The Cardamom Rose Cake

I have no patience for Days. You know, those dates set aside to focus on set things in set ways: World Oceans Day, Women’s Day, Teachers’ Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and (goodness help me) Valentine’s Day. As if attention to such matters can be meaningfully concentrated in solitary Days. As though the daily, churning, self-modulating work of love can be reduced to flourishes of bought roses and usually-not-dark-enough choc boxes. Or celebrated with paltry evenings out and the passing clink of champagne flutes.

So much of our emotional selves made available to ad-men and salesmen for trade? Bite me.

No wonder the anthropologist Daniel Miller could describe at such length “the way commodities are used as part of the technology of love within the family” and shopping as a ritual of sacrifice.

So Valentine’s day gets largely ignored in our house–except maybe to assert the contrarian point that every day is a Day damnit, structured unremarkably around so many mundane instances of love and care. Think of it: the laundry gets done, food is on the table at each meal, dishes get washed. Sooner or later, the floor gets swept. Someone struggles out of bed on time to wake the kids, or stays up late working so others needn’t. Someone keeps things humming so steadily, others don’t have to realize they are. If there’s a hug or a kiss on a wanting cheek somewhere in the midst of a daily bustle, if there’s a special meal or a bunch of flowers that appears as an acknowledgement of something–then that’s both completely normal and quite extraordinary. Love, any way. Love, as usual.

But then this year, there was this cake–at first blush all romance and rose.

Note this was not made in anticipation of ‘V-Day’ and the obligatory blog releases of appropriately romance-inducing recipes. But it was made of Love–incidental, impulsive, intense;concentrated in far less than a day but with effects that lingered long after. The older boy had run a 15 kilometer race on mixed terrain with many others longer-trained and more fit. He had won.

“Shall I make you some nice dessert?” his mother asked.

The almost 17-year-old nodded yes-yes-yes-yes as though he had never grown a day beyond the happiness of being 3, melting his mother’s buttercream heart and materializing a meal that ended, as I say, with this cake.

The signs that celebration should take this form were all there already. The roses were there drying for a hair powder in-the-making. Cardamom had long-since been captured, genie in a bottle, from Kochi. Ricotta was in ready supply–a fact not to be taken for granted in small, sidelined Pondicherry. The ingredients of Love itself politely lined themselves up, waiting. All that was left was to acknowledge and combine them.

There are many recipes out there for “ras malai in a cake” and in a way The Cardamom Rose approximates that: the soft richness of the fresh cottage cheese dumpling immersed in sweet saffron cream, with the scent of cardamom and the slight crunch of pistachios. But really, why ras malai in a cake when just ras malai is so divine? That seemed a little silly. So the idea was to evoke those Indian origins, those textures, and those redolences–but to make a cake that was just always meant to be a cake.

Perhaps also to learn to love with old ingredients, in new ways, and so to create a Day that was there just for itself, just here, just now, never exactly to repeat.