Growing up i used to look forward to the months of July and August as these would bring a lot of birthdays and that would mean loads of black forest cake - my family's all time-favorite at that point in time. I used to love black forest cake till one fine year we decided to move on to other kinds of cakes which came along with ever mushrooming, swankier pastry shops. But, there are a few things i am quite particular about when it comes to pastry shops. There's a quaint little pastry shop that used to exist and every stick jaw in the world is compared with that yardstick. Another bakery that has grown with the times still has the best frikkin chocolate éclairs you can get!
I would love venturing into my neighborhood pastry shop to pig out on their hot-dogs (that had a mutton seekh kebab instead of a sausage!), their lovely mini-pizzas and their chocolate truffle which the lady would microwave just a little so it would be like a chocolate volcano going off in your mouth. Also it was pure bliss watching the pretty lady pipe her cakes while i gorged on her lovely lemon tarts. I was in pastry heaven and i had the fat to prove it!
Zoom through to a few years later. One particular Saturday probably in March of 2000, we were yet again in the bakery at college but this time it was our final exam in bakery. We had to make breakfast rolls (the figure of eight - which incidentally is the only thing i ever learnt in bakery), muffins (with a little help from my friends) and a mousse or something like that. Now this last preparation needed something that is known as a sabayon. This sabayon thing is a mixture of egg yolks that are cooked slowly on fire (but not warmer than body temperature!!)so as to not get it grainy (Source: Google zindabad!). Insanity!
Anyway while everybody was leaving i was trying to make my sabayon for the 5th or 6th time. In the end my bakery chef just gave up. She not only made the sabayon she also helped me finish the mousse. She then gave me a passing grade folded her hands and said thank you for never coming back now!
Cut back a few months when i had just joined the insti. On the first or second day i was crossing the bakery, which by the way happens to be the first classroom as you enter the building, and 'cause it was empty i opened the door to step in. I was nauseated! I had never smelt something that awful. A few weeks and a couple of bakery classes later i figured out what that odor was. Lingering, stale fumes of yeast, odors of raw eggs, the smell from the ovens, awful remains of vanilla essence and the ever present sugar made for the most awful air that stuck to your chef coat for days. I could handle the curries and cream but this was a whole new planet. And the way i see it now, we as a group (batch a and b) were paying for some past sins. 'Cause not only was the bakery nauseating and hot, we were scheduled for bakery classes on Saturday afternoons while the rest of college was out having a good time and you could see all of this while you were in there suffering and literally sweating your blood out in the heat. My dislike for something or someone has never even come close to the pure hatred i had for bakery!
For a couple of years after college it was still quite difficult for me to enter a pastry shop 'cause i would fear that those awful odors would come back to haunt me. I still don't particularly like going to pastry shops, but it has become better. I will always love the wonderful treats a bakery can produce and if wasn't for the single thought that how can something that tastes like magic in your mouth smell so bad while in production, i wont really consciously walk into a bakery!
