A half-baked affair

A year or two after I turned a corner, as well as 30, I thought I should start to bake. The plan was to be incredibly good at it, or fall in love with its exactitude, whichever should happen first. The plan was to start right away, not start with learning, mind you, for how hard could it be? Someone I used to know wondered why women tend to take to baking once they entered their third decade: Apparently his ex-wife had then just started, as had several others he knew. He proposed, in typical chauvinistic zeal, that we might be trying to fulfil a maternal void — what with that old clock ticking and all that — by lining up cupcakes and elaborate pastries and such like. I called the postulation the name it deserved: Bullshit.

After years of living on Maggi and curd rice, I had long since succumbed to making proper meals. It had come after years of stubbornly holding off from loving the kitchen, for I had thought, stupidly, that it wouldn’t be in keeping with who I thought I wanted to become. But then, fed up with instant noodles and just the one rice dish, I began to throw things together — a little of this, some of that, topped with the other thing and served hot. Endless hurried calls to the mother with stuff in the pan on boil, some mash-ups of recipes and Googled hacks later, I had become someone who could cook well. Enough to invent dishes from non-sequitur ingredients. Enough to cook a three-course meal for 50-odd people in a foreign kitchen. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Thus, with all the hubris of someone who could feed a village, I asked myself, upon turning that hefty old age of 30, how hard could throwing in three to four ingredients together and shoving them into a preheated oven be? Well, naivety is a recourse of the once-proud, it came to transpire.

Mother let me permanently borrow her fancy, perfectly working everything-in-it oven because all she did was heat dinner in it. My childhood was never filled with freshly-baked cakes cooling on a tray. 'I don't suppose many of us growing up in austere 1980s small-town India had home-baked cakes a lot, if at all. It did have cake — generic, local bakery-made sponges and a stray chocolate cake or two, a home-made spillover from an odd party — but I had no auditory memories of cracking eggs, no recollection of what slightly browning milk smells like, or an idea of the satisfaction of sliding a knife into soft sponge to cut myself a large slice.

The very first cake I made must surely have been a chocolate cake, taken from one of many generic recipes online. It must have been appreciated by the family with polite sets of claps and a nod here, a smile there, because that is what most families do — refrain from honesty. I must have then proceeded to bake a few more before reverting to my natural state: Reading, writing, have the dog follow me about. In my journal entries, I never made it to the point where I would include a list of food I made. Ate, yes, alongside entries of friends I ate the food with, what we talked about, who said what and how much we laughed, or not. Of the food I made just for myself, of cakes, there are entries nearly never.

Over the years, I have time and again gone back to baking, determined to discover a love for it, a love I knew just had to be there somewhere. The results have always been edible, fairly okay even, if accompanying great coffee, of which my home has aplenty. But here is the thing: I have never loved baking, despite being desperate to. Along the way, the non-love has felt like an affront to both feminism and to long-ingrained ideas of feminine expectations of baking.

There is a lot to unpack here.

Baking cakes and such like is a cooking process that we must have borrowed in recent history, yet another offspring of colonial influence. Over there in the West, the ’50s, a decade before the feminist revolution, was a time of the idealised housewife. She was a perfect wife and a doting mother. She cooked elaborate meals, baked the best things. She kept an immaculate house. She obeyed her husband. She wore pretty dresses and perfected coiffed hair, and served meals with red lipstick and high heels intact, and the smile never leaving her lips. She not only enjoyed domesticity, but thrived, and derived sustenance from her capability in it. She was also the protagonist of the peculiar phenomenon of someone who had every abundance in the post-war years, yet suffered from lethargy, an ennui of existence. She had the problem with no name, as Betty Friedan would term it in her seminal The Feminine Mystique .

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Take the cake, and biscuit: Cupcake feminism — a kind of rebellion against the idea of a postmodern woman who also works outside the house — is a fetishisation of the stereotypical housewife who, among other things, is a skilled baker

Of late, cities in the West have seen young women indulge in a certain fetishisation for the old-fashioned housewife stereotype by taking to the domestic arts — by playing dress-up, by wearing vintage, and spending hours decorating cupcakes. It even acquires a name: Cupcake feminism, where women have chosen to knit, cook, sew and bake in an attempt to be subversive and to rebel against the idea of a postmodern woman who can work outside the house, have a career while bringing up a happy family on the side. Predictably, there have been detractors on either side, wondering if domesticity can ever be subversive and on the other end, deeming it acceptable for women to make even this choice, if that is what they wanted.

My feminism comes from my mother, a homemaker who did not teach me to cook when I lived at home and let me climb trees, stay out late and become “me” instead. No one was more surprised that I finally found my way into a faith where cooking was both a stress buster and a thing of joy. “You are cooking!?” she would ask, for years after, with several exclamation marks unfailingly slipping into her tone. Given how I fell in love with the act of growing and making food, I had expected to master the process of baking soon enough. It was my rebellion of sorts against a mother who never baked. I was trying to be a cupcake feminist.

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Baking demands a degree of trust that is absent in most other forms of cooking. In it, you combine various powders — flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, sodium bicarbonate — all of which, taken individually, have little romance, little conceptual reality. You add something wet and introduce heat, and watch it change into something so wildly amazing: How can this not be magic? Baking is math and ratios, and demands a subconscious understanding of chemistry and a certain exactitude deep-set in the baker’s bones. Subjects that bring up old longings of loathing and panic, like bile.

I love that baking is like magic. I love that baking someone something always makes them feel special. Baking is a set of precise instructions. Logically, I know there is nothing to be intimidated about. But somehow it is never undaunting. Not one to let go of a challenge soon, I bought measuring cups and measuring spoons in multicolour. I put them to hard work. I told myself to stop being silly and just get on with it. I borrowed recipes, got friends to handhold me through baking a cake, watched endless videos, forced myself to follow instructions to the T, cried into the flour, did everything (read in all caps). But here is Michael Pollan in Cooked saying what I felt: “As a form of cooking, it (baking) seemed too demanding — of exactitude and of patience, neither a personal strong suit. Baking was the carpentry of cooking, and I’ve always gravitated towards pursuits that leave considerably more room for error. Gardening, cooking, writing, all are roomy in that way, amenable to revision and mid-course correction.” Of course, Pollan being Pollan, he proceeds to become a minor master of bread making. I remain my illogically scared self. There must be a word for this inability, even phobia, to bake.

Does it make me any less of a woman? Of course not. Does it cause a pang of sadness that I will never be the wife who makes the best oatmeal cookies or possibly, the mother who makes the world’s best chocolate-chip cookies? I want to say a feeble yes. But I have decided this: The husband and future child can stay disappointed, because I have other worlds to conquer.

The road to reconciling with the fact that I could never bake has been many years in building, nevertheless. The ideas of feminism, of the illusion of free choices, the acts of subversion and of rebellion, and the reluctant acceptance of reality, all these feels like a well-established process line of thought. And diverting from the narrative, I have evolved a hack: a no-bake cake that is a hit.

Powder Marie biscuits. Mix with Milkmaid into a dough, add coffee decoction, and roll it out. Add a layer of grated desiccated coconut on top. Fold into a long roll, pat the edges close and freeze for a few hours.

I make the best coffee coconut cake in the world. The coffee coconut cake is a dream, especially with coffee. Coffee really makes everything and sorrow better. As for the fancy microwave, I use it these days to heat dinner.

Deepa Bhasthi is a writer living and working between Bengaluru and Kodagu