Thursday, April 13, 2017
Sunday, April 2, 2017
Milk cake OR Why I am not blogging regularly
Milk cake OR Why I am not blogging regularly
Rich? Oh yes!
Why did I not blog for the last ten days or so? Have I lost the interest? Have I not been cooking? Or have I just been too lazy to take photographs?
Well, none of the above. I havent been blogging because my broadband connection was down; thats why.
Many of you have asked me in the past one month to write about my experience of moving back to India and how I find life here now. One thing that I would like to point out in this context is that we as a people are laid-back. Please dont misunderstand me. I absolutely respect my country. I wouldnt have come back otherwise. However, every country or community has a few flaws, and they can be corrected only if you step back for a while and watch it like an onlooker. Many of you will agree that living outside India gives you that perspective easily.
And I am sure that many of you will agree with me when I say that time does not put as much pressure on us as it does on some other communities. For example,
- we give unrealistic deadlines. We are always too afraid to say that it will take one full week. We always only use the word soon.
- we never are punctual. Although everybody seems to be in a deadly hurry on the road, nobody reaches anywhere on time. Why the hurry then?
- we do not value others time. We just dont.
The moral of the story is that I had to live with a dead broadband connection for about ten days. But believe me, I have not been wasting my time during this period. I have been cooking and photographing while cooking quite religiously.
Like I finally managed to try out this dessert, the recipe for which I had for the last three years. Shall I straight away head to the recipe without wasting any more time of yours then? :)
White goods? :)
Clockwise from top left: condensed milk, plain milk, Paneer
Recipe for Milk Cake
(Can you please please suggest a better name? I know that you are good at it.)
Makes 12 small servings.
Ingredients:
400g. sweetened condensed milk (I used one tin of this.)
250g. finely grated Paneer (I used store-bought.)
½ cup milk OR water (Please see Step 1.)
2-3 tsp castor or powdered sugar (optional; I didnt use.)
2 tbsp Ghee
saffron strands, chopped nuts for garnishing (I used this store-bought blend.)
Method:
1. Combine the condensed milk and grated Paneer in a non-stick pan. In case you are using up the entire tin of condensed milk, add ½ cup of water to it, shake vigorously and add this milk to the pan. Otherwise, add ½ cup of plain milk.(Dont you just admire my sense of economy in the kitchen? :))
2. Add sugar, if using and put this mixture to boil on medium-high heat. Stir continuously.
3. After about 10 minutes, add 1 tbsp of Ghee along the sides of the pan. The mixture of will start getting thicker now. It will move as one mass as you stir.
4. Take the pan off heat and let it cool for about five minutes.
5. In the meanwhile, grease the sides of a mould with the rest of the Ghee. Spread the saffron strands and/or chopped nuts on it. If you wish, you could add some to the mixture in the pan too.
6. Spread the mixture evenly into the greased mould and allow it to set. No refrigeration is required for it to set.
After about an hour, unmould the Milk Cake onto a decorative dish or platter. Garnish it more, if you wish, cut into pieces/wedges and serve.
I made this dessert for my younger sisters bridal shower. Or shall I say one bridal shower? There are two more planned in the next 15 days. Is the foodie in me HAPPY or what? :)
Now I need to rush this post to the Festive Food Fair organised by Anna. After all, it has a long way to go. Australia isnt around the corner, is it? :)
Tags: festive food fair, Dessert, Kalakand, Condensed Milk, Paneer, Barfi
Available link for download
Thursday, March 30, 2017
Monday, February 20, 2017
Maven not downloading latest snapshots or releases
Maven not downloading latest snapshots or releases
Ever had issues with maven not downloading the latest snapshots when you know for a fact new snapshots are available? Or your CI environment just deployed a new release (2.0), but when another Hudson job builds, maven does not download the latest 2.0 release artifact. Want an automated solution so you dont have to manually delete the artifacts from your local repository just so maven will download the latest?
Force maven to download latest snapshots
Our company uses Hudson for our automated CI environments. Our project basically has two jobs. The first job checks out and builds HEAD when modified and deploys SNAPSHOT WARs to our companies maven2 repository (artifactory). The second job, which builds nightly, uses maven to download the SNAPSHOT WARs from artifactory, creates an EAR, deploys it to JBoss, and runs integration tests. By default, maven will check once a day for changes to snapshots, so when our second job was triggered, maven inside hudson was not downloading the latest SNAPSHOT WARs.
The solution was to append the -U in the maven goals (run mvn -help). It stands for update-snapshots and tells maven to update all snapshots no matter what.

Force maven to download latest releases
Our next problem was when we created a branch and started creating release artifacts such as 2.0. Unfortunately the description given by maven for the -U option is incorrect (or at least in v 2.0.9), "Forces a check for updated releases and snapshots on remote repositories". As much as I tried, the -U option wouldnt work in our hudson job to force maven to download the latest non-snapshot releases.
The only current solution I know of is to use the maven-dependency-plugin and its goal purge-local-repository. So in your maven goals at some point execute mvn dependency:purge-local-repository and maven will physically delete your projects artifacts from the local repository (/home/user/.m2/repistory) and its transitive dependencies (I think). I tried setting the actTransitively to false and it didnt work for us so I just removed it. I also set verbose to true so I could see what maven deleted in Hudsons console output.

The pipes are used to separate out different goals to isolate its classpath or properties. That way we can skip tests in one run, and then run them in the next all in the same goals section.
Available link for download