a

bit and give her company. And all these years of giving her company have made me very fond of a good cup of tea. Now everyone has their own definition of a good cup of tea - mine is spiced tea with ginger, cardamom, cinnamon and a hint of clove in it. I like my tea medium sweet and lightly laced with skim milk .... it is what most people would call a watery tea but that is the way I love it and now coffee is my morning drink and tea my afternoon drink.

In India tea is also often accompanied with a myriad of snacks. One of the

most popular is rusk. It is a twice baked bread, which is dipped into hot tea

and it absorbs the tea in the countless holes and is a delight to bite into.

There is another version of rusk called cake rusk which is closer to Italian

biscotti. It is like a basic pound cake or sponge cake which is baked twice. It

does not contain nuts but is fairly rich in terms of its calorie content. The

cake rusk obviously tastes much better then its basic counterpart but I prefer

the latter as it is a snack I can have more often without guilt. Even the basic

rusk can be made with all purpose flour or wheat flour or sooji. Recently I

learnt to make Sooji bread from a very generous fellow baker and blogger

(Sunila Munjal) who shared her recipe with me. The bread itself was

wonderful and once I had made it, I felt I could make rusks also.

The recipe for the rusks was a bit different from the bread. I had to do a

couple of tweaks to the bread recipe to make it more suitable for rusks. I

added an egg to the dough to prevent it from becoming dry. I also added

cardamom powder and vanilla extract to the dough. Cardamom complements the flavor of tea and vanilla is just something I dont do without when baking

anything with eggs or sugar in it. Vanilla complements both these ingredients

so well! I add to pancakes, waffles, cookies, cakes, fruit breads, mousse,

ice-cream. It is the most essential ingredient in my baking pantry. Lately I

have switched from liquid vanilla extract to a thicker, sludgier version and I

love using it. It has more concentrated vanilla flavour in every drop! The

other thing different in terms of the ingredients is the sooji that I have

used. It needs to be a fine grade semolina. I got this one - Bob's Red

Mill brand. It is very fine and can be used for making pastas as well.