The Blonde Mistake!

Yesterday was one of those days when I woke up and realized that I had an entire weekend stretched in front of me. Determined to make it productive, I decided to bake Lemon Blondies. Everyone who knows me well is very well aware of my culinary skills or the lack of it. In the last 20 months of marriage, I have fed Abhishek some very disastrous food, initially he would gulp down everything saying ‘You made it with so much love. I can’t let your efforts go waste’. Sometimes he would blatantly lie and say ‘this is the yummiest Khichdi ever! How did you ever manage to mash those vegetables and make it so soft?’ And I would, with a sullen pout tell him that it’s not khichdi, it’s Vegetable Pulao.

Over time, however,  he’s stopped encouraging me to cook and has started coming up with the most random lines like, ‘Arre. Look at you, you look soo tired and unwell. Why don’t you just relax’. This, after I’d have woken up fresh after a good 8 hours of sleep all night. The good thing (or bad, especially for others) is that I don’t stop trying. I have not given up on myself yet and I keep attempting to make something close to edible every now and then.

So, yesterday was the day I told myself, ‘Ok. I might be bad at cooking but I could try to bake! Because, baking is not the same as cooking. Baking is a lot easier, right?’

So I quickly booted up my laptop and opened the food blog that one of my friends had suggested. ‘You can’t go wrong with it. It’s very easy!’, she’d said.

The recipe did look quite simple. Just throw in some eggs, flour, sugar, lime juice, LOTS of BUTTER together and put it in the oven and voila!, within minutes you would get spongy, yummy and moist Lemon Blondies. Yes! That easy!

Abhishek kept offering to help me with the cake and I had to keep pushing him out. ‘I will beat the eggs, I will mix the flour’, he kept insisting in spite of my strong protests. After a couple of minutes, he reappeared in the kitchen and announced that he would let me make the batter if I would let him bake the cake in our microwave oven. That’s when I realised what this was all about. Abhishek is crazy about gadgets and loves experimenting with them all the time. He had been wanting to check if the oven in our microwave actually worked for a long time but had never gotten around to do it. And here was his golden opportunity. But I wasn’t going to let him experiment with my cake. I had already borrowed the gas oven from my mom and was just going to follow her instructions to avoid taking any risk.

After a squabble, we decided to bake 50% of the cake on the gas and 50% of the cake in the microwave. But I cheated and gave him only two spoons of batter to bake in the convection microwave. I knew it was going to be a major fail.

We waited for 20 mins for our respective cakes to bake. Gucci sat close to me, while Skye stood near Abhishek. It seemed like they were taking sides. The devoted Gucci was on my side and the traitor Skye was on Abhishek’s.

The sweet, bakery-like aroma wafted from the kitchen. The smell that indicated that everything was alright with our cakes. However, after a while we got a burnt smell. We quickly jumped and ran towards the kitchen. We first opened the gas oven. My cake was overcooked (fine, it was burnt) from the outside and under-cooked(okay, it was pure batter, happy?) from the inside.

A Big BLOND-er!

We had a horror-stricken expression on our faces as we looked at it. We then opened the microwave oven to check how Abhishek’s cake had turned out and to my utter surprise, his cake had a beautiful golden brown color on the top and the rest of the cake had a nice lemony, yellow color.

Exactly the way it was supposed to look.

There was a moment’s silence and then Abhishek, in his trademark style, held his belly with one hand and burst out laughing pointing at me with the other.

If you are wondering why there is no picture of Abhishek’s tiny, little, shockingly-well-turned-out cake, it’s because it was smacked clean by our pug, Gucci before we could even take a picture of it. We got to eat only the crumbs and I could tell that it tasted quite good. Although Abhishek thought otherwise. “It’s too tangy for my taste”, he said. Of course, it will be tangy, Captain Obvious; it is a Lemon Blondie after all!

So here was how my Saturday morning was. To get over it, we had a good fish-lunch at Carnival De Goa, and my darling fake-vegetarian husband ate more fish there than he had had in his entire lifetime. And he loved it. Amen.

P.S. If you want to try baking Lemon Blondies or any other Desserts, do check this blog out: http://www.thedessertedgirl.com/ and share your experience.