A Six Coloured Rainbow.
It’s the 20th of June and I am baking. Well, that isn’t the whole truth. It’s the 20th of June, I had decided I was going to bake a cake, but I am currently sitting on the kitchen platform with a bottle of vanilla essence in my hand. It is my neighbour’s birthday tomorrow. I have not seen her in over sixty days as we are diligently observing the lockdown. She likes rainbow cakes so I decided to bake one for her. However, it is now four o’clock but I cannot stop smelling this vanilla essence which is triggering my olfactory nerves in the most pleasant way possible.
It is now fifteen minutes past four and there is no way I can postpone any longer if I want to have a six layered cake up by twelve o’clock. There was no way I could find both violet and indigo food dyes, so I have settled for a midway colour and named it Iris because purple is too mainstream. My cake is called ‘the incomplete rainbow’ in my head and that agonizes me a little. I have failed to romanticise incompleteness. I disagree with the poets. My Physics journal from tenth grade is a physical witness. I pacify myself by thinking of how Goethe’s colour wheel had six colours too. He has definitely thought about colours more than I have.
250 grams flour. 1 and a quarter teaspoons of baking powder. Half a teaspoon of baking soda. A quarter teaspoon of salt. Sieve. I hate the recipes that say add ‘a pinch of salt’, it is too ambiguous. I love how meticulous baking is. Follow the instructions, and there is little margin for error. My current batter will help make three layers. I add butter and sugar to a separate bowl. Apparently, softening the butter before beating it is rather important. I don’t bother finding out why. Mix until ‘fluffy’ and ‘pale’, the recipe said. Fluffy like clouds? Mine looks like a buoyant grainy mixture, I panic and scramble for my phone to check the consistency of her batter in the video. Hers looks like that too. I make a mental note. Mix until ‘fluffy’, ‘pale’ and ‘grainy’.
I think about the day I first learned that clouds are not static but they move. I sat on the window for a full fifteen minutes, determined to prove this statement false. I couldn’t. Turns out they are not actually static.
I am now supposed to add a teaspoon of vanilla extract. I add one and a half of it. You don’t always have to follow instructions. Be a rebel I tell myself, add an extra half teaspoon of pure liquid sunshine. Adding curd to the mixture, I started using the hand mixer again. It makes an unpleasant sound with a jarring note as it repeatedly clashes with the Borosil bowl. This sound is the subdued version of drilling into a wall. It’s chaotic. I like it. A significantly amplified version of this is what Dominique must have felt when she first saw Roark at the quarry. Ayn Rand’s spicy opinions are highly inconvenient sometimes.
I add the dry sifted ingredients to this mix of butter, sugar, curd and vanilla essence. I add milk too. After whisking it till it reaches ‘a desired consistency’, I separate it into three separate bowls. I pick up the yellow food dye to the first bowl, the batter seems to come to life with the soft, exciting character of this hue. A perceptible change. The lifeless, dutch white coloured batter is reversed to a beautiful impression of fire and gold. I am happy already. I rush to call my mom. She was pleasantly surprised when she discovered my affection for baking. Quarantine makes you do things, I told her. I post a story on instagram, people need to be updated. To the second bowl, I add the red food dye. I have to add a couple of extra drops because it looks more pink than red. I wanted it to be a strong carmine. I empty these two in separate parchment parchment paper lined and greased six inch cake tins and shove them into the preheated oven of 170 degree celsius for twenty minutes.
I add orange food dye to the last bowl, the colour reminds me of the sunset I saw yesterday. Every other evening, my parents and I sit at the window and watch the Sun tumble somewhere into the horizon, somersaulting away from us after showcasing a flurry of hues that range from pink that reminds me of boomer, the chewing gum, to the almost fluorescent orange of my cake batter while bathing itself in the omnipresent cerulean of the dusk. Were sunsets always this pretty? Moments like this, I am almost glad for quarantine. It is my constant lockdown mood:high comfort, bursts of productivity and constantly waiting for the dusky-golden hour.
