Akara-West African Bean Fritter

 

copied from   curiouscuisiniere

I was watching  The Joyful Cook on Facebook and she had a recipe that I thought would be easy, delicious and nutritious. It was for a dish known as akara, also known by other names in other regions of Africa and Brazil.  For the sake of simplicity let's just call it akara. I'd been saving the recipe since December 2, 2021. In her recipe she uses the term beans but, she uses black-eyed peas.  In other recipes which I consulted there are other legumes that can also be used.  I consulted three other sites,  Curious Cuisinere, The Kitchn,  and Ify's Kitchen.

copied from     Ify's Kitchen

The Joyful Cook's recipe is below.

Akara Recipe 

Beans 3 Cups

1 large onion

Fresh pepper to taste

Salt to taste( be Carey with the salt. 1 used 3 small teaspoons)

Oil for deep frying

I allowed an entire bag (12 oz.) of black-eyed peas to soak overnight in the refrigerator.  I followed various cook's suggestions as to the easiest way to remove the skins. I drained them and put one cup of peas into the blender with two cups of water. I pulsed 3 times and some of the skin came off.

The next step was to drain the peas separating the skin from the pea.   According to the various authors, the husks would float to the top because they are lighter than the meat of the peas. BTW- I did this several times and it is time consuming. See the video below to see how that turned out.

After numerous tries you see the beans on the left and the skins/husks on the right. 

copied from   love is in my tummy

 

⬅ Definitely not the white product the cooks I saw had.

I decided to continue on since one cook said it was okay to have a few flecks. I had more than a few.  The next step was to  whip the beans into an airy consistency similar to whipped cream. The airiness is what makes them puff up and float to the top when frying. Use a mixer with a whip attachment for this or do it by hand.(no)  Just before this I chopped my vegetable seasonings and put them aside.

I whipped and I whipped . That is to say; The whipping tool on the mixer did but, I was never able to achieve a light airy batter.  One  cook said that if there was too much water they wouldn't have the fluffy texture they're supposed to. SOOOOOOOOO, I took the batter and poured it into a clean cheese cloth and I wrung it as tight as I could. 

Look at all the water that came out.

I tried again but still no fluffiness.

Looks like cooked oatmeal

Finally, I gave up and tried frying it the way it was. Here is the result.

Fried up pretty, didn't puff up, Texture not as hoped for, tastes bland even with the seasonings. Not good.  This had been labor intensive and time consuming. The rest of the mixture went into the trash.

 

Things don't always turn out the way we want. No problem. The good thing is that I tried and got it out of my system. 

That's it👀👀

LIME CAKE

Who could forget the ugly cake? 
I vowed to do better next time with a key lime cake. I became a fan of the key lime cake after attending a church tea and tasting one made from scratch by one of the ladies there. There are some things that can't be duplicated and I didn't even try. I just wanted some semblance of the cake and so I tried again after scouring the NET for EASY key lime cakes. Most of what I found was the 1960's version in which holes are punched in the cake with a toothpick and lime jello is poured on top allowing it to seep into the cake. That wasn't what I was looking for. BUT, I sort of ended up with it anyway. *More about that later.

I used a recipe I found at Fabulessly Frugal .  Of course being me I changed some things.
Here's the general recipe:

This isn't the entire recipe but you get the idea. You measure, mix, stir, etc. etc.



Items used for cake.

I used prepared limeade in place of the water the cake mix called for and lime jello to give it flavor and color.

It has such a pretty color.



This is the cake out of the oven cooling.





I used the sheet cake pan again. You may notice a greenish tinge to the cake.

I took this photo to show BEFORE things could go wrong. I cut a sliver of the unfrosted cake and put whipped topping to the side which I then spread over my cake.. The cake was delicious. It satisfied my desire for key lime cake .








*Experimenting  more I  tried to finagle a topping using lime jello and whipped topping.


The two ingredients




Dissolving and mixing the jello using limeade

















I won't show you the results but it was a retro version of the Jello Fluff without the marshmallows.  Showing the results would have made UGLY CAKE #2. The fluff tasted just fine and eventually gelled.  I prefer to leave well enough alone.
THAT'S IT ***