The cake comes by air mail

December 08, 2015 08:10 am | Updated March 24, 2016 02:31 pm IST

Christmas is around the corner again. That means the time to dust grandmother’s recipe books to conjure up some age-old delicacies or, for the uninitiated, to visit the pastry shops looking for traditional Christmas fare. Soon we will find the pages of different newspapers displaying strategically placed and colourful advertisements of cakes and other goodies on offer, making mouths water. The mere thought of those delectable cakes takes me back to my childhood when we waited for the postman to deliver our special yearly Christmas cake.

Yes, our Christmas cake arrived by mail! Even before the age of e-commerce, we had them despatched all the way from the other side of the world. My uncle who lived in Canada would religiously send us the Christmas cake by air mail, year after year. Mind you, this was long before the days of the courier services. Yet, they would reach us just in time for Christmas, or at times after Christmas, in an unpilfered packet. Thankfully, it was never lost in transit, nor was an empty carton received.

The size and look of the parcel would send us all googly eyed. Well, the cake had a Christmassy green carton packing with a lovely picture of the confection on it. I now know its name. The traditional German Christmas cake – the Weihnachtsstollen.

Unwrapping the parcel was a ritual in itself. We grandchildren would crowd eagerly over grandpa, who mostly did the honours. Slowly, or should I say treacherously, he would slit the adhesive tapes and open the carton. Lo and behold! The cake would be sitting pretty, wrapped in cellophane. My grandfather would gently reveal the contents. Everyone will have a sniff at the ‘yummy’ fruity aroma. With icing sugar dusted on the top, the Yule-log shaped cake would look like a freshly cut wooden piece straight from a frozen North American forest. The inside was filled with raisins and had a dark brown thin crust that contrasted well with the pale yellow core.

The number of heads was counted once again just to make sure the cake would be apportioned equally. Rarely used porcelain pastry plates, shaped like cupcake wrappers, complete with the undulation and gold coloured trimmings, were taken out of the shelves. These would be washed, wiped and presented. The cut pieces of cake would be placed on each one of them, ready to be doled out.

The delicious cake knew no waiting. It was savoured and eaten at one go after our eyes accurately measured the size of the pieces in one another’s plates in comparative terms. I always wondered how it seemed much more than the tiny portion on one’s own.

The cake when savoured had a tinge of cinnamon, numerous rum-dipped raisins, a soft texture at the core and velvety icing. It would just melt in your mouth. It surely was a slice of heaven. We would thank our luck when we get a second helping, which though rarely happened.

Often this would be done surreptitiously, on a sleepy afternoon or during a lazy evening. Our craving was satiated with a visit to the dining table. Sitting pretty upon it was the inviting cake-laden ubiquitous stainless steel chapathi-box. Each of us would have a hurried pluck of what was left in it after the ‘official’ first round. Grandpa always commented on how the cake was found ‘gnawed’ every time he came back from his afternoon nap. This was received with silly smiles from the brats.

Later, grandpa would dash off an air mail letter thanking his son for the year’s Christmas cake. The wait for the arrival of the ‘cake by mail’ the next year would have already begun!

The practice wore off as we grew up, and the Christmas cake was no more a novelty in a middle-income Indian household. Yet, the memories of tasting such traditional fare, year after year, remain precious.

anuradha.uthamkumar@gmail.com

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