Baking Basics for Beginners

It's been a year since I got into baking and it has become one of my hobbies that I look forward to every weekend. I bake something atleast once a week, which my family really appreciates and enjoys the end results. Some say baking is therapeutic and brings joy. I totally agree!

This post is an attempt to help others who want to get into baking but don't know how. What's the first step? Buying an oven, ofcourse? Not really, some use pressure cooker to bake cakes but I haven't tried that method yet. I have a LG 28 litres convection microwave oven. There have been many debates on OTG v/s convection but for a small scale home requirement, I find convection oven to be perfect. It occupies less space and cakes/muffins come out good. The only regret is that I could have purchased a slightly bigger one, to make a bigger batch of cookies/muffins. For a family of 3 (2 adults + 1 child), 28 litres is adequate but for a bigger family, I would recommend you invest in a 30 ltrs+ model.

Next comes the accessories. Most MW ovens come with a baking pan/tava that you could use for baking pizza, cookies etc. For baking cakes, I have 3 pans - a 4" square pan, a 8" round pan and a medium loaf pan. I also have a muffin tin that can hold upto 6 muffins. All are made of aluminum and you can get them easily from any supermarket.

Apart from these, you need a mixing bowl, a hand whisk, a sifting plate and measuring cups. Any broad steel vessel/frying pan would be perfect as a mixing bowl. You don't have to invest in a delicate glass bowl. Measuring cups and spoons are a must and they are easily available too.

Now comes the basic baking ingredients to stock in the pantry - flour, sweetener and fat.

Before I ventured into baking, all-purpose flour (maida) never found a place in my grocery list. But it has become a regular now. I usually try to tweak the flour proportion with 50:50 wholewheat flour : maida so it's relatively healthier.

For sweetener, I usually substitute either sulphur-free brown sugar or organic powdered jaggery in place of white sugar. But I would suggest you to start off with regular sugar and once you try out a few recipes, then experiment with these substitutions ;-)

For the fat, I use either sunflower oil or rice bran oil for cakes and unsalted butter for cookies.

Buy good quality baking powder and baking soda. Store them in air-tight containers.
Buy good quality unsweetened cocoa powder. I use Cadbury. I have heard Hersheys is good too.
Also have vanilla extract handy. I usually buy a small bottle of Bush vanilla essence.
I prefer to bake eggless recipes. But if you don't mind eggs in your cakes, make sure you have some fresh eggs stocked up in your pantry.

Now, you are all set to bake.

There are loads of recipes available but figuring out which one to bake when you have the urge to bake something is the tricky part. Many days, I would happily browse one recipe after another, without realizing 30 minutes has whizzed past by then :-)

Here are some of the recipes (eggless) which I have tried many times and have worked out very well.

Muffins:
Banana muffins
Apple cinnamon muffins
Chocolate muffins
Lemon cupcakes

Cakes:
Carrot cake
Chocolate cake
Gingerbread spiced cake
Strawberry yoghurt cake
Chocolate nuts cake
Brownies
Banana walnut cake 

Cookies:
Oatmeal raisin cookies
Ragi cookies
Cumin cookies
Chocochip oatmeal cookies
Jowar coconut cookies

Other minor aspects to keep in mind:

• Ensure you have undistracted time of atleast 20 minutes before you get into baking. I usually bake when my little one takes her nap in the afternoons.
• Baking requires multiple dishes/pans/cups/spoons etc. So if your maid/househelp has informed you of leave the next day, postpone the baking plan :-)
• I usually don't ice or frost my cakes. The amount of oil and sugar that goes into the base of the cake in itself makes me feel a little worried on the health factor. But do try out icing your cake once in a while. It looks pretty and tastes yummy too.
• Plan for power fluctuations if they occur in your home in a predictable manner. I have heard eggless cakes are unforgiving if power goes off in the middle of baking. So far, I have faced this problem only once (touchwood!) and the power came back in 10 minutes.
• You can easily substitute with other flours and sugar substitutes to make healthier cakes. In any case, Home-baked ones are way better as compared to the ones available in the bakery.

Do share your comments if you have any questions. I'll continue to write about how my baking adventure is progressing!

5 lessons I learnt on startup scaling

Around 3-4 months back, I visited a new health themed restaurant to have lunch with my family. We were the only visitors that Sunday afternoon. The car parking lot right outside their entrance was completely free. We had a delicious and filling meal and the service was good too. They offered a nice spread (thali) with multiple healthy dishes. And the prices were very reasonable. We came back with happy memories of this place. I shared a short review of this restaurant with my friends in Facebook too.

