Next Stop: Crazy Dessert Lady
The story of how I found baking.
Age 7: Young me sits by my cousin’s side and watches her make a cake in an old school oven, the round one which would rotate on the inside. I am perplexed by the number of times the batter has to be mixed, I must have counted up to 100 watching said cousin whip up the batter. But the baked cake smells incredible, the kind that stays with you for a while, and seems worth the effort of whipping it up endlessly.
Age 10: The neighbour’s daughter talks about this yellow cake her mother makes in the cooker. She calls it perfect. I pester my mother to learn it. She finally does. I carefully write down the recipe on the back of a telephone directory where my grandfather would write the phone numbers of relatives. The cooker needed to have a slotted plate kept in it before keeping the vessel in, and I remember we could never find it. The cake would have a dome at the top. I didn’t seem to mind, for it did taste perfect.
Age 13: I bake a chocolate cake for my cousin’s birthday. I have added too much sugar, but I don’t know it yet. I have whipped the batter too much, But I don’t know it yet. Amma scolds from the background, for I have made her living room smell too chocolaty. “She doesn’t like the smell of cocoa, how insane”, I think. The cake refuses to come out of the vessel. I forgot to grease and line it seems. It’s too hard to eat. I baked it for too long it seems. I put the vessel in the sink, let it soak and run to buy one from the nearby bakery.
Age 18: It seems to have gotten better. I make cakes for my best friend’s birthday. It’s a two-tier cake. But not the ones which have height. It’s small. I make cakes from boxed mixes now. It’s easier, time-saving and cheaper I figured. They seem to look alright. People around me love them, maybe they are just being kind. But I like baking things, surprisingly, ‘cause I don’t like cooking much.
Age 21: I am freshly back from college. I have access to an Oven again. I have decided to study for a god-forsaken exam that seems to be taking a toll on me. I scroll through youtube and discover this channel called Bon-Appetit. I spend hours watching a chef, Claire Saffitz. I seem to relate, maybe cause she is a little nerdy like me. Or because she is very particular and crafty. I can’t seem to understand. But with her, I discover baking again and at a different level. I deep dive into the Baking side of Youtube. But, I only watch.
Age 23: The city undergoes a lockdown. The world’s in an uproar, so am I and so is my family. My sister is stuck in a different city, away from family. I am locked with my two parents who are as clueless about how to navigate as I am. You can only eat in. You cook what you want to eat. I want to eat nice things. I don’t want to cook just for myself. My parents don’t eat onion or garlic. Most savoury dishes are out of the question then. I decide to make desserts. They would eat those, but only if I made them without eggs. I deep dive on the internet and order a bunch of things from Big Basket. They arrive late at night. I resolve to make these decadent chocolate chip cookies by Bigger Bolder Baking I had been eyeing for a year now. I bake 12. They are a hit. Father had three of them, I tell my sister. I post about it on Instagram.
Age 24: I have upgraded from posting about my baking adventures on Instagram to a small baking business. Crazy Dessert Lady I call it. I bake before and after my full-time job, which means odd hours. People at work wonder if I am insane. I do too but I don’t tell them. I work with a youth development organisation and I start learning a lot more about myself. On the side, I bake, I experiment, I sell. It’s all in the aesthetics, people tell me. So, I pick up the phone, style my desserts, take photos of them, edit them on Adobe and post them. People seem to like it more. I have epic fun with it. I get to be particular, crafty and crazy all at the same time. I am on a roll.
Age 25: I move to a new city for my job. I enjoy the newness, the friendships, and the freedom. I meet new people, talk to several hundred young people, have many firsts, build beautiful relationships and find myself more. The thing about working at my old organization was that nothing was surface, everything had layers and working there meant uncovering those layers. And doing that is like being free from shackles I didn’t even know I had. It’s liberating. It’s courageous. It’s empowering. It made me audacious to recognise, it was okay to move on from something even if you enjoy and love it with your whole heart, only because you want to chase growth. After lots of churning, and finding what growth for me looks like, I arrive at this.
I want to be challenged. I want to experiment. I want to fail. I want to be my own boss. I want to be thrown into uncertainties. I want to create. I want to embrace the insanity that comes with running something of my own.
So what do I do?
I quit my job, move back home, take a month-long break and prepare for returning to Crazy Dessert Lady. Here’s the thing, my life hasn’t gone how I thought it would. And if you know me, you know I am a planner. But life’s funny and things don’t go according to plan. So here I am, at 25, with no experience or knowledge of how to run a business, ready to do it. Have I always known I wanted to be a business owner, a baker or an entrepreneur? Hell, no. But I have always known that I wanted to live a life where at the end of it, I know I did everything I wanted to. And since I am lucky enough to have the privilege to take a risk, I am taking it.
So join me on this adventure as I discover what it means to be an entrepreneur. Watch me as I figure out, how can I run a business that doesn’t just care about profits, but also remains socially relevant. I don’t know what the future of this looks like, but I know the journey would be an epic one. It’s very fitting that my business is called Crazy Dessert Lady, ‘cause what else would something I do be called?
