Bombay Foodie

It's been ten days since the bakeoff and I am a little off the high of winning the regional round so let's sit and chat about that very exciting day. Kitchenaid had told us in advance that this will be a mystery box round and we will have half an hour to go through our books and iPads before they take it all away and we start baking. So early morning on March 18, I joined nine other exceptionally good bakers at the Callebaut chocolate academy. It was so exciting just to be in a professional looking kitchen with all workstations set up with kitchenaid mixers and so many ovens and so much bakeware floating around. For the first half an hour, I read through the mystery box ingredients list and then started sifting through recipes. That's when the struggle started. We had five mystery box ingredients (chocolate, peanut butter, orange, kiwi, chilli) and the kitchenaid team had assembled a whole lot of basic ingredients but every recipe I came up with had something missing.

If you follow me on any of my social media accounts, you probably know already that I sent in an entry for Kitchenaid's probaker contest and was shortlisted in the top 50. Then I went to the regional bakeoffs and much to everyone's surprise, specially mine, I was one of the two winners. So now I get to go to Delhi in April to compete one last time in the national finale. By then, they will also have winners from Delhi and Bangalore who look like a serious set of bakers, so I am both excited and terrified at the same time. Before I get practising baking with my shiny new red kitchenaid mixer that I won as a prize in the regional bakeoff, I wanted to share the two recipes that got me here. First, the recipe I created and sent for the first round. I thought that instead of just baking a dessert, I'd pick a theme and create a plate around it. The theme I picked was 'Day at the Movies' which captures m y favourite part of going to the movies - obviously, food. Af

I remember the first time I met another food blogger. After months of back and forth over emails and commenting on each other's blogs, Harini , Alka and I landed up at Bandra's Carter Road on a mildly cold afternoon in December 2008. Sitting on a bench on the promenade, Alka unwrapped her box of koki. I passed around cookies I had baked for them to take home, and Harini brought out a vegan cake she had baked just that morning. We chatted for hours, feeling that we already knew the other two from their blogs and when the bill finally arrived at Cafe Coffee Day, each of us fought to pay but ended up sharing it. Fast forward seven years. Bombay's food blogging scene is buzzing and there must be at least a hundred blogs being written from the city. A lot of these bloggers only write reviews so restaurants have jumped onto the bandwagon. I must admit I quite like the excitement of being invited to launches and menu previews, specially because you get to meet the chefs as wel