Indian-style Laddoo Cake

Every year, Puddi spends ages visualizing the way she wants her birthday cake to look. The ideas and themes keep changing, and even though her birthday is in June, she’ll start in at any time of the year – Mamma, let’s have…a flower cake for my birthday next time, she’ll say in July. Around September, her thoughts may wander to a fairy. Cartoon characters like Winnie the Pooh or Tigger may make an appearance on the wishlist around January. By March, it’s turned to heart-shaped cakes. This year it was a cake like an Olympic torch, with the flames made out of mango slices – her invention and a good one. The problem is, the kids don’t actually like cake, and therefore rarely end up eating it. It’s the shapes and colours and creativity of it that they crave, but they don’t relish the taste of cake much, and given that the average shaped and decorated cake can’t be made to specific size in under 2 kilos, we always end up with tons of it on our hands.

This year we had two birthday parties for the Puds – one for her friends, for which we ordered said Olympic cake which was delicious and looked fab but of which we had a lot left over. And a second party was all family – the inlaws, the parents, uncles, aunts etc. So for that one, given Dad’s aversion to eggs and his habit of finding cakes smelling of eggs even when they are eggless and the fact that my kids actually prefer desi mithai to cake any day, I hit upon the idea of a laddoo cake.

It was made of motichoor laddoos!!!

I got a kilo of motichoor laddoos, heated them up slightly in the microwave so they would be extra-sticky and broke them apart while hot. I spread them around in a flower-shaped cake pan and stuck it in the fridge to set. For the icing, I used the normal barfi ( I would have preferred khoya but nobody makes it in summer) – heated up about half a kilo, spread some heated raspberry jam on the surface of the cake and spread the barfi out on top, much like marzipan, and popped the cake back into the fridge to set. Later, Puddi and I decorated the cake with readymade decorations I had picked up from Michael’s in the US, and voila! It took all of maybe 15 minutes to assemble, and was devoured with much enjoyment by our desi guests!

PS. I admit my cake decorating skills suck!