Parsi Mawa Cake

I was travelling the day before my husband's birthday this year, and at Mumbai airport, decided to pick up a Mawa cake from Theobroma as a birthday morning surprise. We had first come across Mawa cake at Sodabottleopenerwala which one year became our favourite restaurant - we went there 8 times in that year, a record for people who don't even eat out at restaurants that often! The warm Mawa cake was a real revelation - soft, moist and delicious without being super sweet.

It reminded me of the first time I had eaten pound cake, as a teenager back in Singapore. It was a Sara Lee frozen pound cake, eaten straight from the freezer, but managed to be so succulently soft and moist that I simply could not get enough. There was something so comfortably familiar and loving in the taste of it that I feel I've been looking at recreating that taste my whole life.

The Mawa cake at Sodabottle and at Theobroma are exactly like that taste of childhood nostalgia - moist, dense, familiar, sweet and untainted by any form of decorativeness that takes cake from being a comfortable friend to a formal acquaintance. It's quite like a pound cake, in its soft and moist taste - nothing sticks to the tongue or the palate in a claggy way, but just eases its way so smoothly down the gullet, you're left looking to the next bite and the next.

I was hit by a powerful urge to bake that from scratch today, having bought some mawa (khoya) from the neighbourhood market recently. I've got to say, I understand a phrase by one of my favourite authors - a cut-and-come-again-cake, after eating this one today. The kids piled on to it like they'd never had cake before, the elder ones putting away a cool three slices apiece. Having just baked it this evening, there is barely a fifth of it left! I'm not sure if I feel delighted everyone loved it or dismayed that it whooshed by so fast!!!

Oh well, at least it's not too complicated or time consuming to make!

Ingredients:
1 cup plain flour
1.5 cups sugar
1/3 cup softened unsalted butter
200 gms mawa
1 tsp vanilla
3 eggs, room temperature
1 tsp baking powder

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees c.

Mix the dry ingredients and then all the wet, except the eggs. Beat together, then add the eggs one by one and beat to a smooth mixture. If it's clumpy, add a small portion of plain milk and beat until the mixture is smooth and dropping consistency.

Pour into an 8 inch greased and floured baking pan and bake for 45 minutes - if a knife comes out clean, it's done. It should have a lovely honey-gold colour.

If you insist on tarting it up - and I wouldn't - you can dredge some icing sugar in nice patterns over the smooth honey gold top. I did get a hankering for a smidgen of salted caramel icecream on the side - not the oversweet kind, but the kind that's genuinely a little salty.

It would probably be a great coffee time treat as well.