Noushad and the Plum Cake

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.