To Cheesecake, with love

This may seem like an odd first post, but hopefully you’ll see how it is a fitting tribute.

Food is my love language. Not cooking per se, but the sharing of deliciousness and how one might experience those moments is something I enjoy.  It all started with cheesecake when I was 14. The one family outing I looked forward to all year was the Christmas Eve feast in a luxury hotel in Mumbai – twinkling lights and Christmas trees with giant presents under them, staircases decked with holly, live-sized gingerbread houses, bright red poinsettias on the tables….and the food, long counters full of tartlets, pies, carved meats, baked goodies, roasts, desserts, everything exotic. In an otherwise busy year, it was the one day we made the long road trip to this place of wonder. When recalling those dishes – often looking them up on Google – my sibling (who we’ll call M on my blog) would always exclaim “and that cheesecake! I ate three slices!”. Honestly, I don’t recall tasting it then and thought cheese as dessert sounds funky. And it wasn’t served the next year, or the year after that, much to M’s dismay. Cheesecake wasn’t readily available anywhere at that time, and slowly, work got too hectic to make a trip across Mumbai on Christmas eve. M and I moved to college and meals with the entire family became a rare occasion. Our new method of celebration was plum cake from the nearest bakery, and the family classic of butter chicken and fried rice (ordered, of course, from the local establishment). But I wanted to recreate those precious moments where my family marvelled over what seemed like culinary masterpieces reserved for fine dining. But all those recipes required an oven at some point!

At that point, my culinary skills were practically at the level of soupy Maggi, but M reposed great confidence in my skills (if one is a relativist, sure). One failed microwave cake attempt later, but armed with knowledge from Youtube cooking channels I purchased an OTG Oven (26L in size, and still working great!). The first week was spent toasting bread and cheese (homemade pizzas, anyone?). The first thing I ever baked from scratch in there was of course, cheesecake on Christmas eve for M! I still hadn’t ever eaten a cheesecake then, but I’d religiously spent hours on the internet researching the making of a classic, baked New York cheesecake, all sitting 500 kms away in college. I went down the rabbithole of cheesecake conundrums – cracks, burnt tops, dents, soggy bottoms. There was a flood of recipes on Youtube – Martha Stewart, Alton Brown, Chef John, Laura in the Kitchen, Joy of Baking…whose to use? Anyhow, the cheesecake (served with a fresh strawberry coulis) was dense, creamy beginner’s-luck perfection! M couldn’t stop grinning and eating. My parents said it was “the best”. And they didn’t even like cheese.

The very first cheesecake, circa 2015. I forgot to take a picture of a neat slice, sorry!

Since then, I’ve gone on to try various versions of cheesecake. Every birthday of M or mine has witnessed a new cheesecake debut. I also started baking and cooking in general – as long as those dishes aren’t easily available here. It’s been an interesting journey for me, one quarter I’ll be caught up in the cuisine of Northern Italy to get my ragù just right and the next, attempt ramen from scratch. But in these five years, my inspiration and learning has been the same – food connects us. And I wanted to curate more of those experiences where I see that marvel, that perfect moment of joy where you’ve tasted something so sublime, so filled with love, that you’re taken back to a familiar place of nostalgia, a memory, or just transported to a happy place in a way good food does. Chasing those moments has become, sort of, my side gig mentally.

So you see, it was all M’s desire for cheesecake that put me on this path of food discovery. I want to use this blog space as a journal to record all those great memories, appreciate all the fantastic restaurants that I love visiting in my two cities – Bangalore and Mumbai, and also about my trials in the kitchen in getting that soufflé to rise perfectly or sauce to be just-so.

My blog is going to be a Work in Progress for a while, but watch this space for upcoming reviews, the occasional cooking challenge, and my musings about the whole food, history & dining culture!

Oh and WELCOME.