It’s a rather warm Sunday morning in bustling Velachery. But the Food Consulate is lined with baking enthusiasts who are busy with various stages of baking plum cakes. While one carefully portions out the ingredients, the other cracks open an egg into a creamy mixture of butter and sugar. Another is wielding a hand blender making the cake batter, while at yet another station a gentleman carefully pours exactly 320 grams of the batter into a mould, ready to send it off for 35 minutes of baking.
We’re at The Hindu Friends of Chennai Bake-a-thon, where a batch of 50 volunteers is busy making batches and batches of plum cake. With four such batches (and 200 volunteers in all) the 12-hour Bake-a-thon that began at 7.30 am, aims to make as many as 400 cakes; all meant to be sent to various charities across the city in the spirit of Christmas.
The event saw celebrities such as Ganesh Venkatraman and VJ Jagan drop by to lend support. Fever FM was the radio partner at the event that was spearheaded by The Hindu in association with Food Consulate.
The event was largely volunteer driven, with readers of the paper enrolling for the bake-a-thon; some first time bakers, others old hands in the kitchen. Take for instance, K Thirunavukarasu and his wife Selvi, who love volunteering at events like this. “Well, I’m usually busy with work most of the week, while my wife is at home. So over the weekends, we both love heading out to such events; we don’t like sitting at home. And this one was for a cause,” says the senior VP at Hitachi, who’s just finished portioning his cake batter into moulds. “We were to make two sets of cake, but it’s been a lot of fun and we are now onto our third set,” he grins.
Each of the volunteers has been given a kit with carefully measured out ingredients — eggs, flour, butter, fruits and nuts, caramel and sugar. “Just enough to make three cakes per kit,” says Chef Jins Paul, head pastry chef at Food Consulate. He and a team of six other chefs are bustling between cooking stations monitoring the volunteers’ progress and doling out helpful tips and advice to ensure the Bake-a-thon ran smoothly. The volunteers were also handed recipe booklets as backup.
The fruits and nuts for the cake had been soaked in a mixture of grape and orange juice a week earlier and the flour spiced with a blend of roasted spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, star anise and white cardamom. “Each batch worked for an average of three hours with each cake taking one- and-a-half hours to bake,” smiles Paul. Some of the charities that the cakes were sent to were Annals Children’s Home, Kaakum Karangal, Little Sisters of the poor, Good Life and Sai Baba Gurukulam.
