Orchid

Orchid:
I have loved that plant since I first saw it placed by itself on a table in an interior design book. It went perfectly with the serene white bedding and light blue walls.
From that day I wanted to try and grow one. Orchids are considered exotic plants. Since I stayed in an apartment with minimal light and no gallery to keep plants, wasn't sure if I wanted to buy an exotic plant just yet.
When one day, talking to a lady at my workplace who loved gardening, we discussed the Orchid among other plants.
Little did I know she had a few plants herself and she brought one for me in a beautiful handmade pot the very next day.
She advised me not to water more that a tablespoon or two of water once or twice a week, whilst the roots got wet. It was not planted in regular soil. She had just placed it in a bark mix and in a pot with lots of holes for air to pass by.
I would have never known all this information if not for her.

The orchid plant was small with two leaves and I wanted to see it flower. I watered it diligently for about a year and then there was one bud that bloomed. Imagine the joy to see it was not only living but doing well. But that was it for that year. With signs of progress I carried on an watched.
As that flower fell and in about another 8 months it was time for blooming season, a small shoot came off of an existing branch and started growing fast in direction of sun. It grew the way I turned it. It was so easy to design the shape go how I wanted it to be. It was lovely to see it grow so rapidly. After the branch grew in about a month or two. Small nodes started to grown out to form buds. The buds stayed there for about 2 months, while one of my colleagues at work asked me..when does that bud ever bloom :)
And in about 3 weeks it started to bloom. It took a while for all 4 flowers to bloom a good 3-4 weeks. But these flowers look strong and well and happy and here to stay.
I am not sure how long it will last. But enjoy looking at it through the day while its beauty lasts.

Baby cake

So I heard the wonderful news from my sis-in-law. She was expecting and we were going to visit her soon to see her. Since I had just started on baking classes, I thought of trying out a cake for her. Though it is nowhere near to a professional one aesthetically, I am glad it tasted wonderful. It was a strawberry cake baked with yellow cake mix and strawberry pudding mix. Once it was made, I cut it in 2 halves horizontally. Made some fresh strawberries juice. Put some juice in between the two layer to soak the cake a little, so that its moist. Then made a strawberry and whipped cream/sour cream mixture in the grinder. Applied that between the two layers as a cream. And kept it overnight to set. The next day cake was ready to do icing. I applied icing on the cake, but as it turns out, it was a bit yellow than white icing. Also, the green color was not exactly the one I needed. I did not go with pink/blue since we yet did not know the sex of the baby. So though as I said the cake tasted delicious, I would do icing differently next time. Probably a purple with white or something on those lines.
The writing and the design of cart on cake was my darling husband's idea. Since he is very good at drawing, he helped me put it down on paper and I loved putting our mini project over the cake.
Here is what the end product looked like:

About books n beans

One of my favourite places in Birmingham, AL where I have spent the maximum time (ofcourse other than work and home) in last 2 years is this. Its the barnes and noble book store which brews starbucks coffee!  The warmth of coffee, the smell of Mocha and crisp and colorful books,  siting in a comfy chair, by the window, with a friend beside. Perfect! for everything else there is Master card. A little wind chill or rain would be a icing to the ambiance. Since, a sunny day would usually call out to play or walk.

As I look through the well defined isles in the book store and read fiction and classics I am reminded of the summer vacation which would mean get up in the morning, play badminton and then read read read all day.

'The cherry tree' a story in gulmohar in std 5, made such an impression by its simplicity that since then I fell in love with the writing style of Ruskin Bond and still wish to go to see him and the places described in this book like foothills of Nilgiri, Missouri and Shimla.  Enid Blyton's -  famous five's treasure island, smugglers top, kirrin island and sea were the places that really existed and which I did visit every summer vacation. Chilling with the my dog on the beach, When I was young I still wanted to go to UK to actually see if the picture in my mind really did match anything up there...

The lilac inn and the Nancy drew from River Heights....were real people and places created after years of following her through her growing age and solving mysteries with her dad every other month and driving down to every mysterious cottage with her cousins george and bess...
Similar are my attachments to "baker street", Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson and the joy of much cheered Dr. Watson is equally shared with the comeback of sherlock holmes after his fake death....

For shools I did say I like Malory towers and Hogwarts any day over mine.
"Alice in wonderland" is by far the most random instance of imagination I have ever seen. It is a book rightly made for children keeping in mind their attention span and hence the events in the book happen quickly and randomly. I am amazed at the skill of the author to capture such randomness in one small book.
"The little prince" is a book which does total justice to the word " a child's imagination". Its published in 180 languages across the world. That tells how many more children could visualize their dreams...
"Little Women" was the first classic I ever read and a story of 4 sisters by Louisa May Alcott still is fresh in my mind.
On the similar lines, One day I came across "sense and sensibility" and with the potrayal of strong women charachters in all novels of Jane Austen, I also came to admire her simple but old english style of writing.

I will always love a book for the crisp sound of the pages, the scent of a new book, the details of the cover, the beauty of heartfelt acknowledgements, the random page of the book written as preface and the book itself.

Coffee

Well, to my tea gang and all my tea loving friends I have grown up drinking tea made with fresh milk, so I am still faithful to it. But as I enter the bookstore I have to break my vow and succumb to the warm hot chocolate bundt cake and coffee (since they don't server that good a tea there). I can as never imagined now distinguish between the taste of nescafe and starbucks as oppossed to any other. So much is the addiction is that I wish to visit the first starbucks coffee shop (started:1970) in Pike Place Market in Seattle. Well, maybe also due to the fact that that is another city in US I have so much wished but somehow never visited while many of my friends made their random trips and brought along coffee beans as token.

While I have more than 4 times visited the west coast, Peet's still has the mark there. To all those who wonder, Peet's is where starbucks came from.  The three founders of Starbucks knew Alfred Peet personally, founded Starbucks and bought the coffee beans for Starbucks directly from Peet's during their first year of business in 1971. In 1987, Baldwin and Peet's owners sold the Starbucks chain to focus on Peet's, and Baldwin and Howard Schultz, Starbucks' new owner, entered into a no-compete agreement for a period of 10 years in the Bay Area. Hence, Starbucks did not probably come into existence till 1997 in Bay area.


Peet's has been much slower to expand than Starbucks, and has maintained more of its focus as a coffee and tea retailer, rather than a coffee bar, a distinction that has long separated Peet's from Starbucks. Peet's is still primarily a California operation, while for starbucks as we all know has more than 10,000 stores all over US and is a part of many book store chains providing the speciality coffee!

So, all my dear friends, you see how mesmerizing times get and how easily we get driven to another world of memories. Here is my humble attempt to put in words the imaginations and writing of these inspirational authors with coffee on the side. Lets do it!

First Valentine Day Cake 2011 :)

[gallery]

Baking-Icing Day 1

Recently I decided to join a Wilton’s cake decorating class 1. The course was a four week course with instructor Ann at Micheals store. It ende up becoming a 2 week course with some date adjustments, which as we call it turned out to be a crash course.
After that I made a couple of cakes and saw a good lot of baking videos with impressive techniques.
My mom asked me to pen down my experiences with the class since she wanted to read them and so I took up this task. I thought it would also serve as a revision to what we studied in class.

Day 1:
Of the class was all about, how to bake a cake, what containers to use, how to cool the cake, how to ice it so it looks plain etc. Initially I don’t think I paid much attention to it, since I was just writing down stuff Anne said. But when I baked my first cake, I realized soon that was excellent piece of information. We had to get a cake in our next class.The first day we did practiced some icing on cookie.