Pat a Cake-The Tradtional Christmas Baking of North India

Dear friends with my housekeeping,hospitality and entertainment
responsibilities I 've been slow in my blogging lately, but I have plenty of photos and posts in store.
The cold weather has also played spoilsport. The past 2 days have been better with the sun reluctantly creeping out after mid-day.Otherwise our parts have been enveloped in a thick freezing pall right out of John Carpenter 's mystery movie 'The Fog '
Around Christmastime I wrote about the bakeries where one can get their traditional Christmas cakes baked ,which are really rich fruit cakes , the British introduced to India. Very similar to the famous Yorkshire pudding.
This is the way the North Indian Christians like their Christmas cakes. Wedding cakes are also prepared in the same way-rich fruit cake with marzipan or cashew and sugar icing etc.
Earlier this month Sonia went to order some cake to take with her to Lucknow and I went with her to take photographs.

Pat a cake, Pat a cake, baker's man
Bake me a cake as fast as you can;
Pat it and prick it and mark it with a 'B',
And put it in the oven for Baby and me

Bushy the Baker ( so nick-named because of his thick Muslim beard) is famous all over India for his exceptional Christmas and wedding cakes.(People have taken his creations overseas too) His forefathers were bakers for the Firangi Sahibs and Memsahibs.Bushy has passed on and his sons now carry on the family business in their small bakery cum house. Let me add here that most bakers in India are Muslims (perhaps its the usage of eggs).

Here is a wedding cake being iced at the bakery.

No matter how expensive they are, one cannot imagine a wedding without them.

Somebody 's cakes have been retrieved from the wood burning huge furnace like oven. The large ones can weigh up to 2 pounds with all the rich ingredients. Since several people are having their cakes baked at one time, they place slips of paper with numbers and their names written on them into the cake tins, so that they can be recognized and counted when they are done.

The oven with one of the bakery employees. Its like a hot burning cave.

A large tub to mix the batter in. People take their own raw ingredients (flour, sugar, butter etc) to the bakers and they mix everything for them.You can get your un-iced cupcakes, coconut cookies and macaroons baked here too. You pay for each kilogram of batter mixed.

The baker daily supplies buns, biscuits (salty cookies) pizza base, cakes ,flapjacks and bread to shops, outlets homes and cafeterias they bake their stuff on the side. And if you are feeling peckish while waiting for your cakes to be baked (it can take several hours as you have to wait your turn -like a doctor 's waiting room) , you can buy his treats to refuel yourself.

Some more of the wedding cake and buns.This is the marzipan layer. They cover it with icing sugar and decorations.

The round cake could be for a birthday or some celebration.

You can see one of the workers briskly mixing the cake batter.Its all done by hand...pounds and pounds of batter - no machines involved here. Of course in the modern/commercial/industrial bakeries machines are used -but this is an old fashioned traditional place.

Numbered and marked cakes out of the oven.

Suppose I am getting 10 cakes baked , I will put my name and numbers 1-10 into the cake tins,so that I can identify and count them later on.

This gentleman is watching over his batter mixing. The cakes are put in steel trunks and carried home. You can see one on the side.You can also bring your ingredients in the trunks.

During Christmastime these bakeries become places of social gatherings an mingling.As folk from different churches and areas come together for their baking. Greetings, gossip and news is exchanged...recipes and ingredients compared. All this is needed to while away the hours.Sometimes your cake enters the oven around midnight and you can go home, rest and come back the next day to collect it.

Here are samples of pizza base ready for the shops.

I hope you found a little excursion to Bushy 's interesting. When I told them that I was going to share about them with the whole world through my computer, they were very pleased and gave Sonia a small discount.LOL.

Namrita has also ordered a few ready made fruit and walnut cakes to take home with her. I may get some more photos.

I really enjoyed sharing this with you.