Ever heard the saying “birthdays are nature’s way of feeding us cake”? How true, right? And when it comes to cakes, chocolate cake is the ‘king of cakes’! That is exactly why we were all very excited to join the morning 8.15 am session on Friday, the 6th of August. It wasn’t a usual class- we had an expert session hosted by Ms. Violet Christina, an FSSIA certified home baker. The session was on ‘how to bake a chocolate cake’. By 8:20 am all the students of grades five and six joined the meeting. We were informed about the ingredients in advance, such that we could be all set to bake.
After a brief introduction, Ms. Violet started the demonstration. She took a bowl and added an egg, followed by 80ml of oil and some buttermilk, and whisked it lightly. After that, some sugar, 125g of maida, and lukewarm water were added. She then explained the importance of adding the wet ingredients first, followed by the dry ingredients. Ms. Violet said coffee powder can give a really good taste and flavor to chocolate cake. That is interesting, I thought. I drink coffee every morning and have eaten chocolate cake a good number of times, but have never thought about adding the coffee powder to chocolate cake! She then gave all the ingredients a good whisk. It would take far too long for her to demonstrate the baking part since our session was limited to an hour. Hence she explained to us, the temperature and duration for preheating the oven and the time required for baking. We listened carefully and took notes as we did not have all the ingredients ready. Some of us who could get the ingredients ready, baked along with Ms. Violet.
It was an entertaining and interactive session and many of us had questions like, “ How many grams of sugar should I add?”, “Should I put the buttermilk before or after the maida?” etc. We dropped our questions in the chat and Ms. Violet answered all of them. The session also helped us learn the correct measurements and techniques of baking a moist and delicious chocolate cake. It was indeed a very interesting and thoroughly enjoyable sixty minutes spent on a lovely Friday morning. Post the session, we were excitedly telling our teachers how we loved and enjoyed learning to bake our chocolate cake! This session truly inspired many of us to try out baking ourselves.
We’ve all eaten cakes. But how many of us have thought about baking one ourselves? If we haven’t thought about it yet, this is our chance! With the weekend approaching, we could all try our hand at baking one and enjoying it with our loved ones. Baking a cake and sharing it will lift the spirits of everyone around you! After all, like Charles M. Schulz rightly said, “All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt”.
By, Siddharth Vishnu, 5B
