My Adventures with baking

Last afternoon, I woke up from my afternoon siesta, to the aroma of Banana Cinnamon cake with Tea..it was heavenly. Homemade bakes have something special about them. There is a taste of love, affection and great effort that blends in with all the goodies to give an unbeatable combination. My daughter too shares the same passion and I am glad that she too gets all excited about trying new things.

Late evening, she excitedly served a slice to my husband, who took a bit and said he didn’t prefer banana cakes. She was very dejected and actually this episode took me back in time, when I started baking at home and all my experiments were graciously/ or rather bravely eaten and encouraged by my father -Baba.It was his encouragement that added charm to my experiments. Mom ofcourse was a little strict on wastage of food ingridients, gas or electricity.

 My affair with baking started when I was 12-13 years old. At my mom’s place, although we were vegetarians, occasionally an egg was allowed. Mother had just learnt how to bake a cake and I added on to it by adding orange zests or lemon rinds or some such thing. The first oven was a round aluminium tin that was kept on gas with a little sand pit underneath it. The next one was an OTG and microwave came much later in life. There were no cookery shows like today nor was internet . So whatever you got from some magazines or recipe booklets that came with non-stick / new cooker was eagerly tried on. I tried many things from cakes, biscuits to buns.  Cakes turned out pretty good but cookies and breads were a disaster. Biscuits that needed hammer to break in or buns that tasted funny and cakes also sometimes behaved weird ...And Baba has the record of being one and only man who very graciously ate it...even if it had gone horribly all wrong. I remember trying to make a bread with wheat flour instead of maida and boy! It just refused to rise...not knowing what to do with it,lest my mother see's it, my bother served it to our dog Julie (who would gobble up anything) just turned her face away in sheer disgust.. My brother of course had a great time laughing at me and that was a joke that I had to bear for many years.