Yesterday, I invited a friend round for dinner and decided to bake a cake for dessert. Sourcing basic cake ingredients in India is non-trivial; I'd sent our driver Sagar to find plain flour and caster sugar earlier in the week and found some local butter in a nearby shop on Sunday morning. You can buy imported brands including President and Lurpak here, but I can't quite bring myself to pay £4 for a small block of it...Eggs though are two a penny (almost) and I picked up a pineapple to complete my tropical cake theme.
I'd found a recipe for fresh pineapple cake online and everything was going swimmingly; I was even feeling a little bit smug for adding an exotic twist of vanilla and cardamom when poaching the diced pineapple.
Unfortunately, at the key moment, I could not find the flour anywhere. Our maid, Veronica, has a very tidy but often complex and ever-changing filing system in the kitchen, but she was stumped by the location of the flour when I phoned her to check after searching high and low. Defeated, and short of time, we had flambeed pineapple with ice cream for pudding instead.
This morning, Sagar insisted that he'd bought the flour last week and Veronica swore that she'd never seen it. Puzzled, but not wishing to make a big issue out of a such small matter, I simply added flour to this morning's shopping list to make sure that we had some in for future use.
Sagar completed his shopping tasks this morning, phoning me to confirm that he'd bought everything on my slightly eclectic list (mouthwash, melon, flour, new battery for kitchen scales) without difficulty. After a long and busy day at work, I returned home to open the fridge and contemplate how to transform its contents into a tasty meal for one (Phil's still away in the UK).
I took a double take owing to the large white bowl filled with chopped cauliflower in the middle of the fridge. Exactly the same thing had happened last week; I hadn't asked for cauliflower and yet it had been mysteriously added to the shopping tally. Last week, there was such a lot of cauliflower that I was eating cauliflower biriyani for three days and still have more in the freezer! I only managed to polish off the last of it in a stir fry this evening.
After a baffled moment, the penny dropped. Flour....cauliflower...ah! Suddenly it all became clear.
Problem solved, now all I need to do is buy some actual flour and find a decent recipe for cauliflower cake!
I'd found a recipe for fresh pineapple cake online and everything was going swimmingly; I was even feeling a little bit smug for adding an exotic twist of vanilla and cardamom when poaching the diced pineapple.
Unfortunately, at the key moment, I could not find the flour anywhere. Our maid, Veronica, has a very tidy but often complex and ever-changing filing system in the kitchen, but she was stumped by the location of the flour when I phoned her to check after searching high and low. Defeated, and short of time, we had flambeed pineapple with ice cream for pudding instead.
This morning, Sagar insisted that he'd bought the flour last week and Veronica swore that she'd never seen it. Puzzled, but not wishing to make a big issue out of a such small matter, I simply added flour to this morning's shopping list to make sure that we had some in for future use.
Sagar completed his shopping tasks this morning, phoning me to confirm that he'd bought everything on my slightly eclectic list (mouthwash, melon, flour, new battery for kitchen scales) without difficulty. After a long and busy day at work, I returned home to open the fridge and contemplate how to transform its contents into a tasty meal for one (Phil's still away in the UK).
I took a double take owing to the large white bowl filled with chopped cauliflower in the middle of the fridge. Exactly the same thing had happened last week; I hadn't asked for cauliflower and yet it had been mysteriously added to the shopping tally. Last week, there was such a lot of cauliflower that I was eating cauliflower biriyani for three days and still have more in the freezer! I only managed to polish off the last of it in a stir fry this evening.
After a baffled moment, the penny dropped. Flour....cauliflower...ah! Suddenly it all became clear.
A lot of cauli-flour
Problem solved, now all I need to do is buy some actual flour and find a decent recipe for cauliflower cake!
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