What’s Common Between Lord Ventakeshwara and Cake?

Disclaimer: I was not forced or coerced into writing this. This is no marketing spiel. This is genuinely my own experience written as it unfolded 🙂

---

A couple of years ago, I was looking for options to get a custom cake for my daughter’s 16th birthday. A girl doesn’t turn 16 often, so the cake had to be special. A friend gave me the contact information of a custom cake maker.

I reached out to her and sent her all the options I had in mind. I was not sure she could pull off the fancy designs I had found on Pinterest. But she was pretty chill. ‘No problem,’ she said. And that was that.

On the very important day of my girl’s 16th birthday, the gorgeous cake arrived home. The peony was literally the icing on the cake and looked exquisite.

Cake pic by Anu Anniah

Now, we usually assume that if something looks good, it may not taste as good, right? We feel like all the attention has been lavished on the looks department and there was probably no time for the actual cooking and prep work. We were dead wrong in this case. The beautiful chocolate center cake was so delectably tasty that we just couldn’t get enough of it. Even the edible icing flowers were eaten up at top speed.

And thus started a long association with the Cake Girl. I went back to her repeatedly over the year for custom cakes that were both beautifully crafted and super yummy. We had a slew of 50th birthday parties among my friends. I tried to get custom cakes to suit the personality of some of these golden birthday babies. Cake Girl always delivered on both quality and aesthetics. Everyone was left licking their fingers and asking for her contact information.

A shopping-themed cake for a shopaholic friend

A travel-themed cake for a – well – a traveloholic!

And so on. I’ve kept Cake Girl busy. 🙂

In addition to designer cakes, Cake Girl also does this thing where she sells slices of 2 varieties of cakes on one day of each week. One of the flavors is chocolate-based and the other is – well I don’t really care. I don’t look beyond chocolate. The slices are limited in number and are usually gone before I see her announcement on Instagram. Aargh! We’ve managed to order a slice a couple of times so far and I love seeing the gleam in my husband’s eyes when he eats a piece. He is normally a Zen creature, but Cake Girl’s cake slices bring out a side of him that is very rare. He positively drools at the very mention of her cakes.

Now, this is all very well, and I’ve given you a lot of cake for thought. But where does our Lord Venky come in?

---

A few months after I discovered Cake Girl, I played the Venkateshwara Suprabhata one morning. A short while after MS Subbalakshmi started singing, I found myself thinking of Cake Girl’s cake. Hmm!?

This happened again a few days later. I felt like Pavlov’s dog. I tried to work out why this was happening. What was the connection?

And then it hit me. See, I have this strange ability to hear a random word and think of a random song. Not so random, actually. It usually turns out that the word is embedded somewhere in the song. The word doesn’t have to be in the opening lines of the song. It could be anywhere. The search algorithm in my brain latches on to the word, pulls up the song, and plays it in my head on a loop.

For example, if I hear the word ‘chain’ regardless of whether it is in English or Hindi, this song usually starts in my head:

Badan pe sitare lapete hue
O jaane tammanna kidar jaa rahe ho
Zara paas aao, to chain aa jaaye

‘Chain’ is somewhere in the song. But the mere mention of the word is enough to start the entire song in my head. A friend once commented that my search algorithm is better than that of Google 🙂 Hehe – cheap thrill moment!

---

Cake Girl’s name is Uthishta. If you know the Suprabhata, you figured out what is happening already.

If not, here is how the first few sentences of the Suprabhata go:

Kousalya supraja rama poorva sandhya pravarthathe
Uttishta narasardula karthavyam dhaivamanhikam
Uthishtothishta govinda uthishta garuda dwaja
Uthishta kamalakantha trilokyam mangalam kuru

See what I mean? Cake Girl’s name appears so often in the Suprabhata.

Suprabhata -> Uthishta -> Cake

Therefore, Suprabhata = cake

My brain quickly connects the dots and places Cake Girl Uthishta’s delectable cake slices in my head each time I play the Suprabhata. There is no escaping the connection. This happens every.time.without.fail!

---

If all this has left you craving a slice of gooey, sinful cake, reach out to the Cake Girl here:

https://www.instagram.com/uthishtakumar/