Turn on the heat this summer...

It’s summer. And who doesn’t have time to romp around in the kitchen, whipping up fantasies about temperamental macaroons, or an espresso chocolate chip pound cake? Maybe it’s a bread pudding that floats your boat or the smoothest  Sundae this side of the monsoon? Maybe it is the idea of lining up those spotless white ramekins, surrounding yourself with the intoxicating whiff of vanilla beans, citrus-spiked tangerines, ripe and luscious berries, crisp pastry, fluffy white cream, and the seductive aroma of baking?

What does it take to turn out a cutting-edge crème brûlée or that pin-up cheesecake? You could start with a copy of Baking with Julia (yes, Julia Child). But would that make you a masterful baker? As they say, it would be a white lie, big enough to ice a wedding cake, if we said “Yes”. Of course, recipes and technique and skill and ingredients are everything, but we have it from four amazing bakers that the real route to baking bliss is passion and creativity, experimenting and risk-taking. And fear not, for we have four people to guide us through their favourite desserts. We don’t look up to them for their recipes – but instead, as bakers who inspire us through their academic, experimental, dramatic and classic approaches to great desserts. Between them, they make everything look like a cake walk. And best of all, each one of them insists they bake to destress. Feel like baking away your blues? This way:

Academia meets contemporary chic

Manish Gaur, Co-Founder,
The Institute of Baking and Cake Art

Manish’s credentials can be intimidating. He once taught baking at The Institute of Hotel Management and Catering and then went on to start The Institute of Baking and Cake Art. In many ways, his is the academic approach to baking. Everything is carefully measured, the temperatures must be just right and the chemistry of the ingredients must be understood. For Manish, however, creativity must attempt to fuse the traditional with the modern. So, when a couple from the United States recently came to India for their wedding and asked Manish to bake them a wedding cake, he just couldn’t resist trying out an astonishingly traditional but completely unexpected cake: a 26-kilo, 5-tier cake, with traditional mehendi designs using chocolate.

“While conceptualising the cake we kept in mind the melange of Indian traditions coupled with modern creativity, the colour concept, taste and the uniqueness of what we could offer the couple. We chose the soothing colour of turquoise and the vibrancy of  orange with special intricate mehendi designs made from chocolate piping,” says Manish. Not surprisingly, guests at the wedding were stunned, says Manish. Although Manish teaches baking and cake art, nothing is sacred and sacrosanct in his kitchen. His best moments are when he throws his classical learning to the wind and experiments to unwind.

Manish’s Top Tip: While producing great ideas on cakes and desserts, remember to keep the colour combinations vibrant. Technical knowledge regarding the process, technique and texture will help in enhancing your creativity to the optium.

For the Mehendi Art with Lilies on Chocolate Cake: Take a rich chocolate cake layered with ganache cream with fondant dough covering and royal icing dotted border. Achieve the mehendi decoration by piping dark chocolate filled in butterpaper bags. Orange gumpaste dough is used to create wired sugar lilies.

The high-jinx
drama queen

Vandana Narula, Baker-by-accident,
The Fat Chef

Vandana is responsible for the large array of desserts that greet you as you enter The Fat Chef, a restaurant thrown open recently behind Whitefield’s spanking new Jagriti Theatre.

Vandana spent 16 years catering to corporates, turning out 25,000 meals a day with a partner before starting her own catering business in 2006 with her husband. They did 15,000 meals a day and finally were bought out by a European firm. That left her to romanticise about her own restaurant.

In early 2011, she, along with her husband and a partner, launched The Fat Chef. “I always wanted to see my own dessert shop with a purple neon sign saying ‘Purple Passion’ but never got around to it,” she says. “I wanted to do orange chiffon pies, Mississippi mud pies, and bring all those pictures you see in dessert books come alive.”
Then she found the perfect opportunity: of starting a restaurant at a theatre. How much more dramatic could things get?

Vandana believes that you can’t follow a recipe book all the time; you need to combine your intuition and your imagination with the ingredients. “It’s a stress buster and it brings me great joy to try new things,” she says. When she steps out of the kitchen, her entire crew waits with bated breath to see what she has turned out. Will it be a New York Cheesecake with a twist? Or a Walnut Chocolate pie with a dramatic new spin?
Her favourite is a Japanese cheesecake – a light, cloudy interpretation of eggwhite, slow cooked on a steam bath placed within an oven.

