With Christmas right around the corner, Mumbai’s Catholic community have already started their preparations by putting up the Christmas tree and making the delicious sweets. Among other traditions, they have also started cake-mixing
Mogan Rodrigues soaked the fruits for the cake in the first week of December and will be feeding it with liquor every five days till Christmas. Photo Courtesy: Mogan Rodrigues
Mogan Rodrigues is busy feeding his cake with liquor when we call him on a lazy Sunday afternoon. It is a process he will undertake till Christmas day to bring out the rich flavours of the cake he is making for the festival. A few years ago, Rodrigues, an Uttan local, got the opportunity to taste the most delicious fruit cake during Christmas he had had till then. The flavour of which he had never experienced before. Till then, he was tasting every other kind of cake that was made closer to the big day, but the flavour of this rich fruit cake lingered on his palate long after the Catholic festival was over. That is when he took it upon himself to make the cake with his family every Christmas season. He explains, “My family doesn’t have a tradition of making cakes, so I started it. They are heavy and dense cakes, unlike plain cakes which we make for rosary or for home.”