Eggless Cake with Dates

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This cake was referenced in one of my favorite blogs for eggless baking - Madhuram's EgglessCooking. I am posting the original recipe below with some notes of course!! This is yet another simple cake recipe with some basic and easily available ingredients and the net result is a fluffy, yummy cake! The cake goes very well with vanilla (or) mango ice cream! :)

Date Cake (Eggless)

From Aayi's Recipes by Shilpa

Ingredients:

Dates - 18 dates, preferably seedless
Milk - 3/4 cup milk
Sugar - 3/4 cup
All purpose flour (or maida) - 1 cup
Oil - 1/2 cup
Baking soda - 1 tsp
Chopped walnuts - 2-3 tbsp
Cashews - 16 halves
Chopped dry apricots - 3 tbsp (this is optional, I used this instead of walnuts on my second attempt at making this cake!)

Take the milk in a microwaveable bowl, add the dates and microwave for 2 mins or till the dates are soft enough to grind. When done, let it cool for 5-10 mins, add sugar and grind it to a smooth liquid. Pour this into a bowl, add oil and mix.

You could set the oven to preheat at 350 deg. F at this stage! Sieve the flour and baking soda into a separate dish and add this dry mixture to the wet mixture, one tbsp at a time and keep mixing the batter to make sure the flour mixture gets incorporated into the batter, kill lumps if any!! Now mix in the nuts.

Grease an 8-inch square baking tray and pour the batter into it. Once the oven is ready, set the cake for 35 minutes and bake until a toothpick comes out clean!

Notes:

• Oil - you could use any cooking oil, I normally use Canola Oil for cooking but when I made this cake I used EVOO for 1/8th of the required quantity as I ran out of Canola Oil but that didn't disturb the taste one bit! That said, I wouldn't be too sure about using EVOO for the entire quantity!!
• Nuts - you could use a combination of chopped walnuts and cashew nuts for the batter (like in the original recipe). I used only walnuts and saved the cashews for decoration
• The size of the baking tray is optional but I would stick to a size around 8". The 8-inch square baking tray gave me 16, 1" (approx.) pieces that were about 1.5" inch high.
• My cake was done in 28 minutes the first time but the second time I made this cake, it took me 30 minutes and I think I could have let it sit for another 1 or 2 minutes. So, I would do the "toothpick test" after 25 minutes and decide accordingly!