Onde Onde

The Peranaken community is unique to South East Asia and particularly the Malay archipelago. Chinese or Indian Traders who sailed to the Malacca straits and plied their wares, couldn’t return to their places of origin until the monsoon winds aligned with their destinations. So they would drop anchor literally and figuratively and spend 4 to …

Of Plum Cakes and Kerala!

Did you know why Plum cake and Kerala are synonymous? How did something so British become a Kerala staple? In 1880, a young man named Mr. Mambally Bapu returned from Burma where he’d learned to bake biscuits and set up the Mambally Royal Biscuit Factory in Thalaserry. In 1883, a few days before Christmas, Murdoch …

Will the real Red Velvet Cake take a bow?

It was a long , long time back. Dinosaurs had just about stopped roaming the earth….probably because there was no Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat….  There was however a man called Adams. He had a wife — nah, not Eve. Her name was a more prosaic Betty. Remember them, they will re-enter our story at …

Sugar and Candy

The very word conjures up images of M&Ms and Hershey’s kisses, gumdrops and candy canes, jujubes and gummy bears, peppermint patties, puffy marshmallows, colourful lollipops and all things tooth achingly sweet. But did you know that the word candy comes from Khand or Khandsari — another name for raw sugar? Or that the word Sugar …

Vanilla — a bittersweet tale…

Vanilla is the best loved flavour in the world today. Vanilla infuses cakes, ice creams, cookies, confections, yoghurts, fragrances, bath and body products, candles, rum, vodka, medicines, Coke, Pepsi…..the list is endless.   When you reach for ingredients to bake a cake, inevitably there is vanilla in the list. Never mind the flavour of the cake …

George Clooney and Rainbow Rice-paper Rolls

You may well ask, what does George Clooney have to do with Vietnamese rainbow rice-paper rolls? Does he make them? Or eat them, regularly? Or endorse them? I have no clue….as we haven’t communicated of late :)……but then I haven’t communicated with anyone in almost a month. I’ve been busy, busy, busy. Busy making cakes, …

Kubla Khan

Can a poem haunt one? I’ve not been able to stop thinking (I’m sure you guys are thinking- “Here she goes again! One day it’s pigs, another day, it’s poems!”) of ‘Kubla Khan’ written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Kubla Khan Or a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately …