Tag: home

Categories
Hobbies

A ‘date’ with a cake


Baking fascinates me — especially when the aroma of fresh cookies and cakes fills up the home.

Growing up, birthdays were made extra special with home-baked cake. I’d eagerly wait for my mother to whip up the cake batter. When she transferred the batter to the greased cake tin, I’d grow impatient. ‘Why are you being so thorough! Let me have the joy of cleaning that up!” As soon as the mixing bowl left her hands, I’d dip my finger to scrape out every last drop!

Unlike my mother, I have zero knowledge of what goes into baking. It’s the end result that truly matters (and the batter, yes!).

I find it hard to remember the chemicals involved in the process — is that baking soda or cooking powder — what proportion are they to be used and when should they be added, most importantly, what are the chances that the mixture will explode?

Most recipes are handed down generations, and when in doubt, I simply pick up the phone and ask, either my mother, or my mother-in-law; sometimes asking the same questions over and over. Thanks to the internet, I now also have advisors who don’t mind my asking the same questions repeatedly.

With the help of the food blogging community, I have got answers to some questions, such as, “what if I want to bake a cake without eggs… and without refined flour?” and “what if I don’t have an oven, and what if I’m off refined sugar too?” And I think to myself, how did people remember recipes before the internet?

I posted a few pictures of my experiments with different types of cake and some friends asked me for the recipes. This gave me an opportunity to document my own scribbled notes for future reference.

But first, the credit roll

The original recipe for this cake is by the food blogger / YouTuber ‘Hebbar’s Kitchen’. I replaced some of the ingredients with what was available with me, and it worked out just fine!

If you’d like to see a detailed step-by-step process, I recommend visiting the website, or better yet, check out the YouTube video.

And now, here’s my version:

Step 1: Soak ’em up

  • 2 cups of dates, without the seeds
  • 1 cup hot milk

Soak the dates in hot milk for half an hour. In the meanwhile, read ahead, gather up the rest of the ingredients and then soak yourself up under the winter sun.

After half an hour, blend the soaked dates and milk into a fine paste.

Step 2: Going nuts

  • Handful of your favourite dry fruits
  • 1/2 tbsp wheat flour

Coat the dry fruits lightly with flour to prevent them from sinking to the bottom of the batter

Step 3: Just beat it

  • 3/4 cup unsalted butter
  • 1/4 cup curd

Beat the ingredients till they form a smooth mixture

Combine with the date paste from step 1 and mix well

Step 4: Shaken, not stirred

  • 2 cups whole wheat flour
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp cooking / baking soda
  • 1 pinch salt

Sieve all the dry ingredients together

Step 5: All mixed up

  • 1/2 cup milk

Mix the date paste (step 3) with the flour mixture (step 4)

Add milk, mix well

Add the chopped dry fruits (step 2) and mix lightly

Step 6: Time to bake!

  • Pre-heat the baking apparatus of your choice as you would normally do for any other cake for ten minutes.
  • Grease the baking tin with butter and dust the greased tin with a little flour.
  • Pour the batter and tap gently to level the cake.
  • Garnish with more more nuts, as per taste.
  • Place in baking apparatus.
  • Cook for 45-50 minutes (or till you get the sweet scent of heaven).
  • Check if it’s done by inserting toothpick / knife – if it comes out clean, it’s cooked.
  • Patience, my friend – let it cool.
  • Transfer to a plate, and then, dig in!

Coming up in the next post, the very first cake I baked, without an oven or pressure cooker.

Categories
Hobbies

The food channel comes home!


Having spent two nights in a hospital room with a poor WiFi signal, needles piercing my arms and eating some rather bland food, coming home was a heavenly feeling.

The hospital wasn’t all that bad. For starters, atleast we didn’t have to cook, or worry about household chores. Then there was a large TV – a device we have chosen not to include in our house. After all, who needs another screen and another monthly subscription for something we neither have time nor inclination to watch. So there we were in that homely room switching between food and science channels for pretty much all our waking hours. I have to say it had a little bit of an impact on me.

I’m not really a foodie. I know lots of people who are – they know which is the best place to eat in pretty much any part of town; what is the speciality of those food joints; and are even willing to travel a fair distance just to taste that one flavour which has the perfect contrast of textures and smells. For me, all that is Greek and Latin. But after a prolonged exposure to the micro waves of the TV shows, I decided to turn into a chef for a while.

The recipe – a tower of biscuits layered with creamy chocolate and dunked in coffee – was one my mother had been wanting to try out for long.

I took pictures along the way and noted down all the steps – detailing everything a TV chef would likely mention. Taking pictures meant that it took us four times the time it would normally take to make this sweet.

This week, Jen Hooks asked bloggers where their heart is. Right now, it is set on devouring this delicious piece of home-made tower of biscuits!

The tower of biscuits

To see how other bloggers interpreted this week’s photo challenge, head over to the Daily Post.

