On
Wednesday, my brother and I craved for chocolate. Chocolate cake to be
specific. It was 12:15 a.m.
In
the history of unanimous verdicts, ours will also go unnoticed as the drawing
room, habitual of listening to guard’s thak thak thak, suddenly became
alert to our particular promise: We will make cake tomorrow.
Utterance
of WE is important here.
Next day, the sun rose from east. Birds twittered. Anxiety of water running out, made the two adults of our house take an early bath. Between work from home and online classes, I became busy. Exactly at noon, my brother reminded about our midnight pledge. By then, I had no craving of chocolate.
But
having seen so many people posting cooking recipes I screenshotted one from
Instagram and whatsapped it to my brother. And even though he read it very
carefully, I star-marked it.
Our
trust in each other goes back only a few minutes.
Mother agreed to the commotion that followed.
This wasn’t our first time in kitchen. When we were 12, we had cooked Pasta on Mother’s day and this has always made us feel good about ourselves in a subtle way, which is beyond the sarcasm we offer ourselves. Afterall, anything could have gone wrong that day. Especially if the cooks are 12-year-old kids who are alone in house.
The ingredients for the cake were arranged on black marble slab of our kitchen. It smelt of milk and ginger. Didn’t I tell you we got this!
But I should also tell you that air smelled sour because a day before bhagona that skipped introductions with the fridge. Didn’t I tell you it is impossible to always get it.
As
a break from Tenses, I walked into a situation of articles and determined how
is one table spoon different from one tea spoon. The ingredients were prepositioned
according to their heights, in a decreasing order, all kept in the front row.
Four big cups sat in the second row. Milk ka bhagona in the corner. The kitchen
was electric from then on.
The
procedure was a bit different from our usual cake practice. We used to have our
own recipe. It was one of those taken for granted writings written on a
tattered page of a phone diary and as you know losing such countable nouns is a
law of nature.
Anyway, bowls were taken: aata, peeci hui cheeni, baking soda, cocoa powder, oil/butter/malai, milk, cocoa powder, all that could be added, was added.
The Brown Batter was getting properly n(o)uanced; neither too thick nor too thin. After using all the muscle powers present in the house, the mixture was put in microwave for seven minutes and I waited with a knife for the final step. Oil was visible at the top but I thought that was just my eyes playing trick and so the cake settled inside the microwave for another 5 minutes. The cake looked shiny. It was reflecting light of TV.
The
sound of ‘this is not going to end today’.
What
had happened was that after my brother discovered what had happened to the
cake, he quickly reported things to the headquarter of ‘please help us, we need
your help – Mother’.
My mother recounted all the likelihoods when she had said that the cake was ‘done’. Funny, how I don’t remember anything. More funny, because all the other three members of the house remember her saying so. Watching Ramayana, in a quarantine house is full of intensities: fight so fiercely for a food item as complicated as cake. Tempers were raised. Arrows were drawn. Ramayana won as DD went on since my parents kept sitting glued to the television and breaking into an argument only in the break. I found the Amul advertisement quite nostalgic.
Coming back to the sound of ‘this is not going to end today’. My father had poured hot water in order to take the cake out from the container. Didn’t work. A friend on DM suggested, to put some milk and microwave it again. I did. Many times.
Nothing.
Then,
I warmed one-fourth cup of water. Added sugar. Heated it for five minutes. All
this while, I was wondering why I was the only one working to salvage the cake
that I perhaps had lost the taste for at 12 noon. But that is the thing with
thoughts, I continued thinking without once stopping. The sugar syrup was ready
and cake absorbed that too. There were very tiny holes now in the cake, looking
like an ants’ colony stuck in the pan.
Next
day we had bread and tea for breakfast soaked in the same oil from the one that
I sieved from the cake. An hour later, I was cutting onions and preparing gravy
for Kadhai Paneer. By then, father had scratched the whole cake alone. The
sugar syprup helped in taking the cake out into pieces, I guess.
But
majaal hai jo ek bhi piece could be eaten! The cake could have been substituted
for a slab in the kitchen. What better reuse!
Later
in the afternoon, while I was adding Paneer in the yellow frothy gravy made
with onions, tomatoes, cashews, malai, dahi, my mother was beating petrified
cake in the ginger beater, picking the chura (big ladoos of chura) and filling
the container, with the ‘dessert’ for the new few days to come.
In
between, I managed to burn one roti and crash our precious 1994 mixie. That
night, my brother and I wrote a stupid song about it. The neighbours wondered
about our collective IQ.
It
is Saturday 11 April, 10:20 p.m. and we have tried eating (swallowing) the crunchy chura every day
like medicine- after breakfast, post lunch, after dinner.
p.s.
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| Later episode in a photograph. Another blog on just this is boring. |