Saturday, December 29, 2007

Life and Times of an Eggless Cake


We are born in Aden [through no fault of our own :-) ]
We live, we die, we bake cakes,
and someone blogs about it.

When you bake a cake you have a recipe, you have ingredients and you have good intentions. You put them all in a container and you mix them up, but this does not make a cake. This just makes a gooey glob of glutinous gastronomy. You then put the concoction into an oven, savour obscurity for an ephemeral moment, and apply energy to transform it into a cake, which looks nothing like the original ingredients. In a sense that is what baking is all about. Amen. But then again this world cannot survive on 'Amens' alone, especially when you are trying to make an eggless cake for the first time.

"AAAAAAAHHHHHHHH", unable to decipher if it was a prayer or an expletive, I turned my attention to the Woman, who seemed to be going through a mid life crisis. It was 1900 hours to be precise, and like clockwork chocolate, accompanied with that confident whiff of her hair, she decided to test if the cake was baked in the center by using a baking needle. What unfolded before us will go down in the annals of baking history as the sinking of 'Le Gateau au chocolat'. In other words, 'Haava hi nikal gayi'. We then put it back into the oven and were hoping for a miracle, waiting for that resurrection. However it refused to rise again. We then made plans about how to cut it so that the crator doesn't show. But to add to proceedings the extra heating left remnants of soot at the sides... yes it got burnt. The final nail on the coffin was when we tasted it; it didn't taste of chocolate, it tasted more of maida. A postmortem analysis of the subject, and we couldn't say it was too chicken to come out well, cause it didn't even contain eggs!!

Anyways, so we attempted another one the next morning. This time the baking powder was put at the end. Not sure if that made the difference, but we put more milk this time around. And it didn't sink and it smelt chocolaty. And the People Rejoiced!!

"Should we taste it", I queried. "NO", came the premeditated reply, "We don't have time for a third attempt. It smells ok but if I taste it and errrrr", there was a pause, followed by a shiver (for dramatic effect and since I have the poetic license to claim so) and finally more words, "errrr and if it doesn't meet the cut then I wouldn't want anyone to eat it". "Seriously". So we decided that we would just take feedback from the end consumers since its about the thought anyway.

Well what can I say....
We live, we bake, we're just getting started.
And someone always blogs about it.

4 comments:

Ree said...

hehehehehehe, this is one helluva piece of hilarious writing!

Alistair D'souza said...

tank coo :-)
the experience itself was quite amusing...

Chipper said...

Perhpas this question has already been answered at one point...but why are you trying to make eggless cakes? They sound horrible and heavy! ;-)

Alistair D'souza said...

a lot of friends are vegetarian and don't have egg... in india many cakes sold in bakeries or eating outlets will be eggless... and you can't make out the difference...

infact even when I take cake to office a lot of colleagues don't get to taste the cake cause it contains egg..