Class is over for the day but the smell of freshly-baked bread and crispy puff patties hot off the oven lingers as you walk into the Inner Wheel Home Science Academy in Vellayambalam. Inside, self-styled ‘baking technologist’ and veteran baking tutor K. Sivaprakasam is hard at work preparing for the next day’s class. He is making an “industrial” cake. “For industrial cakes you substitute butter with cake gel, an emulsifier. It gives the cake increased volume and a good texture, which makes it more cost-effective for industrial production. A lot of people who attend my baking workshops come with the intention of starting bakeries and cafés and this one of the tricks of the trade,” says Sivaprakasam, as he painstakingly whisks sugar, eggs, cake gel, flour and oil until the batter attains the right consistency. In no time at all he’s pouring the mixture into a lined tray and transfers it to the oven. “It should be ready in 40 minutes. Baking, as you can see, is a fairly simple process, once you get the hang of it. It just takes practise and a whole lot of trial and error,” he adds.
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Sivaprakasam, founder of the Chennai-based Institute of Baking Technology, is here at the invitation of Inner Wheel Club of Trivandrum, to conduct his signature, five-day training course in bakery and confectionery. “Baking workshops must be more of hands on training than a mere demonstration, for baking is a very tactile process. I always make the participants help me with the baking; only then will they get a real understanding – the right moment to stop kneading the dough or whisking the batter, how to mould the dough and things like that. It also helps the participants overcome inhibitions,” says Sivaprakasam, one of the early graduates of Institute of Hotel Management, Chennai. He says he got the calling quite late. “I was 23 or so when I started baking. I had completed B.Com and joined IHM only to further my job prospects! But I quickly realised I have a flair for baking,” explains the septuagenarian.
He has been teaching baking for 40 years now at several colleges in Tamil Nadu and Bhubaneswar too, before starting out on his own. “Over the years my oven, my baking tools and I have travelled all over the country to conduct workshops, particularly in Kerala. In fact, for 11 years straight, my equipment never left Kerala as I kept getting offers to conduct one workshop after another, from Thiruvananthapuram to Kannur and everywhere in between! A lot of people here seem to enjoy baking, more so nowadays, because ingredients are readily available,” he reasons.
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This time around he’s teaching 21 mouth-watering items as varied as Shrewsbury biscuits and hot cross buns, Danish pastry, Christmas cake, jam tarts, pineapple pudding, swiss rolls, whole wheat bread... and even pizzas. “The most requests are actually for my pizza recipe. Each recipe has been specifically chosen to cover different aspects of baking, which might help participants if they want to go commercial with their baking skills,” explains Sivaprakasam, adding that his “baking Bible” is Thangam Philip’s seminal Modern Cookery Vols. 1 and 2. “I experimented with her recipes and made them my own,” he says, just as the oven pings. Cake time!