Handmade cake, followed by digression on the value of goods.

Tonight is probably the first night in a while where I feel alright and not glum. Also, I finally got around to baking a cake. On previous nights, I had talked about making a cake out of the disastrous chocolate ice cream that I'd made over the weekend, which is inedible because it's got too much chocolate in it. I watched tons of YouTube videos and read mountains of articles about the ratio of sugar to flour, fats to egg yolk, moisture to flour, but couldn't figure out what needed doing. So I just baked a straight forward vanilla cake, and six little cupcakes. The cupcakes were done first. They came out of the oven smelling like Madeleines and I thought, "Too much egg!" but after tasting one, I thought it was quite alright. Hooman's had two already. The thing of note is that we made the batter without a single electric appliance. Yes, everything done by hand. A true hand-made cake.

We live in a tiny apartment (viewable on Street View on Google maps!), with a tiny kitchen where there's not even room to store an electric mixer. That's why the cake was made by hand, not because we were trying to be organic or anything. I started off on my own, creaming the butter with a spoon, or at least trying to cream the butter. Then Hooman came along and stuck his big nose in my business, and it was just as well because my arm was getting tired. I told him to add the eggs while I kept beating the batter, and then he took over the beating while I added flour and milk. It was a workout for both of us. I thought Hooman might get an asthma attack, but he didn't.

If I were in Malaysia, I'd be helping my mother or grandmother make Raya cookies right about now. Not too many, maybe two kinds. People in the city tend not to bake their own cookies anymore, they order them from a baker, usually a distant relative of some sort, working out of her house, selling cookies at 15 cents a pop, or whatever. That's RM45 for 300 pieces. Actually, I'm not certain what the rate is; what I do know is that the mark-up is high. It's all fair, because baking is labour intensive. Not many people appreciate this.

I'm always willing to pay a high price for handmade goods because I understand fully what's involved in making something. Take a knitted garment, for instance. It's an insult to say to someone, "I'll pay you back for the yarn, if you knit me a sweater." The cost of producing that garment lies in the time spent imagining its design, plus the hours you spend knitting the thousands of stitches involved in bringing that design to life, as well as undoing the mistakes and re-knitting the wrongly knitted portions. There's also the amount of care taken in knitting it, and the attention paid to the finishing. You can easily produce a sloppy garment; but an honest artist would never do that. So, the yarn -- which, incidentally, doesn't come cheap, especially if you're using 100% wool -- is not where the value of the knitted garment lies. The value of it lies in everything else.

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Post-script: I'm not a knit-artist. I knit for fun. My stuff is sloppy. If I agree to make something for you, there's a chance I won't finish it. Or I might finish it three years later. So don't worry about asking me to knit something for you. It would be my pleasure. Or not, as the case may be.