For those who are interested, here’s the recipe:

  1. Whip some milk cream with chocolate sauce.
  2. Add cornflour and heat the mixture over low flame, stirring constantly, till it thickens into a smooth paste.
  3. Spread the mixture over 6 Marie biscuits and place them one on top of the other.
  4. Cover the tower with an extra biscuit and press lightly.
  5. Pour coffee decoction over the tower, ensuring that the biscuits are fully soaked. Drain the excess coffee and place it in the freezer.
  6. Remove it after about half an hour, or till it becomes stable. It should be soft and have the consistency of cake. Make sure it does not freeze completely, or it will be nearly impossible to eat it!
  7. Serve as is, or sliced.
  8. Consume immediately – we did not keep it to test its shelf life 😉
Categories
Stories

The Komal House

The house
The house

The Route
The Route

We left Chennai on Christmas eve. After a short visit to Chidambaram and overnight at Vaitheeshwaran Koil, on Christmas morning we set off towards our destination — a small village named Komal.

I remember my grandmother mentioning Komal several times, but beyond the name, I knew nothing. To me, Komal sounded out of place. It was too north-Indian a name, to be a village in Tamil Nadu. In fact, for a long time, I thought it was in Myanmar!

We knew no-one in the village. The house was sold several years ago, and my father hadn’t been anywhere near Komal for forty years.

We had no address. Back then, my father told us, people never had addresses. Everyone knew everyone else in the village. Each house was identified by its occupants. How, then, were we to find that house? “I’ll know it when I see it. I’m told it hasn’t changed one bit,” said my father.

One of my father’s cousins gave us the name of a person who could help us locate the house, just in case.

“It is near a temple.”
We followed the highway leading towards Kumbakonam and asked for directions from locals. Our landmark was a temple. We found one. And another. And another. But my father could not recognise anything. “There should be a bridge, followed by a row of shops. I don’t understand. ”

My father asked a few local people about the person my uncle had mentioned. “No brahmins live on this street,” said one man with a glare. He pointed towards another street, and told us to ask there.

On the other street, we were told that only Iyengars lived there, no Iyers. They pointed towards the end of the street and told us that some of the residents had been living there for years. Perhaps they could help.

At the end of the street, we stopped outside an old looking house, that my father thought looked familiar. Unsure, he knocked on the door, and asked the residents if he could take a look. A few minutes later, he came out and told us that it was not the one.

We had been going around in circles for over an hour. The sun was beating down on us.

Dejected, and frustrated, we were planning to return to Chennai, when we saw an elderly gentleman. As a last-ditch effort, we asked him about our mysterious contact person. To our delight, he knew the person. “Oh! Yes, I know him! But he doesn’t live here. He lives in Komal. This is Therazendur.’*

Once we realised we were in the wrong village, it took us barely 10 minutes to reach the narrow entry to Komal.

“The bridge!” my father exclaimed. “I know this! We are here! Those are the shops. Take this turn. Right here. Wait! Stop!” No sooner had the car stopped, that my father sprang out of the car. He looked around the small roads, and then began walking at a fast pace.

There was an old man, walking alongside a cycle, on the side of the road. My father asked him about a house that had once belonged to an uncle of his. “Oh that person passed away many years ago,” replied the old man.

“Yes,” my father replied in an excited tone, glad that someone finally knew about the house. “That was my uncle. My father had bought it from him.”

The old man’s eyes widened. He took my grandfather’s name.**

“Yes! I am his youngest son! Can you take me to that house?”

My father’s steps quickened. His excitement was evident. The minute he laid his eyes on the house, my father pointed towards it and exclaimed, “It is just as we had left it!”

The old man introduced us to the occupants of the house. He must have become accustomed to members of my father’s family coming to see the old house, and graciously allowed us inside.

“This house was the only house in the entire village to have electricity, in those days!” My father was visibly proud. “There used to be a swing. A large swing. Is it still there?”

The owner smiled and said it was there. Everything was just the way it had been. The swing, the large stone grinder, even the light switches and fans!

“This house was purchased in 1940 when the war broke out, and my mother had to move with three of her children along with our grandparents and stay in a largish house. It was bought for Rs. 4000. It was in this house that I was born,” my aunt later told me.

Watching my father almost run around the house, I can only imagine how many memories must have come back to him. Every wall, every pillar, must have meant the world to him — a world very different, and in another time, from that of ours right now.

The owner told us that my uncle once casually asked if it were up for sale.

“So was it?”

“No! It’s been a very lucky house for me,” replied our smiling host.

The house
Kolam outside the Komal house
The porch
The courtyard
The corridor
A stone grinder can be seen on the right

* My grandfather was born in Therazendur. We had practically gone around the whole village a couple of times, and it is likely that we passed by one of the houses that may have once belonged to his family. But we will never know.

** That old man, we later found out, was a distant relative of my grandmother!

The walls of this house are my entries for this week’s Daily Post Challenge – Wall

About the photographs: These photographs are of someone’s house. They graciously allowed us to enter their private space and I request these photographs not to be used elsewhere.