Last week, we had some errands to run in the same vicinity where this restaurant is located. So we decided to have lunch there. To our surprise, there were no parking lots available. When we went inside, the restaurant was packed, with 2 waiters running around. I sat with my daughter in one of the free chairs, which a graceful elderly couple shared. Since we were hungry, we placed the order while waiting for the tables to free up. After around 15 minutes, a family left a table and we quickly grabbed the seats. The used plates were lying around for nearly 5 minutes and we had to "ask" the waiters explicitly to clear the table. There was a young lady, seated next to our table who was arguing with a waiter about the delay in serving food. It took them another 15 minutes to serve food for us. By then, my toddler girl was getting restless and wanted to run around. The even more surprising factor was that the menu had been changed, with reduced spread of dishes in the thali. The price had been doubled for less quantity of food. Though we gobbled up the food and would have eaten more, we were in no mood to top up our order, as we realized it's going to take ages for them to serve additional dishes.

When we reached the billing counter, there was still some more waiting time in getting the bill ready and making the payment. Overall, it was the exact opposite experience that we faced in the same restaurant, just a few months back. After this bitter experience, we decided not to go back there again.

This whole experience taught me five important lessons that startup founders need to keep in mind, as they scale:

1) Customers don't care whether you are growing or not. They expect the same level of service and experience that they received from you when you were a small, hustling startup in the proving stage.

2) It might be hard to predict the customer demand but there has to be some parameters that need to be well understood in order to meet the demand, as and when it arises. This is even more applicable for service based industries. What are the different situations/scenarios that would motivate a customer to reach out to your product/service? For instance, in the case of a health focused restaurant that's gaining popularity, they should be able to plan for certain demand triggering factors - a Sunday afternoon, no festivals/long weekend, first Sunday of the month, a New Year just started (early Feb is still new year!) when people make health based resolutions etc.

3) Understand the factors that are important to your target audience. These don't change whether you are small or growing fast. In this scenario, reduced portion sizes for higher costs, longer waiting times and service delays were the key issues that marred the experience. Healthy food is an important differentiating concept. But this factor alone wasn't sufficient. Also, more than the increased costs, the poor service levels really pushed us to the limits. I sensed the same feeling around.

4) It is not only important to understand your customers' needs but also to have a clear idea about your own strengths and limitations/constraints. In this case, since you know you have limited waiters, it would have better to stick to a fixed meal menu than provide for an ala-carte. Yes, ala-carte gives customers more choices and in the process, helps you to increase your prices but it leaves a bad taste if you are not able to meet the demands.

5) Last but not the least, one bad experience can render all your initial good efforts to wow your customers useless. Talk about the power of recency effect !

The growling hunger pangs

I'm a stickler for timings when it comes to my meals. I prefer to eat on time (mostly!). If someone takes up my time while my stomach is growling, I get extremely irritated. The Sneakers ad must have been based on my reactions, I suppose. Due to a certain miscommunication, I had to wait at my daughter's pediatrician clinic today for nearly an hour during lunch time. My temper was at its peak and D was her "naughtiest" self during the wait time. Though I ensured she ate her lunch, it didn't occur to me that I should have atleast grabbed a banana before stepping out. Thankfully, I kept my temper under control and it wasn't lashed out on anyone close (*hubby* dear!).

While eating my lunch at 3 PM today, I couldn't help but remember one of my ex-bosses who had this habit of scheduling meetings between 12 and 2 PM. He is one of the best bosses, mind you. But I didn't have the guts to tell him that the timings weren't working for me. Those were the days when eating healthy wasn't one of my priorities. After the meeting, I would rush to the nearest Darshini and gobble up rawa idlis or a South Indian thali.

Last week, I had a customer meeting at 2 PM. I happily ate an early lunch at home and reached on time. My colleague who traveled from a different city with back-to-back meetings came rushing for this meeting. I asked him "Did you have lunch?". He replied "No, I haven't had my breakfast too. Just ate a few biscuits". I was shocked and saddened. Felt a little guilty too, thinking I should have brought something.

People who are in business development or sales had to travel so much that their eating habits go for a toss. 1 or 2 days is somewhat okay but regularly skipping meals or eating very late is unhealthy and can cause serious health issues like acidity, heart burn, ulcer etc.

It's the responsibility of the individual as well as the organization to ensure *eating on time* is given a priority. There is no point in having fancy cafeterias, exotic menus and salad counters, unless the employee gets enough time to sit down and eat.

Been a while since I ranted anything in my blog. Purpose achieved :-) Do share if you have been in similar situations. Does your hunger bring out the best or worst in you?

