Cookies Unmade

This year, in a very long time, the Holiday season is different. I am not baking any cookies. No Raspberry Linzers or Danish Butter, or the humble jam thumbprints. No chocolate dipped shortcake and peanut butter cookies. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

My baking journey started a very long time ago in a small, sleepy town in the dusty Maharashtrian hinterlands. The town had nothing much to offer, really, in terms of entertainment, but it had an excellent library. And a book fair would be held in the large hall at the library every year, an event my brother and my parents and me looked forward to. Though I didn’t realize then, the book selection was quite predictable. Dickens and Austen and other classics in hardbacks mixed with a generous dose of Ludlum and Forsyth and other popular authors in paperbacks. And (not really) surprising number of books from the Soviet. Printed on glossy paper with beautiful illustrations. Always hardbound. Complete collections of Chekov’s short stories and Dostoevskys to illustrated 3 book sets of the Russian Revolution (which I bought for the pictures, but never read) and commentaries on Marxism. Amidst this bizarre collection, my mom once found a book, or a magazine, it certainly was a little of both. It was a special baking issue of the Australian Women’s Weekly. I don’t know why my mom bought the book. She didn’t bake. She didn’t even like cooking that much. She owned one unillustrated cookbook written in Marathi that every Maharastrian housewife was expected to have and it was brought out only during the festivals to get the ingredient ratios.

A few days later, with nothing to do after school, I gloated over the books we had bought at the book fair and the Australian Women’s Weekly caught my fancy. I thumbed though it. I was stunned. Did that recipe really call for 400gms of almonds? That would cost a small fortune and it would be silly to spend it on a cake. And what was demerara sugar? How on earth would zucchini bread taste (yuck) and could it be substituted with something else? I was sure it that something the local bhajiwallahs would not carry. But it wasn’t just the recipes. The photographs too. Beautiful lacy table linens and exquisite silverware. Dainty china teapots and delicate crocheted napkins sitting smugly beside a thick slice of delectably golden lemon-poppy seed cake basking in the glow of the morning sunlight streaming through windows that I imagined opened to exquisite gardens. It was a whole new world to my 12-year old self. I poured over these pictures from start to finish and came back to the beginning again to an introductory section where they listed the tools required for baking. Out of a list of 15 or 20 recommended pieces that included odd looking whisks and large rolling pins and springform and lamington pans, my mother probably had an old, dusty round aluminum oven and I wasn’t sure it even worked. So the book and its culinary treasures lay partly forgotten, there were simply no resources to buy the fancy gadgets and ingredients.

And then, a few months later came summer. My mother had to leave town for a week to attend a training program and my Dad was left with me and my brother in the middle of our summer holidays. My grandmother was there to look after us but I craved adventure. I had already made a kiln and lit a fire and baked mud pots in it a couple of weeks ago but that hadn’t gone too well with my mom. I had tried making some homemade translucent paper and that turned out to have disastrous results. In search of an uncharted territory to explore, I decided to bake a cake. Once my father left, I started to execute my plan. I took down a recipe book. Not the Australian Women’s Weekly, but a closer to home version of Tarla Dalal that my mom had borrowed from my aunt. Since the last two experiments at being adventours hadn’t gone as planned, I decided to let my grandmother in on my secret. But not all of it. “I want to cook something and I need some money to buy ingredients.” I wouldn’t tell what I wanted to cook. In the end she gave me a few rupees and my brother and I walked to a little shack of a store and bought eggs and white flour. Back home, I took out the pot of butter from the refrigerator knowing fully well if I made a noticeable dent in it, I would have to face my mom after she got back once again. But 12 year old girls can be quite unfazed. I took down the dusty oven and cleaned it. Then I turned the Tarla Dalal book to the simple vanilla cake and measured and poured and mixed. Just as I was about to put it in the oven, the electricity died. With batter in hand and nothing to bake it in, I was crestfallen. My grandmother suggested I keep it the fridge and bake it when electricity returned. But I knew batters could not be stored like this. The cake would come out like a rock. I thought and thought and a brainwave hit me. We had a solar cooker on our roof that we used sometimes. That would do. So I poured the batter in the solar container, climbed the ladder (there were no stairs) to the rooftop and put the cake to bake in the solar cooker. I checked on it every hour. The batter had risen and overflowed and I was happy about that. That meant the cake would not be hard. By evening the cake was nicely done and enjoyed by all. After that there was no looking back.

When I came to the United States and “settled”, the world of Australian Women’s Weekly opened to me. I could walk into a store and buy all the pans and whisks and gadgets I wanted. And I did. My kitchen is full of every gadget they sell out there (not silly ones like egg yolk separator, but real gadgets). And a couple of years ago I splurged and bought the beautiful Kitchen Aid Stand mixer. But life took its unexpected turns. Chip was diagnosed with an egg allergy before he turned one. And a few months ago BigGeek stopped eating butter because of cardiac issues. It’s hard to bake without eggs and butter. I have found recipes that use oil and applesauce instead of butter and I have found egg free recipes. They all work out OK, for most part, but a treasure trove of recipes now lie sadly abandoned.


This is a picture of the cake I made for Chip's first birthday. The animals are moulded by hand using marshmallow fondant. Lower tier filled with oreo cream is chocolate, upper is vanilla filled with strawberry cream.