A Slice of India!

From the bakeries of Allahabad and Puducherry to homes in Mumbai and Goa, cakes made with typically Indian ingredients like ghee and petha can be found jostling for space along with the more ubiquitous varieties, making for interesting confectionary chimeras.  

  

By Raul Dias

Incredible as it may be to believe, but until I was around 10, I thought that ghee was the only shortening agent employed in baking a cake! It was only when I began to get ensnared in the vice-like grip of a multitude of cookery shows—thanks to the satellite television invasion of the early 90s—did I discover butter as being the de facto, world’s favourite cake fat. All this, much to the chagrin of my Anglo-Indian grandmother who resolutely refused to make the switch, insisting that her spiced fruit cake could only be made with lashings of shudh desi ghee.
Thanks to the forced WWII frugality thrust upon her in the form of grocery rationing, as a young homemaker, she came up with several recipes substituting the expensive and tough-to-procure butter with the easy-to-prepare homemade clarified butter. Recipes, along with a larder of rather strange ingredients, that would remain intrinsic parts of her baking repertoire, forever.     
Speaking of strange, long before it became fashionable to add a bit of puréed pumpkin (and grated zucchini, too!) to impart a rich, moistly dense crumb to a fruit cake, my Nan would chop up bits of her favourite sweet—Agra ka petha, or sugar candy pumpkin—in lieu of the more ‘kosher’ candied peel and tutti-frutti. Along with ghee and a sprinkling of spices like sonth (dried ginger powder) and javitri (mace), she’d lovingly make her legendary fruit cake that both my mum and I have tried to replicate rather unsuccessfully over the years since Nan’s passing. 
But on a recent trip to Allahabad, I came across a version of a spiced rich fruit cake that could easily step in as a worthy doppelganger to the one I’ll sadly never savour again. Once a stronghold of thousands of Anglo-Indian ‘railway’ families, Allahabad today has barely a dozen or so left. But what they’ve left behind is an edible legacy of sorts in the form of the Allahabad Cake, which is what I discovered at Bushy’s on Kanpur Road. This modest, 54-year-old little bakery still makes a scrumptious, Indianised version of a traditional fruit cake using nutmeg, saunf (fennel seeds), cinnamon, caraway seeds, ghee and a marmalade that the person at the counter told me is sourced from Loknath ki Galli—Allahabad’s foodie haven.
The mava cupcake is another Indianised cake treat most of us grew up eating here in India. Dried whole milk or mava is the chief ingredient of the moist, eggless cake that’s flecked with cardamom seeds that go pop in the mouth when bitten into! This classic tea time delicacy has been made famous by the Irani and Parsi bakeries of Mumbai and Pune—particularly Merwan’s that has several branches in both cities and by Mumbai’s iconic Sassanian bakery at Marine Lines.
Made with copious quantities of salted butter, eggs, semolina and the main star ingredient—desiccated coconut powder—the bhaat cake is Goa’s pride and joy (see recipe). A vestige of Goa’s Portuguese colonialists, this dense, intensely coconut-y calorific treat has its underpinnings in Middle Eastern confectionary, given its remarkable similarity to the basbousa semolina-orange blossom water cake of Egypt, that is understandably bereft of the very coastal Indian ingredient—the coconut.
Another close colonial cousin of bhaat is the East Indian thali sweet that uses an additional ingredient in the form of almonds ground in rose water. And alluding to its name, this festive treat is both baked and served in an inch-high steel thali. Once ready, diamond shaped slices are cut and eaten more like an Indian mithai than a cake.
On a year-long work assignment in Chennai a few years ago, my weekends were mostly spent driving down to Puducherry, both, for bar essentials restocking, and to partake in the wonder that is the vivikum cake. Also known as the Pondicherry cake, this more-ish treat is prepared by Puducherry’s Franco-Indian Christians for Christmas, though one can find it all year round at bakeries such as La Boulangerie and Baker Street. Made with ghee (there we go again!), eggs, semolina, nuts, brandy-macerated raisins and zesty lemon peel, the alcohol in the cake helps lengthen the vivikum cake’s shelf life. Not that longevity matters in this cake… err, case!

Bhaat Cake Recipe

Ingredients
500 gm granulated sugar
250 gm salted butter
250 gm semolina
250 gm desiccated coconut powder
1 tbsp rose essence
1 tsp baking powder
6 whole eggs
200 ml water (room temperature)
25 ml water (heated)

Procedure
* Put 200 ml water and sugar in a thick bottom pan and allow to melt over a medium flame.
* When melted, add butter and allow to combine.
* Now add desiccated coconut powder and semolina and cook for five minutes. Allow to cool to room temperature in pan itself.  
* Add baking powder to heated water and pour into the cooled batter.
* Add rose essence to batter and keep aside.
* Beat the six whole eggs till frothy and add to batter combining well.
* Line a 1kg-bearing cake tin with butter paper and bake in a pre-heated oven for 45 minutes at 180˚C.
* When cooled cut and serve on its own. 
 

--Recipe courtesy Ann Dias

(An edited version of this article first appeared in the 5th February 2017 issue of The Hindu newspaper, India http://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/food/Cake%E2%80%99s-colonial-cousins/article17193172.ece)