In the twenty minutes that I have, I repeat the same exercise. Mix. Sieve. Beat until ‘fluffy’, ‘pale’ and ‘grainy’. Add vanilla essence. Mix. Whisk. Separate into three. Drops of Jupiter by Train is playing in the background and it makes me sigh. “But tell me, did you sail across the Sun? Did you make it to the Milky Way to see the lights all faded? And that heaven is overrated?” Literally poetry. Seventeen minutes have passed, the smell of vanilla is now wafting through the house, it is like a hug. A gentle envelope of comfort. If I hear carefully, I can almost hear my heart singing, I feel that happy.
So, three separate bowls.I add blue to the first bowl. This indescribable hue has a powerful effect it brings along with it as i slowly incorporate it into the batter. It somehow always associates itself with a degree of darkness. The oven trings. Twenty minutes are up. I check whether or not they are cooked through by the knife-insert technique. It comes out clean. I start jumping. Emptying them into two, separate plates; I take a step back and admire the way the colour has developed, the way they have risen. I scream-call my dad, who is as happy as I am upon seeing them, if not more.
I now put the orange batter in one cake tin and blow batter into another and in they go for another twenty minutes. During those twenty minutes, I dye the batter of one bowl into an exciting purple colour that i refuse to call anything but Iris. I also add green food dye to the remaining batter in the last bowl. Within the next forty minutes, all of my six layers are ready. I lay them out nicely and take a picture which I put up as a story on Instagram. People need to be updated.
There are things about social media that I have learnt from this quarantine, people are quick to start pointing fingers and scream “monster”. Nobody is willing to do the less thrilling, more-urgent work of dismantling structures and questioning systems that have created the pattern of rewarding such monstrous behaviour. Upon introspection, I have found out that three times out of ten, I take the effort to read up and educate myself. However, the other seven times I am a victim and a perpetrator of this belief system.
It is now ten o’clock. I start preparing a buttercream frosting. I beat the butter with the hand mixer for a good five minutes. Did you know that butter changes colour and becomes pale-er the more you beat it? I checked, it does. I add little icing sugar slowly in small increments. I then add a teaspoon of milk and a teaspoon of vanilla essence. I stuck to the recipe here. You cannot rebel everytime. I empty it into a piping bag. I boil sugar and syrup in a hurry and by thirty minutes past ten, I am ready for assembly.
I arrange all of my six layers, sugar syrup and frosting neatly on the platform. I remove my offset spatulas and cake decorating rotating table. I put a golden coated, six inch cake base in the middle and I neatly arrange the layers on top of it. Cake layer, sugar syrup, frosting, repeat. I do this with all the six layers. Iris. Blue. Green. Yellow. Orange. Red. I apply the crumb coat and refrigerate it for half an hour. At 11:30 I start applying the frosting uniformly. I then try to even it out with an offset spatula. This is difficult, I say to myself. I am covered in frosting, I have run out of frosting and I look nowhere as cool, clean, confident and collected as the people in the hundred youtube videos I had seen. My frosting is messy and does not have any clean edges and that makes me upset. However, it is now ten minutes to twelve. I decorate it with white chocolate shards that have little pops of colour in them. I am exhausted.
At twelve, I am at her doorstep with a mask covering my mouth. I give her the cake. Happy Birthday, I scream through my mask. I tell her about the messy frosting. Being confessional is like a defence mechanism for me. If I can tell you about the flaw before you see the flaw, maybe it’ll be alright to have committed that flaw. She takes the cake after ridiculing my comments about the shitty frosting. I come back home and video call her, she cuts the cake on call and screeches when she sees all of the six layers of the cake. I know ideally I should not even have given her the cake, but I hear her manic scream through the phone screen and I forget about that part for a minute. The rainbow is incomplete and it looks perfect.
