Baking and Birthday

Another year gone by. A happy year I would say.

So to make the day happier I started with baking some stuff. It had been ages since I baked and I just loved it! After baking three things I wanted to bake some more!! Hahaha...

So I baked a banana-walnut cake, a batch of oatmeal raisin cookies and a chocolate layer cake.

Seeing the awed look in betu's eyes made it all the more worthwhile. And the way Nishka relished both the cake and the raisin was the final stamp of satisfaction for me.

Here are the pics -

I also baked a simple cake and layered it with whipped chocolate cream. The look isn't great as I didn't know how to smoothen the cream.

As it is every year was flooded with emails, SMSes and calls from friends and family. It just overwhelms me. Every year.

Ended the day with a dinner out at DimSum Bros, New Friends Colony. The food there was great and so was the ambiance and the staff.

So like always a day well spent!

Bliss

Bliss is when hubby dear prepares the gajar halwa! And you just sit, eat and relish it! :D

Yes, hubby dear made the first gajar halwa of the season. It was his first time but it wont be the last! As now we have decided that making gajar halwa will be his job. I used to make it the long way...with boiling/cooking the grated carrot in milk. He tried the shortcut way by pressure cooking it for a while and then just adding khoya (condensed milk) and ghee. It was much faster, required less effort and consumed less fuel. And yet tasted so yummy!!

Orange peel

The season of oranges is here and it brings back many memories revolving around oranges as kids.

Remember how we used to squeeze the orange peel in the eyes of our friends taking them by surprise and making them squint because of the prickling sensation?

Remember how we used to make threads from the juice of the orange peels by rotating it around the plastic rulers? It would leave the scale all melted/shrivelled and basically useless. God!!! How many rulers we ruined in this process!! :D

And it also reminds me of an incident from school. I must have been in 7th or 8th standard. And I was eating an orange while waiting for our English teacher to come. The teacher came and I shoved the orange inside my desk. We were then asked to read a story from the book quietly. And I in total absent mindedness started eating the orange again while reading the story totally forgetting that the teacher was in the class.

And as well all know we can smell anyone eating an orange from 20 yards. So obviously teacher smelled the fragrance of orange and started looking for the culprit. And then she saw me chewing and asked me to stand up. It was only then that I realized what I had done. I quickly swallowed the orange inside my mouth seeds et al. When asked about it, I tried to lie that I wasn't eating. I was so damn scared I still remember.

The teacher than asked another student to check my desk and of course that student confirmed seeing an orange there. Thankfully since I was in the good books of the teacher as I was one of the few students who were good in the subject, I got away with just a good shout from her. And boy did I feel glad about it then?

What do you do when...

...you see your child being taught wrong pronunciations by their grandparents? I kept quiet as I thought correcting that time would be taken as embarrassment/humiliation by the grandparents. It was hard to keep quiet. To see wrong and still be quiet.

If the child learns the wrong pronunciation, not only will he speak it wrongly but also write it wrongly.

Confused. Clueless. 

What do you do...

...when it saddens you on the news of the demise of a distant relative? Even when you had just "seen" the person couple of times? When there has been no interaction with this person? When there has been no emotional attachment?

It hurts me to think how a person perfectly fine two days before, gets a fever and the next day we hear of the demise.
It hurts me to think that the person was just 40 years old.
It hurts me to think about his wife.
It hurts me to think about his children with the youngest child just 10 months young.
It hurts me to think how suddenly all this happened, how it has left everyone totally shocked and unprepared for this sudden death in the family.

I'm feeling very low today just thinking about it. And it again makes me realize how uncertain life is. You do not know whats in there for your the next day.