Cake, MacGyver Style

I like cake.

A lot.

There are so many things in America that I simply don’t miss. I like not having what I’m used to. Every day is a little bit of a challenge getting by without some things that I once considered necessary. Showers, easy transportation, fast internet, and cheap phone calls are just a few things. Even foods that I loved eating in America, I don’t miss very much. Things like peanut butter sandwiches, cookies, breakfast cereal and yeast bread used to be a part of my daily fare, but I don’t get a bite of them anymore. And that’s okay. I’m eating a completely different diet, and enjoying it. I just don’t miss any food from back home.

Except for cake.

I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I got here. I just love it so much. Moist, soft layers blanketed by sweet, buttery (usually European-style) icing and flavored by exotic combinations of chocolate, caramel, vanilla or something else exciting, all stacked neatly together in an ordered arrangement… well, that’s my idea of perfection. Cake is the one food that I always eat slowly, because in a good cake, every bite is a masterful symphony on my taste buds. You have to slow down to really enjoy it. On top of that, if a baker has even a little bit of know-how and ingenuity, a cake is turned into a blank canvas on which they can execute a wide range of edible decorations that just adds to the wonderfulness that is a piece of cake. Yep, there’s nothing like cake.

Especially in India. Sure, you can go to one of the bakeries here and buy of piece of what they call cake. But you won’t like it, I promise you. It’s dry, tasteless sponge hastily shrouded in a simple white icing which lacks soul as much as it does flavor. It’s just sweet, and nothing else. I remember purchasing one within two weeks of arriving, and after two bites I stopped eating it. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just not good at all. There’s nothing to it. In my opinion, cake here needs a great deal of improvement. Oh, and don’t worry, this has very little to do with influencing the culture or introducing Indians to new foods. I was just really jonesing for a good piece of cake, and willing to go to pretty good lengths to procure it.

The plan was set into motion several weeks ago when I made brownies for Principal Ramdev’s wife. I may have mentioned before that I discovered it was possible to make brownies in a microwave, which is exactly what I was doing at the time. It just so happened that the plastic container in which these particular brownies were being nuked was perfectly round, about 6 inches in diameter, and the resulting brownies slipped easily out of the container after they were finished. It got me thinking, if you can make brownies in the microwave, why not a cake? It’s almost the same thing, just a batter risen by baking soda, and using a round container would yield cake rounds ready to be split into layers and frosted. I almost hit myself for not thinking of it before. I realized that yes, I can make a cake in India, despite lacking what I would consider to be common ingredients and equipment. I just needed to think outside of the cake box a little bit.

Next, I needed to find a recipe that could be easily mixed without beating butter and sugar. While the creaming method tends to produce the best flavor and texture, it would be nearly impossible to achieve the desired texture by hand, and by hand is the only way you get things in India. No electric beaters to be found here, no sir. I also decided almost immediately not to try and do this project without eggs. It’s possible, sure, but not this time. As I mentioned before, this was for me more than it was for anybody else. Not just the eating of the cake, but the cooking and construction of it are things that I am very good at doing, and I have missed doing them (and eating the results) for the past 3 months. What can I say, I’m like a cake junkie.

Armed with a simple but delicious chocolate cake recipe from my overseas culinary consultant, I had to next select the frosting, and in my mind, a buttercream was an absolute necessity. Standard American buttercream frostings (commonly known as “crunchy” frostings) are nothing but a mixture of butter and sugar, and are far too sweet for my taste. Meringue-style buttercreams, common to European recipes, call for some combination of eggs and sugar cooked and beaten, and are then fortified with butter. These are by far the tastiest, and also the most difficult to produce. I choose the Swiss method, which does not require cooking sugar syrup, but still needs up to an hour of hard beating. I don’t have Popeye forearms, and have thought it would be impossible to make a meringue frosting by hand, but that was before I came to India. In the past several weeks, I made a variety of whipped items, including marshmallows and divinity candy. I felt confident that I could produce a whipped frosting by hand. My flavor of choice would be leftover dulce de leche beaten into the finished frosting.

One problem with making a cake in India is that bakery-quality pastries often require a certain amount of waste to produce a well-decorated product. One must use only the egg whites in the frosting, the sides of the cake should be cut to get straight sides, and any frosting that gets cake crumbs in it can’t be used on the cake itself. I’ve worked in a bakery before, and was trained to decorate cakes with some necessary waste, but I knew that wouldn’t go over to well with Mrs. Singh, whose microwave and kitchen I would be using to make the cake. That’s why I used the egg yolks leftover from the frosting to make simple chocolate custard that I would put in between the cake layers. Instead of trimming the layers to make the sides straight, I would just use a slightly thicker layer of icing to make it look flat. And I would just have to be extra careful to get as few crumbs in the frosting as possible.

I must say, when I finally made the cake yesterday, after planning it for at least two weeks, everything went much better than expected. The frosting whipped up well (after a good 45 minutes of beating it by hand), the custard came together, and the microwave cooked the cake layers perfectly. I improvised much of the common decorating equipment, like a turn table and an icing spatula, with stuff that I found around the kitchen. Best of all, the result turned out to be 90% as good as the best cake I’ve ever eaten, at least by my judgment. Sure, it may have been because I haven’t eaten a cake in 3 months, but still, I think the quality of it was right up there with any other that I’ve eaten.

Why should anybody reading this care about me making cake? Well, the way I see it, this cake is a representation of how much I’ve learned so far, and how well I’ve adapted to India. Almost 3 months ago when I arrived, Principal Ramdev asked if I could make American-style pastries and improve upon the recipes here. I told him that without a proper oven, powered mixer, American ingredients, and specialized decorating tools, it would be impossible. Clearly I was wrong. Now I know that I just need to step outside of my comfort zone. From now on, everything will be better.

Because now I have cake!