Published in the Christmas issue of India Currents Magazine. Available online.
As a child, one thing I distinctly remember
pursuing was a Christmas cake. A plum cake with an inviting dark caramel tone
and the lingering aroma of ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg and vanilla. Each
piece resembles a mosaic wedge. Raisins, cashew nuts, dates, candied red
papaya, cherry and orange peels adorn each piece. A bite makes you an instant
convert and eventually an addict. I used to dream of a day I ate plum cake for
all meals.
My folks in Kerala ate plum cake ritually
during Christmas. Christians celebrated Christmas, but the cake travelled to
all homes and became a custom. Baking a cake at home can be difficult for most,
so the bakeries had roaring success. In December, cakes of all shapes, sizes
and decorations took over the glass shelves of local sweet shops. Anyone who
stopped by our home during this time could expect a slice of cake next to their
tea cup. Cake dominated small talk. Bakers were challenged to bake the biggest
possible cake. Artistic sugar renditions on the cake were made to look like tropical
fruits, animals or buildings. Kids begged and reasoned with their parents to
bring a well-decorated cake home. When our uncle got us a pineapple shaped cake,
it made him a hero at our local school.
Noushad became my close friend during
high school, which opened the doors to his family bakery. They supplied bread
and pastries to local retail shops. The traditional oven – they called it a bormba
– was inside a one-room structure next to their home. The family had a
reverence for it. It was always kept tidy and no one was allowed to enter the
room with shoes on. They baked everything using this traditional brick oven.
Noushad once told me that when they reconstructed the baking chamber, they
collected empty glass bottles from the neighborhood, crushed them and mixed them
with concrete, which helped to retain heat for several hours.
When the bakery is busy, Noushad’s
home smells of sweet milk buns and butter biscuits. When you enter the bakery,
the wooden racks are stacked with bread loaves and cookies. There is no
machinery. Instead Noushad’s brothers knead the dough into long braids using their
bare hands. Kneading is like fighting a
big snake. They have muscular biceps and forearms that show off their hard
work. Noushad’s dad is in charge of the oven. He spreads coconut shells in the chamber
and fires it up to make charcoal. He says coconut shells are better because they
generate less ash and have the aroma of burning coconut oil. Once the charcoal
is red hot and the bed is ready, he inserts the batter filled pans with a
shovel like a spatula. With the shovel’s long wooden handle, cakes are pushed
to the back of the oven since they are the last to come out.
During Christmas time the focus is
to get as many cakes out as possible that are sure to sell. That’s when close
friends get invited to help out at the bakery. Crushing the nuts and chopping
the raisins, preparing the pans with butter and packing cakes in wax paper are
all the tasks we got to do. My favorite task was to trim and level the sides of
a cake before it’s decorated so the icing looks even. This meant handfuls of
cake crumbs and tidbits to munch on at the end of every cake dressing. The serrated
knife worked harder in the beginning for a better yield but waned as the
stomach got full. At the end of a batch the head almost starts spinning because
of a sugar rush, and I would bite a ginger root for a relief.
Back then we had a neighbor, auntie
Leela, who worked in Europe but chose our town to retire. She and her two dachshund
dogs lived in a hilltop villa next to an all-girls boarding school. It had a patio
with a view of the paddy field in the foothills and I always saw her sitting
there holding a tea mug. It was strange, so I assumed that’s how the English enjoyed
their tea. She was also into baking. Every year she meticulously prepared the Christmas
cake batter with cocoa and brandy soaked dry fruits and brought it to Noushad’s
oven, baking several cakes in a single batch. Those special cakes were then wrapped
in wax paper and sent to her friends in far places as a holiday gift. Brandy
was haram (forbidden) in Noushad’s family so they never tasted it. He sometimes
managed to sneak a small cake out for us friends and after the gorging, I described
it to my siblings how special it was. Once we even made a plan to raid auntie
Leela’s pantry while she was out at the post office, but the frightening
dachshunds weakened the idea.
The award for best cake in our town
probably goes to Thompson’s bakery, a quaint shop near the railway station. Its
owner and baker Tommy is timid but for over fifty years, he provided a bold
point of reference for locals when it comes to cakes. Many upscale sweet shops
sprung up in our town that sold sweets from the North and the Middle East. He
also sold other things like ladoos, barley biscuits and mutton puffs. But it
was for the cakes that people came back to this one-man shop.
Tommy works to his capacity every
year but still runs out of cakes before Christmas. Locals know better so they buy
and store them early on. Timid Tommy’s secret is a mystery to the five star
sweet shop owners, and I once asked him what it was. He thinks it’s the right proportions
that balance the taste. He did not think it’s a big deal to get it right. Then
he said something strange: new bakers throw in everything in excess hoping to
get it better and richer. But just like life, excess complicates.
When I started living in other cities
for work, I acquired cakes from Thompson’s to share with my favorite teachers and
my team at the office. Many of my colleagues were new to this kind of cake so
they took a small piece and walked back to their desks. One cautious bite and
most of them would come back to get another serving. It was Christmas when a
beautiful young lady from another team came to me and asked a taste of the
cake. She said her friend texted her about it and she was curious. This was when
I thought maybe I should bake my own cake and take the full credit. One with dried
fruits soaked in brandy like auntie Leela did.
When I got married to Sheena, my
mother insisted that we take her oven, a Glen brand with a baking unit, to our
newly bought home in Bangalore. She never used it for baking and also
complained that it used up too much gas. Those days a full cylinder of cooking
gas was a luxury, so homemakers even gave up cooking dishes that took longer. The
following December we baked our first cake. A lot of work went into chopping the
raisins and mixing the ingredients. The cake came out lopsided with a big crack
in the middle. Noushad said baking powder ruined it but we later learned that a
lot of things had gone wrong. It took a while for us to be brave enough to bake
again, and by then we had moved to the U.S.A where home baking is ingrained in
the local culture.
The grandeur of Christmas here in
the US is revealed throughout December. A million lights and bright ornaments
breathe new life into the neighborhood at night. Santa Clause springs up in
shopping malls and children line up to talk to him and take pictures with him. Radio
channels play nonstop Christmas songs all month long and you listen to them without
feeling silly. Parties at the office and home centered on food and overeating are
acceptable. Everything on earth goes on sale and malls serve warm apple cider
and cookies to cheer up the snow-drenched shoppers. It’s hard to avoid this
festival frenzy, so everyone goes with the flow. But I still missed two things:
a Christmas star in every home and plum cakes.
We first lived in Des Moines, a small
Midwestern city in the USA. Janet Hobbs, a woman in her fifties, became our
guide to America. Jan took us around, introduced us to places and people and
explained things to us. She often baked at home and invited us over to watch. Pat,
Jan’s musician boyfriend, had a day job as a bakery manager so they
experimented with food quite a bit. For instance, they made a rhubarb tart when
Sheena was pregnant and craving sour food.
When Tara’s – our daughter – first birthday arrived, Pat baked an
enormous star shaped chocolate cake with sinful expanse of cocoa and cream. Standing
on the sidelines, we also learned the ways to deal with dough, yeast and butter.
When Sheena ventured into baking all kinds of goods, I focused on getting the
plum cake right for Christmas.
It surprised me that plum cake is
not easily accessible here during Christmas. The cake in Kerala had origins in
the West, but here the closest thing available is a fruitcake. A fruitcake is the
butt of many jokes and may be the most ridiculed holiday food. I once bought a
heavy fruit cake from a European bakery and it had an authentic appeal with
festive wrapping. The cake was dense with dried fruits and nuts and it smelled of
sugar syrup. It felt gooey in the mouth with lumps of very sweet oversized
fruits and missed the essential spices. A comedian once said that there is only
one fruitcake in the world that gets passed from household to household. The
jokes made more sense as we ate.
Humor aside, there are many ethnic
communities that pursue the art of making a Christmas cake in different ways.
All of them have a European influence and the basic ingredients – dried fruits,
nuts and spices. Caribbean black cake is an annual baking ritual where the dry
fruits are soaked in rum for months and baked with dark brown sugar. Just like
Caribbean nations, it is lavish with sugar and rum. Christstollen is a
fifteenth century German cake low in sugar but has distinct rum infused fruits
with little bread surrounding them. Italian panettone has more bread than
fruits and the ingredients are not soaked in rum or brandy. Scottish Dundee
cake stands out by using currants and sultanas, and the flavor is distinct. Obviously
the scotch whiskey takes over as the liqueur of choice. A classic British Christmas
cake has ingredients closest to the recipe we followed from Kerala, but it still
missed the nutty flavor, heavy spices and burnt caramel taste that I was used
to.
Hence we baked our Christmas cakes
every year with mixed results. None of the cakes from the last eight years came
even close to the Bangalore disaster, but there were high points that tricked
us into keeping it going.
The preparation for baking a plum
cake starts a month before Christmas. That’s when the currants, sultanas, dates
and cherries are chopped and socked in a pint of brandy. A strenuous baking day
comes two weeks later and by then the spirited fruits develop an aroma of port wine.
Candied ginger, orange and lemon peels are then added to the mix. An assortment
of spices produced in Kerala gives the cake its aroma to please the senses. Small
heaps of cinnamon, cardamom, clove, cocoa, nutmeg, dry ginger and a few drops
of vanilla are added. Creaming the butter by beating it with sugar and eggs is
a critical step as it traps the air bubbles that leaven the cake in the oven. Burning
sugar into to caramel syrup is precision engineering but its hue and bittersweet
taste justifies the effort. Sifted dry ingredients – flour, spices and baking
powder – are gradually combined with the creamed butter. Then the moist fruits and
candied peels go in. Plenty of crushed cashew nuts and small chunks of candied
papayas are added at the end.
This year, it took about four hours
to prepare the cake batter and at the end the kitchen was an indescribable
mess. Tara was having a sugar rush from eating all that creamed butter. The
floor was sticky and cake batter was all over her. The cake went in the oven
and we all gathered to watch it rise. In about thirty minutes, the sweet smell
of cardamom and cinnamon filled the room and made the waiting even harder. Two
more tantalizing hours later, the cake had risen and turned dark brown. The
bamboo skewer came out clean and it was transferred to a cooling rack. It’s
3:30 A.M and Tara slept on the couch. We made some black tea and cut a thick
piece for ourselves. As the blade squeezed in, it released a fragrance that reminded
me of my childhood. The buttery fruits clasped in sweet caramel bread melted in
my mouth and offered no resistance. As I ate it, I started hearing a song from
another time and my folks were in it.
I thought about a Christmas without a
plum cake and it made no sense.
