Half-baked experiments

I’ve been brazenly self-appreciative of my cooking abilities and have strutted around throwing recipes at unsuspecting folks. Baking though seemed like a distant dream. My recipes of course are real and tested by yours truly. Somehow, I never really got around to baking any bake-able food despite coming to possess a microwave oven for over ten years now. When I purchased the microwave, I didn’t realise OTG and microwave were two different things. Sure, go ahead and judge me!

Like a kid that would fantasize stocking a new refrigerator purchased at a new year sale with ice-creams of different flavours, I fantasized about baking pizzas, cakes, cookies, and bread. Even after a few weeks of getting the microwave, I never moved past reheating food or roasting appalams/papads. Thawing was never a thing and still not is as most Indian homes don’t swear by frozen foods. I don’t know about all the genteel folks out there, but my freezer is stocked with different spices, coffee powder, ‘homemade’ chocolates from a local bakery in Kodaikanal, more chocolates from our travel overseas on work, and such important stuff. Never any real frozen food. My poor microwave’s status was reduced to an appalam-roasting machine by kolla-patti who loved the evenly-microwave-roasted appalam.

Until recently, I was content with the ready-made cakes and pastries in the market and even more content and happy with the cakes my friends lovingly baked – one I befriended through her blog, another from work, and another who was my neighbor. My friend at work tried to inspire me but nah! I was content eating. I still am. I don’t know what changed and when. I think it was an accidental bumping into a video on baking without an oven. What began as a small itch continued to get itchier and there was this desperate urge to try my hand at baking. And I did. On December 25th, a Christmas special – Chocolate-banana-walnut cake. In less than a month, I’ve baked about 8 times now and they’ve so far turned out yumm if I may say so myself :).

My experiments include the said Choc-banana-walnut cake, a regular loaf of bread which was round because I have just a round tin, a complan-kesar-badam cake, blueberry cheese cake, a choc-and-nuts cake, and garlic bread. A few pictures: