The making of the waffle goddess

Reflections

Oh my god, your waffles are so good. You should be called Waffle Woman,” a friend told me on the phone. I frowned. Please.

“Call me the waffle goddess,” I told her smugly. Of course, I didn’t add that the recipe I used for waffles actually came from my mother’s waffle-maker recipe booklet, a revered Braun machine that has been in my house for nearly three decades now.

Not so long ago, well actually, quite long ago, forget waffles, I couldn’t bake a cake without breaking several knives and molars (of those who tried to eat the cakes). Whenever I’d announce that I was baking a cake, my brother would hunt for the hammer and keep it handy while my mother would roll her eyes at the expensive ingredients I would then proceed to waste.

The thing is, I didn’t have the internet to help me out. I didn’t know then that a double boiler was not ‘double’ the size of a regular pan, or that excess baking powder is as bad as exceedingly less. Worse was, I didn’t know that the oven we had at home, a microwave, was not the best oven for baking cakes.

In my naivete, I assumed that I had to just follow the instructions in the recipe and I would bake a cake in it for the same amount of time that one would bake in a convection oven. It was only years later that I learnt that cakes can be made in a microwave; they don’t brown on top; and it takes only seven minutes.

Now, of course, with the internet and also a bit of common sense, there are so many ways in which you can salvage your disasters. When my cake didn’t come out from the pan, I discovered that the cake could be crumbled and mixed with frosting and dipped in chocolate to make amazing cake pops. When the meringue for my pavlova didn’t rise as expected, I broke it into pieces and arranged it in layers in a pretty glass, and called it a ‘deconstructed pavlova’. However, I don’t think there’s anything on the internet to save a cake that has been baked way too long and can’t even be cracked, forget crumbled.

With all that solid experience behind me, today I bake cakes and cookies, and my brownies are to die for. It took me a lot of persistence and the guinea-pig-like patience of my family to get it right. My kids don’t know what it’s like to try and bite into a rock- hard cake, and they think I was born baking their awesome birthday cakes (with icing, mind you).

Baking is also my favourite go-to activity whenever I feel bored writing my books. Something about beating that butter with sugar is calming, and while I crack open an egg, I find myself replaying a crucial dialogue between my characters. Folding in flour gently reverberates in my head with a conflict that my characters are facing.

For some reason, when the characters take residence in my head, I find that thinking about them when I’m cooking or baking, helps a lot in their eventual growth. This is not an excuse for baking more than I should, but it’s my reason for baking, and I’m sticking with it.

When we were kids, whenever my mother baked or made waffles, it became a special occasion because of the fact that she took time out of her routine to do it. My routine involves sitting down before my laptop and pouring out the lives of my characters onto the screen;  so taking time off from that to bake is fun. But it’s also something that my kids take for granted. Whenever I make waffles for breakfast, in my head, I think, ‘Wow, I’m so cool. I make waffles for breakfast!’ I turn to the kids and the brats want to know why I haven’t filled each little square with Nutella.