5 reasons why you should develop the practice of writing at work

peteoshea / CC BY 2.0

For anyone dealing with knowledge work that requires deeper thinking, analysis, unraveling assumptions and developing solutions, writing is a must-have skill. Whatever be your role - a developer, designer, product manager, marketer, analyst etc, I would highly recommend that you develop writing as a conscious practice. I'll give you 5 reasons why you should invest diligently in this practice.

1) Provides clarity
A vague problem for which I seek solutions becomes more clear if I sit down and write about the problem statement in actual words. It gives great clarity and helps me to think through the problem scenarios in great detail.

2) Gives directions
As I write down the problem statement, I automatically reflect and think through the causes and context. It also helps me to go deeper into various aspects of the problem and the expected outcome. As a result, I have a good "approach" or steps that I need to take to solve the problem. It doesn't have to be detailed paragraphs, it could be a simple workflow diagram on a piece of paper or a whiteboard.

3) Brings vague assumptions to the fore-front
Many times, when we brainstorm as a team or when we decide on a specific solution, there are multiple assumptions that drive our decision making. Writing inculcates the discipline of consciously noting down the assumptions. You might even start to wonder why you had a certain assumption in the first place.

4) Focuses on the problem
As I had written earlier, for any problem at hand, we like to jump at the solution immediately. It would be interesting to read up on research that has been done to check the levels of dopamine when we come across an interesting problem to solve. More often, the process of solving takes away our focus from the problem itself. Writing helps us to structure our thinking where we get a good grip on the problem and then navigate towards possible solutions.

5) Enables effective communication
Having been in the software products space for 10+ years, I can see how a Product Requirements Document (PRD) has undergone significant changes from the bulky 100 pager to a lean 2 pager wiki + wireframe. But the underlying need of communicating effectively with your team still remains the same. Writing helps you to foresee the potential questions that your team, partners or customers might have and can even enable you to convince them on why a certain approach/strategy that you are proposing is important.

Apart from these reasons, the power of written words also increases accountability among the team members. Random hall-way discussions and ideas work but in order to execute them effectively, writing them down in a way that brings clarity to the forefront is a key ingredient to success.

Book Review: Delivering Happiness

I'm starting off 2015 reading list with this interesting book on organization culture and customer service - "Delivering Happiness". When we talk about best work culture, there are few firms that come to our mind instantly - Google, Hubspot, Buffer and the pioneer of them all, Zappos. This book is a first-person account of how Tony Hsieh grew Zappos from ground-up, the challenges faced and the foundations laid towards the best customer service and inspiring work culture.

There are multiple lessons for people building startups as well as for those who are looking to focus on customer experience/service as their core strategy. What I really like about in this book is that it doesn't jump into the HOWs of customer service. Rather, Tony has taken the time to talk about his entrepreneurship journey and the lessons learned along the way since childhood. It gives the reader good insights into the thought process of WHYs of customer service and organization culture.  His adventures into various ways of earning money during childhood days provide some interesting and fun moments in the initial few chapters.

The tough calls Tony and his team had to make in the initial years of Zappos, the downturn, pivoting towards warehousing instead of drop-shipping, convincing vendors towards the e-commerce model, taking control of running the warehouse instead of outsourcing to a third-party - there were multiple take-aways in these chapters for anyone in the e-commerce business.

Great customer service and providing a high quality customer experience eventually became their larger vision and a greater purpose. Some of the ways by which they managed to accomplish this goal are running a 24/7 warehouse, surprise shipping upgrades, no-script call procedures where the reps are empowered to use their best judgment etc.

As they embarked on this journey, they also realized that having a strong organization culture is a powerful trigger to provide a superior customer service. They invested efforts towards creating a "Culture book" with inputs from employees and vendors. Culture was formally defined by means of 10 core values. I loved the way the author has taken time to elaborate each core value through examples and case studies.

He had also shared an interesting anecdote around how he improved his public speaking skills. He has shared 3 rules for delivering a great speech:
1. Be passionate
2. Tell personal stories
3. Be real

Towards the end, the chapter on happiness and various frameworks around the factors that contribute to happiness are insightful. I plan to spend some time learning these frameworks in depth, as these are very relevant for both individual and organization purpose. 

Some of the quotes from the book that I loved

"Envision, create and believe in your own universe"

"Never outsource your core competency"

"Telephone is one of the best branding devices out there. You have the customer's undivided attention for 5-10 minutes and if you get the interaction right, the customer remembers the experience for a very long time"

"Your culture is your brand"

"For individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny"

My most favorite of them all

"If you just focus on making sure that your product or service continually WOWs people, eventually the press will find out about it. You don't need to put a lot of effort into reaching out to the press if your company naturally creates interesting stories as a by-product of delivering a great product or experience"