Oh these sinful days, may they come around the corner more often

It’s the weekend again! And I couldn’t be happier at this point. The last few days following my shopping binge have been absolutely fun-filled.

First of all, I visited the penthouse of this well-known couple for a story on their fantastic home. The amount of natural light that filtered in through the bay windows and the beautiful patio that stretched out on the first level of it, just stole my heart. I want a house like that. Filled with daylight and happiness.

Oh and things were so much about art installation inside that at one point I almost mistook their pet, a very ugly French bulldog called Dude, to be a piece of installation too.

Midweek I was filing the above story on a tight deadline and feeling oh-so-stressed-out. But with wrapping it up came sweet redemption – a night of karaoke with my two girl friends at a new karaoke joint in town. The theme was retro Hindi, something that I heart.

How many times have I stood in a discotheque and hoped for retro! I have realized that I can move my body more sensuously when I hear those throaty Jawani Jaaneman and Laila O Laila-like numbers. The deal is that they make me feel very diva.

Of course I have been fighting in between with my boy like crazy. But been making up immediately and falling in love over again. The thing with fighting is that it makes you realize that you cannot really live without the other, without feeling ill inside. And he says something about our catfights. “We might fight a lot, but we also love each other that much.” It makes me smile.

Anyway, the other day I got a call from a communications person of a certain hotel saying they were holding a chocolate making workshop. And she immediately thought of me because of all the times she had seen me talk to the pastry chef with zest. I was delighted.

It was today.

Now getting up early on a Saturday is a bitch I agree (but so is it any other day, isn’t it?). Thereafter I spent the better half of the morning and the afternoon getting chocolate educated. How do you temper chocolate and how do you shock a chocolate mold? How do you make sure you never have air bubbles lodged inside your truffles?

And all of this was with couverture chocolate (couverture has a high percentage of cocoa butter which makes the chocolate honey soft), so we got nibbles of it too in the form of little dark pellets and sugar free blocks of dark and white chocolate. You would be surprised – at least I was – to find that sugar free chocolate was pretty good.

My neighbour was an elderly lady with a fine old-day accent and great enthusiasm. She was chatty. How couldn’t I like her and her love for chocolate? She turned out to be a Bengali when she spoke to her husband during the break. And we bonded. As we also did with the others in the class during lunch.

So over a lavish lunch of butter and bread, baked fish fillets, creamy corn and spinach and kebabs, we chattered away. None of us, it turned out, had really made chocolate before. There were at least a dozen of us. Among which was a mother-in-law who had come with her sweet and pretty daughter-in-law in tow, two sisters-in-law and even a young guy whose hobby it is to bake.

It was cute to compare notes on our levels of cooking. Some like me were ultra lazy but it was our common love for food that had us there I guess.

Once we got back to our class, the chef was cajoled by the above-mentioned women into taking a hands-on class next Saturday. And success was had. So, yes we are on for another chocolate-bonding session the coming week. I am drooling at the thought of making my own ganache and pralines soon. Amen.