My first attempt at baking

Back in India, baking at home is not all that common but when I came to the US, I realised almost everyone knows to bake. That really got me excited. If I could bake a cake it would be an awesome experience. So I took up the task with a lot of interest and research.

I didn't want to spend too much money on baking especially since I was just beginning. So I didn't have a cake mixer and decided to do it by hand. I had also bought the cheapest cupcake pan I could find at walmart. It had only 6 cups so I had to bake in two rounds. I found this really cool video which showed how to bake vanilla cupcakes. Everything on the video was pretty accurate including the timings and the measurements. So I just followed along and everything came out real smooth. You can check it out here.

Because I was doing it by hand, my hand did ache in between so I took slightly longer but in the end it worked out just fine. Initially I had decided to do the cake mixing with a whisk, but when I started doing the butter with the whisk, it just ended up getting caught in between the wires and made the process too messy. So I got out a wooden spoon and thats made it so much easier. In between, I used the spatula to scrape the sides.

When I finally put it in the oven, it was  a moment of tension, worrying if my cupcakes would rise, whether they would get cooked right and a whole lot of things. But eventually they did work out perfect. I didn't frost the cupcakes because I wasn't prepared with the frosting ingredients.

You can see from the photographs that I used some designer cupcake liners. It gives me a lot of satisfaction and pride that my first baking experiment was a success.

Paying the price for cooking

 

Some of the most horrible things are happening in India. Now households can get only 6 LPG cylinders for a whole year of cooking at the normal rate. If they need more, they need to pay exorbitant amounts.

That seems to be the worst decision ever, considering that the normal rate is also exceptionally high. What the hell is going on in our country? How do they expect people to cook for their families? We are supposed to be progressing whereas we are going way back, with bad political decisions, corruptions and nothing but loss for the people of India.

They say its because they have to cut their budget deficit thats why they are doing it. If they have a budget deficit how come they have millions of crores to spend on things like tourism, foreign imports, new township projects? We don't have decent roads, no cooking gas, water supply, our electricity goes out everytime there is a wind or rain, the internet and phone connection is not stable, eating out kills people. None of the basic needs of the people are met, yet they have tons of money to spend on all kinds of projects which everyone knows will not last even a year. When the money comes, it goes into the pockets of all the political leaders and the projects are abandoned. This is what has been happening forever. And they say they have budget deficit? Tell them, to go look at all the old records of all the projects they started till now? Where is all the money they invested? If all those resources were really used, we wouldn't be having any of these budget deficits.

How come our political system is such a bag of lies and an opportunity for the political leaders to just make money? We need good leaders who want our country to progress. I am here in the US and I feel sad that our country is not progressing at all. I am not saying that in one fine day it should have all the facilities that US has but we definitely have the budget to provide high quality basic facilities to the people. If any politician says otherwise, its only because he is stealing our hard-earned money for his use.