I had a fascination with cooking & baking since childhood. Watching cooking shows on TV and reading cookbooks used to be my favorite pastime. In fact, I remember my passion for baking led to a number of kitchen disasters. Growing up in a small town of Bihar, I couldn’t expect to get all the required ingredients, but my enthusiasm and genuine warmth used to melt that inner resistance. I would replace required ingredients with the available ones and managed to bake almost all kinds of cake, hard cake, burnt cake, sometimes cake would turn into biscuit, haha!
Memories. One should always make some, at least to get a good dose of laughter.

Once I was in the process of making a strawberry pie and asked my dad to get me some fresh strawberries, but even the fanciest store of the town did not have them. I settled down with banana bread that day but that incident somehow gave me the perception that strawberry falls in the category of those exotic fruits, which only a person of substance can afford. Maybe because of its unavailability in that small town.

After a few years when I moved to New Delhi and saw this exotic (exotic to me) berry, I fell in love with that intoxicating fragrance of ripened, bright red fruit enwrapped with those tiny golden seeds. Strawberries have always been most loved fruit among the chefs across the world who continue to rediscover the best possible utilization of this sweet-scented fruit to flavor cakes and desserts alike.  The characteristic aroma and that mild acidic taste somehow blend together so beautifully to create a wide selection of sophisticated desserts. But of all the various uses, the one I love is this strawberry shake/smoothie that can be whipped up for a quick morning breakfast.