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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

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