Chapter 4

Chaddis and birthday parties

If you were doing any kind of baking in the 90’s, you were familiar with the struggle of having to replenish your arsenal of everyday supplies. Back in the day you had to depend on friends and family travelling from America to bring back a treasure trove of Wilton icing colours, Wilton pans, and Wilton piping bags (because it was seemingly the only brand that existed back then).

A couple of years into my marriage, I decided it was time to learn to bake. I signed up for a short-term ‘cake-decoration’ course at Catering College in Dadar. In these medieval times we actually had to GO to the teacher, you know. We were yet to be blessed by the magic of experts on Instagram, Zoom and Facebook.

Right from the start, I was hooked. It was fascinating to see how a cake took shape in front of your eyes, from a misshapen blob of sugar and flour into a pretty sculpture of colour and icing. I had plenty of hits and misses amongst my early efforts.

Like this rather anaemic Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall (which wasn’t like any wall I’d ever seen). The foliage looked like poison ivy waiting to climb into Humpty’s vitals.

Or a Barbie cake, which started out as a headless body with a beautiful gown that Masaba would be proud of, but by the time I was finished it would have given nightmares to any little girl.  The icing had to be done directly on top of the plastic torso (“No beta, you cant eat this cake, you can only lick it”). This wasn’t helped by the size-zero Barbie’s of those days (“Itni patli ho gayi hai, kuchh khaati nahi hai”). You were supposed to buy your own Barbie doll, twist its head off and shove it into the ‘body’, which would be a pink platform made of sponge cake. There would be many a torso lying around the kitchen floor, looking like a scene straight out of Dexter.

Contrary to popular belief, life in plastic isn’t always fantastic.

Anyway, I used to ask anyone coming from the abroad to get me cake pans in different shapes and sizes. I started making ‘phancy schmancy’ cakes for my kids’ birthday parties. Rainbow cakes, Harry Potter cakes, Power Puff Girls, Clowns, Choo Choo Trains, Dumbo, Batman, Candy cakes and many more. It was backbreaking, exhausting, time consuming work…and tempting to just order something from Gaylord instead. But gotta keep the kids happy, right?

The best part now is that each of these cakes has its own memories attached.

I made ‘Number’ cakes on birthdays because they were the easiest to make and looked like I had been working on them for days, instead of hours. All you had to do was cut out the right shape and then bless the cake with as much candy you could get your hands on! I used to raid the shops at Crawford market for all the favourite confectionaries of the 90s - gems, coins, jujubs, bullseye, meetha saunf - you name it and it went on the cake. By the end of every party you were left with 40 hyperactive kids running through the house dancing extra enthu to Preeti Sagar’s “It’s a hap, hap, happy birthday… “. At the other end of the room 40 mothers would be giving me the stink-eye knowing very well that shut-eye was a loooooong time away for their child that night.

I made a ‘Pizza’ cake once, which looked curiously like the pizza you get from Santosh Sagar (you know the kind where the cheese doesn’t melt and stays exactly in its grated avatar on the bread even after it’s baked)…my favourite pizza in town, btw.

One time I remember hunting all over town trying to source chocolate gold coins for a ‘Rainbow’ cake I was making (you kids today don’t understand the struggle of life before Amazon and Swiggy). After all, what’s a rainbow without the pot of gold at the end, right? Cadbury gems did the rest of the job. Of course, if I made this cake today, I would put just put bitcoins at the end of it and then make NFT out of it (to keep with the times). Those of you who know my son would understandJ.

Regardless of which cake it was, my kids would proudly stand in front of the table at cake-cutting time to earn bragging rights. “My mother made this, don’t touch it till I cut it”. On a side note, the amount of spit flying around in those days when kids were trying to blow out their candles would have Dr Fauci running for the hills!

Anyway, the first cake I ever made was for my son’s 1st birthday. We had planned a pool party with an inflatable pool in the garden and all the kids were encouraged to bring their swimwear.

Going with the theme, I made a swimsuit-shaped cake with butter icing made from every icing colour that I had. All of you will recall the penultimate moment when the cake is placed on the table and everyone rushes to take pride of place at the very front, ready to shove their not-so-clean fingers into it. Just when my son was about to blow out the candles, one of the kids very loudly blurted out, “Mama, it looks like my chaddi!”

In hindsight, he was probably right.