Baking Goes Bananas

In case you’re in need of a cheer up with some animal antic stories today, I can help. You’ve come to the right place. A small cookery school for Indian sisters, to teach cake and biscuit making, was proposed as something I could fairly harmlessly run. The idea was to invite a number of ladies who had asked for advice on how to make a living for their families by baking and selling their wares. I wasn’t sure that I could usefully contribute in a field where women already excel with modest facilities and threadbare budgets. In the event is was actually a successful time - thanks to their enthusiasm and passion. Snacks - which definitely includes cakes and biscuits- are supremely popular in both city and village life. A taste for tea and biscuits - from first thing in the morning till last things at night - cuts across all social divides. The local delight called “Parle G”, is the best selling biscuit in the world and the Indian biscuit market generated a US14 billion dollar revenue last year. Lots of low cost biscuits are horribly unhealthy with a ton of saturated fat and white sugar. But we figured it might be a market we could exploit and make a healthier product. No-one we know has an oven. All Indian cooking is done on an open wood fire or on a small stove with a bottle gas burner. So baked goods have to be bought, they can’t be made at home. The thinking was if we could supply a few ecclesial groups with an oven they could run a little business themselves in their local community.

We spent the morning going over basics: hygiene, costs, transport, bookkeeping, marketing and advertising. A lot of thought was given to who the customers might be and we figured that selling to office workers would be good as folk there had a disposable income and possible interest in buying something new and different as a treat. We worked our way through my cobbled together manual which everyone could keep for future reference. We costed everything - raw ingredients, disposable items like cake papers, electricity, transport, cost of a market pitch, the outlay for an oven. We talked through the availability of ingredients such as fresh butter. In my life I’ve never had to consider any of these variables. I just hustle down to the supermarket and fill a shopping trolley then get baking. Here it was revelatory to be see that every penny in India counts and has to be carefully and thoughtfully spent.

By lunchtime we were all fired up with enthusiasm to try the recipes. The small oven we’d bought was duly set up inside the main compound building in a fairly decrepit kitchen. The counter top model was for all the world like a toy that a child might bake imaginary dinners in. A small oblong box with one shelf and a simple temperature and timer control knob. We fashioned another shelf out of a cake cooling rack. A trip to Ikea (the flagship first ever Indian depot was amazingly in Hyderabad) had furnished us with cake tins, cookie trays, whisks, bowls, parchment paper and a comprehensive assortment of plastic storage containers. We had our recipes - banana cake with lemon icing, flapjack, which everyone insisted on calling oats cake, chocolate cookies and peanut butter jam bars. One of the recipes comes from a cookbook by Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa. I wonder if she could have imagined her super pbj cakes, dreamed up in affluent Connecticut, being baked in this hot dusty backwater with a view to saving a family from a life of hardship? There was such an air of excitement about the proceedings that we had attracted the husbands, village onlookers who threw in advice from the sidelines, and a whole bunch of kids in addition to the four little groups of ladies. We had set up two long trestle tables under the large shady tree in the Moinabad courtyard and laid out all our equipment and ingredients. I start the next bit of the proceedings with a small prayer and a look at a few Bible verses that talked about cakes and baking (think Abigail and her goodwill baskets for David). All of a sudden there was a lot of rustling overhead and a big monkey swooped down and with one swift move stole all the bananas for our first recipe. He leaped back up into the tree out of reach, cackling and baring his teeth, waving the large hands of bananas around above us. You couldn’t make it up. After the initial fright of being knocked aside by a very large primate I couldn’t stop laughing. This never happens on the Food Network channel. Ina, our Barefoot Contessa, wanders through flower and herb gardens, chopping bunches of hydrangeas, grilling steaks on the terrace with fun guests, sipping cocktails. A cute Labrador might have been brought along for the photo shoot. No tribe of hairy monkeys. No-one steals anything. No amount of yelling and gesticulating brought the bananas back and so someone was dispatched out into the village to buy more so we could restock and restart. The marauder, joined by half a dozen others scampered around, charging across the tin roofs, screeching and pooping. But we’d learned our lesson and vigilantly guarded the tables. Banana cake baking recommenced.

All of the recipes turned out well. It was fairly painstaking waiting on two trays at a time to bake and it was dark at the end of a long afternoon when we assembled everything for the big taste test. Every last crumb was eaten. We spent the following morning going over business plans and building the confidence of the women who were heading home that evening with bags of equipment and all their notes and manuals and plans. We know that some are still going strong , making a living for their families by baking unusual cakes and biscuits in hidden corners of South India. These ladies are just inspirational. They took an often troubling homelife situation and turned it around with their own creativity and willingness to venture outside what they knew and embraced change. In tough circumstances they juggle home and children and school and extended families and keep food on the table. They have such strong faith in a loving God and they start off each day with thanks and praise for another opportunity to work. These are among the kinds of projects WCF supports - a small investment in a motivated individual who will work hard to turn life around under God’s good grace to care for themselves and their wider family. They know the truth of this verse, “He gives food to every creature. His love endures forever” Psalm 136:25.