Vandana’s Top Tip: Go wild. Use your imagination. Step into the kitchen, bake, whip and kick up a storm. When you finish, your joy should reflect itself in the dessert.

For her special Japanese Cheesecake: Put cream cheese (preferably Philadelphia cream cheese), butter and egg yolk together. In a separate bowl mix flour (maida) and cornflour. Mix the two. Then take whisked egg white and cream of tarter and fold into the batter. Bake on water bath. Garnish with caramel sauce. Decorate with a purple orchid to add a touch of drama. Make sure it is an edible orchid.

The wickedly experimental baker

Tina Jadav, Owner, Oventreat’s

Tina Jadav loved to bake and would often turn out strange and unusual cakes for her husband. She had no clue that one day she’d want to have a bakery and confectionery of her own.

But it happened in a strange way: Tina decided to do a course in baking, then began to teach cake and pasty decoration and ultimately could not hold herself back from opening her own outlet in Bangalore’s Banaswadi. She called it Oventreat’s. And that’s exactly what it is: a sensuous mix of fresh pizzas, brownies, cakes, pastries, chocolates, cookies, desserts, breads and rolls. “But I do it because it relaxes me. I love to experiment,” says Tina.

Of course, her favourites continue to be wickedly delicious strawberries and marshmallows covered in chocolate – things that don’t require too much preparation or time. But now that she has a complete bakery to herself, she can’t stop herself from experimenting.

Restless and in overdrive, Tina spends her time trying to combine cheesecakes with souffle, pastries with biscuits, cakes with breads and meringues with pies. “Anything goes,” says Tina, who one day found some leftover mud pie base in the kitchen and whimsically decided to turn it into a new dessert which she calls Chocolate Raspberry Meringue Pie. It’s baked thrice and defies description. But end result?

Tina’s Top Tip: Keep all kinds of ingredients handy. Who knows, you may want to replace half the shortening in your cake with applesauce or plain dahi. Go for it – you’ll get a different texture and a completely different taste. Experiment – it’s a joy to stumble upon the new.

For her special Chocolate Raspberry Meringue Pie: Make short crust pastry with a chocolate flavour. Make lemon curd in the traditional way, except replace the lemon with a raspberry puree. Pour into pie and bake. Then top it off with a meringue and bake again.

Sweetly classic, determinedly traditional

Mariannick Halai, Owner-Baker,
Chez Mariannick

She just makes the fresh, healthy and simple food she had in her mum’s kitchen, says Mariannick Halai who is from a village called Valence in Brittany in the north-west of France. Now, she is in Bangalore with her husband Shashi. Two years ago, they decided to do what they know best: bake. So Shashi built his wife a wood-fired oven in a farm in Whitefield and they began baking breads for people in the neighbourhood. One thing led to another and soon they had their own modest creperie-boulangerie (a sort of restaurant if you will) called Chez Mariannick that does salads, bread, crepes and galettes and – guess what? – desserts from the heart of France. “It’s what I learnt and what I grew up with. I am authentic French and so is the food I cook. I am just giving back what I was given,” says Mariannick, who spent months sourcing the right local ingredients and tweaking her recipes just that bit even as she stuck to the classic, traditional French style of baking.

When you go to Chez Mariannick, you’ll find her behind the gridle, turning out the dangerously addictive crepes. She does it for hours with an ease that is difficult to understand. And that’s because she is completely relaxed while in the kitchen, perhaps going back to her childhood in France.

“I’ve had the most wonderful crème brûlée in France – it was to die for – and that’s what I like to bake,” says Mariannick. “There are a million different ways to make a crème brûlée. But the one I remember had an aura about it.”

Mariannick’s Top Tip: Do what you know best. Keep things simple, don’t try and do things you are not familiar with.

Crème brûlée

A classic crème brûlée is cream, egg yolk and sugar. Put them together and bake. But very often it just turns into scrambled eggs. There is a very thin line between scrambled eggs and crème brûlée – I wish I knew what the secret was, but I don’t. However, the trick is to bake it long and at very low temperatures. Yes, just stick to the simple rules.