Its been quite some time since I last sat and scribbled something new…. Guess the weather is taking its toll on me….From the never stopping, ongoing, pulsating, vibrating, and exciting, not to forget hot and humid Karachi to the spine-chilling, cold, gloomy, quiet Toronto-the difference speaks for itself….Just sometimes one has to decide, based on not what the heart says (Yes in my case its sometimes) but what the mind says or better yet what someone, who is a piece of your heart, wants….for no rhyme or reason of your own!
Here I am braving the temperatures, way below the freezing mark, waiting just to be back….. And before I start again on Karachi, or some tweet distracts me or my phone rings, let me just stick to what I planned….
I had never been a baking person…Never loved baked goodies, never felt like doing it myself…. And then I met this woman….who was high on baking…She WAS a friend…Mind the WAS! She would bring me amazing baked stuff, and would talk about baking all the time. She always wanted to join these cake decorating classes that another friend of hers had gone to, and she was all ga-ga about it.
Then one day she called and asked me to join the class with her. Infact she told me that I have to. Being the kind of friends we were and just to try it out, I enrolled for the class, shopped enthusiastically for the basics. Found out just days before the first session that she had to leave for UK because of some emergency. Without much of a choice, I attended the first session, only to fall endlessly in love with this new form of art, so much so that even after two years, I am still looking for new classes, new designs and an opportunity to learn!
I remember the first time I baked a cake, it was over-baked, and hard and lacked this thing called “taste”. Same goes for the first cake that I iced and well “decorated”…. Duhhhhhh!!! Horribly sweet icing, unrecognizable pattern though I used a stencil to copy it and most of all-even I couldn’t tell if it was a circle or an oval shaped cake.
Well I got better at decorating out of my pure interest- And now I had this new issue: I was a soon-to-be pro at decorating but horrible at baking!
This time around though, I could not go to any school because of time and commitment issues. So I thought of giving it a try at home. And as Aristotle said “For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”
So I just practiced, not skipping a single opportunity to bake, treating everyone around with my baked goodies on birthdays, holidays, Eid, Christmas parties, Easter, and what not, even without being asked for it.
Well, it worked. It worked a great deal to help sharpen and improve my skills. And two years later, I bake, and I get paid, and I get paid fairly good. Good because I can buy new decorating stuff, try new moulds, indulge in expensive brands for ingredients and so on… I bought a pantry exclusively for my caking stuff, but now one entire room is already spilling and I need more space…My teacher always says “When you become a cake decorator, you become a hoarder.” And I guess rightly so. 5 to 6 different tools to make one single petal of a flower. Visualize for a minute those multi-tiered cakes and fancy cupcakes and then imagine the tools and material required for each.
Baking and decorating for me is now more of a passion. When I am busy, am all drowned in flour, tinted in colors and I work straight 16 to 20 hours, sometimes even more. But end of the day, its the result, that custom designed cake, that gives me the sense of owner ship of each master-piece. Makes me high-it does!
