youyemyae scribbles...: Baking turned out to be a "piece of cake" for Dr. A

It was a fabulous birthday weekend. It all started with my aerobics classes, leaving behind dad and son spend some quality time with each other. By the time i could return they had finished the weekly grocery shopping too, how sweet! Grabbed some breakfast and off we were to the Grand Canyon , said to be the largest mall in the Mediterranean area. We walked and strolled into almost all the outlets from Toys r us to Office Depot to Swatch to those tiny nameless shops around the lobby area and near the elevators. A small handbag/purse shop caught my eyes. Common don't we women love purses ? I spent a full 30 minutes trying them all on my shoulders standing in front of the mirror and chose the below two! All these days and months and years i have been carrying those big tote kinda bags, now its again time for the small and chick ones. End of those diaper and wet wipes era in my purses. There's only room for keys n' cash and mobile baby!

In the evening, after a refreshing cup of chai at home, Dr. A comes up with this idea of baking a cake for me! OK, the birthday cake's no surprise now. But we were totally unprepared. There weren't any cakey things at home. After a round of CSI - Cake Scene Ingredients investigation, we discovered he could simply do a chocolate brownie with the available butter, choco chips, flour, eggs and sugar.

He beats and stirs and bakes and then yummmmm appears the royal chocolate brownie! At 6:30pm local time, his creation comes out, this was the biggest surprise of the day. It looked amazingly beautiful, tasteful and the whole house was smelling of butter and chocolate. Neither did A or I expect it to look so shiny and wonderful, the very look n' smell told us that it was going to taste great! We looked at it like a new born and Dr. A it's Brahma, i couldn't have appreciated him more. But, alas! it was his birthday cake for me, and we had to wait for the clock to show the 00:00 hours mark for me to have the cake and eat it too. That night, we kept our dinner very very light - 2 plums and a peach each, since we knew our dessert was going to be v. heavy. We waited and waited, it was only 9pm, at 9:30pm, Dr. A after all those visits back and forth the dining table for those little peeks of his creation and making sure 'it' was doing OK and thoroughly resisting his temptation to taste his creation - comes with this brilliant idea! "Hey, its 12 o' clock in India, why not cut it now" I did not even think or wink or waste a millionth of a second, i just sprang over and was right in front of the cake waiting for a knife to be given to me. In all that enthusiasm and eagerness to taste the cake, we totally forgot to take pictures. We sang a fat-forwarded "happy birthday to you" and then atttttaaackk! It was yummm!!! It didn't taste like a first timer's bake at all. After we had nearly finished 2/3rd of it, appreciating and narrating and re-describing of how he made it and how well it had come out, we realized we did not take any pictures of the whole cake, of me cutting the cake... none at all! Those 30-40 minutes, i had forgotten all about my birthday and it was more of a day celebrating A's debut with the brownie baking !! Managed to save those last few pieces and took a pic to share with family and friends. That's the cake part of it.

On the d-day, wishes pouring in from all near and dear ones around the globe, outside - it was a gloroius bright and sunny day and we decided to go to Zikhron-Yakov. Zikhron is a small picturesque town on a hillock about 35 km from Haifa. To be precise, the look and feel of the town is like Auroville ~ Pondicherry - the promanade, art and handicrafts shops, shoes and accessories, lovely homes converted into coffee shops and wineries adorned the town. Their windows amused me the most.

The below is actually a bank.