Skip to main content

The Baking Diaries


I tried my hand at baking even before mum would let me flip chapattis on the tawa. Though now she berates my utter indifference to the kitchen save when my friends come and my apathy at her plight to also cook (at least 4 different kinds of meals) while she works. She expects me to help, in the least, but my revulsion to household work spares me the guilt pangs. Ummm… Let us get back to baking…

As these words get typed I have put my clumsiest ever cooking into the oven. The Oven, you see, is hardly ever used in our house. We are vegetarians (where the kids now have come to eat eggs) and that too of the baser variety. We eat simple food (save the brother who is a monstrous epicurean and still vegetarian) which has always been made that simple traditional way. But, the father is a spontaneous shopper. Sometimes even to things which are least required in the house. So, one day he surprised us with this, creamy, big, well exquisite Oven! Space…ah! That shall be the rant for another time. A few bleak attempts at cakes (with and without eggs) later ( by me, of course) the bugger was relegated to the attic. He must be so pleased to warm his coils today, after a good four years, I suppose!

Bummer that warming coils! He has blackened the crust of my browny!!! I need to go check

There then… we’d arrived at the brownie… The reason why I ever began writing this was about the brownie. Well, baking really. The intent was to suggest that baking is hardly what it is made out to be – stick it in the oven and it shall be done after that resounding ‘ting’ of an alarm.

No way that! It takes a constant sticking your nose to the glass to watch those bubbles on the crust, the subtle change in colour to assure yourself that all is not wrong (well, wrong cause the browny ain’t right till it slices out neat, right?) Suddenly,  a while later, you smell the burn - the interiors do a cartwheel and the poor disheartened heart  suspends itself to the gastric abyss  of the snakey inestines and you wanna scream the hindi film heroine style –“ Nahieeeee.. yeh nahi ho sakta.”

“Tch, you villainous dramebaaz”, castigates the now agile mind to curb the gyrating lava of lunacy and nudges you to peek closer.

“Yes, all is not lost” – it is just the top. Flake it out and the cakey still would remain.

“Go put your mind elsewhere”, the mind reminds. The now weak nerves send a few caustic impulses to the sleeping bulls of the cranium and “You are my Pumpkin Pumpkin, honey bunny” – Arrey Sirjee, an Idea strikes!  

It has after all been a day of unearthing sombered emotions and sleeping beauty desires. Baking was one of my earliest pleasures, writing was the catharsis and indulgence seemed to be the hour. Before it ‘tinged’ I needed to burnish these repressed impulses…

The Baking Diaries
3:07 PM
January 28, 2013
Monday

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

MKG and I

MKG just popped into my head. I was trying to help India attain Independence all over again when I stumbled upon something that he said. "I travel because I fancy that the masses want to meet me. I certainly want to meet them. I deliver my simple message to them in few words and they and I are satisfied. It penetrates the mass mind slowly but surely."  Somewhere MKG and I struck a chord. I have always been averse to people and situations being portrayed as ideal and flawless. It is pretty depressing, to say the least. To say the worst, it is inhuman! We are not God because we are flawed and that's just how we must stay. Well, you see, God really doesn't have the luxury of going wrong, while we, humans, are entitled to sin!  My learning today was that MKG was yet another bloke, vain and with vice. And if identification at the level of vanity were grounds to forge bonds, I'd  shake hands with him. There are people with calibre to change things around, and they
8 comments
Read more

Hellow!

I am not sure how blogs really work. For me, the little writing I've done has always been personal. I used to write a diary, about 5 years ago for almost about a year.  It ran into 3 volumes, but as time passed, I stopped writing. The need to express was felt less frequently. Then rarely, now, almost hardly. But when I see people writing blogs and publishing, I feel jealous. That people are writing. More importantly, that I m not writing. I used to write my Diary thinking that one day they'll be discovered after I am no more, and great meanings would be derived from those verses and words. (Ha! Ha!) I guess, each one of us, in some corner of our hearts want to feel 'great'. Not necessarily, famous. Feeling great about yourself is a special feeling-It makes you feel, 'Great'. I am not sure if the feeling is indeed 'jealousy'. Until much recently, 'writing' was a coveted art, known and done by only a 'gifted few'. In school, we us
3 comments
Read more

What is it about Dhoni?

I can't stop raving about Dhoni in the new Pepsi ad. With the handle bar moustache and buzz cut, as he gyrates to 'gatak gatak' (and looks Oh, so deadly handsome!), Raina, Harbhajan, and whoever else is there, become non entities. It is the ultimate 'yennada, rascala?' Chennai's Super King look and the eyes are only for D! What were the others doing in the ad? It probably has to do with Pepsi's Men in Blue campaign. But this ain't the only one in which Dhoni has more than just him in the ad and where without him the frame is incomplete. It is not without reason. It is the Dhoni persona. He is part of the crowd, just as much as he is a legion by himself. "If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, If you can walk with Kings and not lose the common touch..."-Kipling I pause to think. When did he become so statuesquely? When did he emerge to outshine  greats like Sachin without ever trampling upon their space? Since when did he begin to
3 comments
Read more