Recipes are often described as a cakewalk. More often than not they turn out to be anything but an easy turn of events that smoothly give you the exact piece of delight that you have been expecting. The path of cooking, and more so baking, is never a smooth path free of doubts and dilemma. This I say, with my brief experience of six years of baking.
Recipes are often described as a cakewalk. More often than not they turn out to be anything but an easy turn of events that smoothly give you the exact piece of delight that you have been expecting. The path of cooking, and more so baking, is never a smooth path free of doubts and dilemma. This I say, with my brief experience of six years of baking.
My granmom is a specialist in cakes. Much unlike my mother she would never rush into a cake recipe. She would wait for the perfect rat-tat-tat in her heart that would impulsively and spontaneously urge her to bake on some easy and lazy day, when there is no hurry and enough time to bring in tasty innovations into her recipe. On other days, when she is not baking or cooking something impulsively, she would describe to me the little tricks of how a little cinnamon (dalchini) can enhance the flavour of a fruit cake. She would often explain how in her times, which was an era technically and chemically challenged to synthesize easy-to-use essenced liquids, an extra degree of art and passion was required to actually bring in those flavours in a cake. An orange cake could be baked only during winters, when the oranges in the market would be bright orange and the peels fleshy enough to squeeze into an orange pulp. The pulp could then be used for baking the cake and if the baking was proper, oh boy, the neighbourhood would know. A Jam Cake; oh yes, my granmom was cool enough to name it that way! A Jam Cake would be more like a tart that would have a checkerboard made on top with different flavoured jams in each of the checkers.
Well, that’s where I started. With a baking history like that, I could never get deviated. I started with the innocent whipping of cake ingredients into a batter, where the ingredients would be improvised by mother or granmom occasionally. I was interested in doing the tiring muscular job of mixing the batter without pay, only because I was promised that when the batter was shifted to the baking tray, I could lick the bowl with some left over batter in it. I could cling on to it as long as I could. Honestly, and I say this even today, the batter tastes way better than the cake!
I was only six years ago that I started improvising the ingredients in the cake recipe on my own. And since then I haven’t stopped. But by then I had left home. I had gone to Delhi for finishing my graduation. Whenever I came home, every occasion called for a little baking. Sometimes baking itself called for some genuine and gentle meet-ups. My birthdays were no more for mother or granmom to experiment their cake recipes with. My birthdays were meant for my friends in Delhi who never failed to surprise me with the richest and most delicious of cakes from the finest of bakeries in Delhi. In the midst of all the glistening icing and the decorative choco chip or butterscotch dressings, the flavour of cinnamon fruit cakes, vanilla sponge cakes, orange flavoured cakes or jam cakes were falling dull. However, I started missing the dullness altogether. Home was the perfect place that let me celebrate on the dull and boring cakes. My granmom was old now and even mother had fewer guests. Their enthusiasm had suffered slacks. Somebody had to pull up the lost glory, right? I was terrible the first time. The first two inches of the burnt crust was neatly sliced out and the next two inches were devoured to the last morsel like it was the best piece of dessert ever. I gained a little confidence when I first prepared the hot chocolate brownie. It had the prefect moistness and the perfect texture. Only I burnt the hot chocolate a little that gave the cake, as my father said, a nameless roasted feel.
In the midst of all the false appreciations, just to keep my spirits high, baking became a hobby for me. It could make me happy, release my stress and surprise people on their birthdays when I could improvise new recipes for them.
The summer of 2017. After a long time spent for studies, in the city of Delhi and the town of Rajgir, I have come home for a little break from all the reckless monotonous schedule of research and academics. After a planning of about 5 years, my father has finally got me a proper microwave baking oven. The first of the baking recipes I planned in the new oven was a Honey-Chocolate Cake Recipe.
I started my preparations late at 9 in the night. It was an odd hour of the day to start a new project of baking. I call it a project because, the process genuinely is a detailed arrangement starting from gathering the dishes and bowls and the ingredients to the dish-washing and putting them back into place. So, it takes a lot of mental planning to actually carry out the baking. Once decided, the dry ingredients including 2 cups of flour, one teaspoon of baking powder and half a cup of cocoa powder were mixed in a washed and dried bowl and kept aside. A separate microwave-proof bowl was taken and some milk chocolate slabs were melted in the oven for 2 minutes. A large separate bowl was washed and dried and kept ready for mixing the wet ingredients. A cup of melted butter, one and a half cup of white sugar and the melted chocolate were mixed thoroughly in this bowl. Once the mix becomes smooth and fluffy, half a cup of condensed milk could be used for bringing a smooth texture and proper consistency of the batter. However, at this late hour, I realized that we had run out of condensed milk. So instead, I boiled about a cup of milk to half its volume until it became a little thick in consistency and added this to the mixture. Once the wet ingredients were ready, about a tea-spoon of honey should have been added. So with this, I come to the most interesting aspect of this blog, where I intend not to write the exact recipes that would give us the dishes we expect. I rather choose to write about the grievous faults I made while carrying out the recipes that turned them into burning mishaps.
Now, to explain why I did what I did, let me tell you that honey is one ingredient that never tires me. I can have spoonfulls of honey in one go. So, once I took the bottle of honey, I could see it pouring into the bowl of mix with its beautiful golden flow and I just went on seeing it. I could feel pricks at the back of my tongue and the saliva striving to come forth and it was too late when I realized that I had emptied about half of a100grams bottle of honey into the mix. Wonderfully aware of this and happy that my cake is going to be rich in honey and chocolate, I poured the dry mix into the wet one. The entire batter was mixed thoroughly and set into the greased micro-wave proof baking dish inside the oven. The batter in the dish was microwaved at 900 W for 5 mins. I went back to licking the batter bowl, as usual.
By 5 mins of baking, the kitchen and the rooms were overflowing with the beautiful smell of baked flour and cocoa. However the batter in the dish inside didn’t seem well baked still. So I put it back into the oven and baked it for 5 more minutes. The entire surface of the cake gave out little ripples of volcanoes and was literally boiling, I saw through the oven window. But even after five more minutes, the cake didn’t seem fully baked. I baked it for 5 more minutes and then pulled it out of the oven and placed it under the fan on the table to cool down. I was not happy with the baking still. I felt it was too moist. Moreover, the baking powder did not seem to have had any effect on the cake. It lay close to the bottom of the dish not allowing the cake to rise at all. I kept wondering what went wrong.
After about half an hour of cooling, the cake was sliced out of the dish and cut into pieces. I took out a piece to try out the taste. To my expected astonishment, as I dug my teeth into the slab, I couldn’t pull them out; it was that sticky and hard. I realized, the extra honey had turned the cake into a crystal that was extra-hard instead of extra-rich. The intense sticky property of the honey makes honey one of my favorite sweeteners. However, it was this property of honey that had ruined my rich honey-chocolate cake.
I saw my mother take out a piece of the cake and put in her mouth. I thought I should confess before she dug her teeth into it. I ran to her and was just starting to explain when she said, ‘How beautiful you make them!’ as she reached out for another piece. My father..well, he is a perfectionist. He took a bite and analysed the faults I could have made in the process, never forgetting to say, “Well, I still like it!”
Now that’s the beauty of a family..
