So with the
introductory disaster, gathering up my wits to bake for the second time, proved
a more daunting challenge than I had anticipated. My friend, Indrani, who was a
trained chocolatier and a baker, asked me to give it another try. She said of
the like “success is most often achieved by those who do not know that failure
is inevitable.” I told her that she was quoting, Coco Chanel. So she turned
around, gave me a hint of a smug and said with her hands throwing up in the air
dramatically, “the highest purpose of intellectual cultivation is to give a man
a perfect knowledge and mastery of his own inner self!” Okay, she was quoting
again but that wasn't a bad speech after all. However, I don’t know
whether it was her inspirational speech or my zeal to prove to my mom that I
wasn’t that bad, gave me a renewed enigma of hope. But this time, I was
determined about not deploying a premixed mixture. Probably I thought it wasn’t
made for my level of expertise!
Anyway, since I
wasn’t sure from where to start, I turned back to the most reliable source of
information, ‘You Tube’. But, the most reliable source, had a barrage of
choices to offer, and my head was spinning by the end of the day. Spirits
dampened, motivation deluged, and reality setting in with a looming question,
where do I start from?
I settled for the
basic sponge cake recipe, more so, because it was the easiest of all.
So, now that the
recipe was marked, the next probable step was to get hold of all the
ingredients. Now, remember my first tryst with the whole cake making business
started with a premixed mixture; hence, I wasn’t quite sure of what actually
goes into the cake. Yes, I had seen my mom baking, but, who cares about the
foreplay, I was interested only in the end result.
Finally, that all
the ingredients were in place, I was ready to get ‘my hands dirty’! So, in went
the components one by one and finally my batter was ready. I gave it a quick
mix with the ‘whisk’, pulled it up to check the consistency. Satisfied with the
viscosity of the batter, I lined the baking tray with stripes of butter, and
dashed it with some flour and poured my batter into it. As before, I wasn’t
giving myself an invisible pat on my back or silently congratulating myself on
my accomplishment. Rather I sent a quiet prayer above, put my baking tray
inside the oven, and hoped it wasn’t a disaster, again.
I was nervously
tramping back and forth the entire perimeter of my kitchen, biting my nails
off, hoping this wasn’t the end of my baking adventure. My cake had been baking
for about 15 min now. I was calling Indrani every 5 minutes giving her a live
telecast of the bake. Her reassuring words were falling in deaf ears. My mind
was busy procrastinating the degree of the catastrophe!! Finally, I
smelled the cake. A sweet aroma which was so indulging in itself that I could
drop all my work, and wait impatiently to dig in. An aroma which could make
anyone feel better about the world.
I was fretfully
hovering in front of the oven, waiting restlessly for my cake to cool down
inside the oven, before bringing it out and checking on it. The 20 minutes wait
was making me jittery and anxious. Probably it was the longest 20 minutes of my
life. Finally, the interminable wait was over. There was a sudden mood of
frenzy and magic all around the room as I opened the oven door. The billowing smell of crystallised
sugar and flour still lingered in the air like jet trails. And then there was
the smell; the smell of hope and fulfillment, the kind of smell that brought
people home, the smell that had the imminent strength of swiping people off
their feet.
As I sliced the
cake, the hedonistic pleasure that I was deriving with each slice, was
inundating me from within. I was so swamped up in the feeling of accomplishment
and gratification, that I was carried away into a state of oblivion. As I took
the first bite, time stopped. I simply closed my eyes and let the cake melt in
my mouth. And as it did, realisation of the extent of indulgence that ‘baking’
brought in my mom, suddenly seemed meaningful.
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