A chef and an obsession...

Baking is an art form in reality. In most other styles of cooking, it is easy to undo human error. Undoing in totality might prove to be difficult may be, but surely the dish can be salvaged by using tips from experts. Digressing a little, Mrs. Mallika Badrinath - rendered a top chef in Tamil Nadu - offers a bunch of SoS tips in almost all her books. I have the whole series of her books sitting on my book shelf. It is interesting that I never purchased even one of them. That is not to be mistaken that I did not intend to buy them, but what I meant is even before I heard of her fame and glory, I got gifted a couple of her books by her son who happens to be a good friend of mine. I started experimenting recipes from her books and within weeks I was hooked! Peps (as we call him) must have realized how much I adored them 'coz he gave me the entire series as a wedding gift. Her recipes are tried and tested ones but what makes them valuable is, they are described in a surprisingly simple way with ingredients right off the kitchen shelf. There is indeed something in them that makes you want to start making them, the moment you set your eyes on them. Three cheers to her!

So baking, I reiterate can turn into a gruesome nightmare if some of its vital ingredients were omitted or forgotten or a pre-processing step skipped. There are some "cool" and handy recipes which fall under the failsafe category while some others can prove to be very finicky. When we lived in IIT Delhi, we had this family living in the apartment above ours, who had returned back to India after living a few years in London. Uncle was a professor in IIT and auntie was a homemaker. After living a few years in India, they decided to go back to London again and that's when they decided to get rid of all the stuff that they couldn't possibly take back with them. We, who were pretty good friends with them started to become proud owners of a lot of "Made in England" stuff. Assorted things started becoming new members in our household which included travel guides on London, some very adorable dolls, a sandwich maker, pens, knife-sharpener (which lived true to its name until its disappearance some twenty years later) and an electric cake oven. One of the dolls that I christened "Goldilocks" still lives in my home in Chennai though she only has her head attached to the torso now. Her hair was and is a point of fascination to me to this day. You'd probably mistake me for being slightly soft in the head if I revealed the things I've done with her hair like shampooing and using the drier to style it. She's lived through it all - the pretty Miss. GL. My mom was an epitome of experimentation. She never ceased to try out new stuff - be it picking up a new art form like doll-making, knitting, crocheting or trying out new foods, collecting new recipes, stitching new patterns of dresses from fashion magazines, learning new beauty treatment techniques or baking new cakes! The oven that we inherited from our neighbors easily became her obsession. We are looking at the early 80's here before the times of food blogs and the internet. She didn't have a recipe book on baking or cakes either. She just followed her instincts to start trying out different combinations of flour, eggs, baking powder, baking soda, butter and flavoring essences to come up with some truly delectable cakes. I was a kid and to me, her cakes looked and tasted very different from the ones we got from the bakery in neighboring Hauz Khas. I loved them for their freshness and ambrosial flavor. Many years later, some time in 2001, I baked my first pseudo-cake. Pseudo because it was from an instant packaged mix but the experience was gratifying. I was a grad student and I didn't have a baking pan back then. Following my friend Anu's suggestion, I ended up baking it in a heavy- bottomed pressure pan and it still turned out great. A series of instant cakes followed but it was not until the fall of 2003 that I tried baking a cake from scratch (again acting on Anu's recipe that she had gotten from her cousin in Dallas). The difference was instantly obvious and the flavor reminded me of the home-made cakes my mom used to bake. That triggered a saga of obsession with baking ONLY from scratch! I wonder sometimes if I inherited the crazy-about-baking gene from my mom 'cuz today if I go without baking something (anything!) for a couple weeks in a row, I start getting panic attacks. x-( Baking being a very healthy substitute to frying gives me that extra bit of adrenaline rush.

When I started writing this post, I wanted to follow it with a cake or muffin recipe but for fear of having to post something ridiculously long, I stop here.