Cupcake Revolution

Nearly everyone who knows me knows that I will seize any excuse to stuff you full of cake. Really. Any reason at all. It’s your birthday? Here, have some cake! It’s my birthday? Here, have some of my cake! You’re having a bbq? Why, it would be better if we had some cake! It’s Friday morning? Let there be cake! And so on.

But it’s only Mahmovies that allows me to really rev my kitchen engine because, for Mahmovies, I get to bake for the whole town. It’s a deluge of cupcakes! I bake and bake and bake all day until every level surface of my kitchen is covered in cupcakes. During last season, we christened our apartment “Le Chateau des Gâteaux.” Here is the sign I made this summer out of some scrap material.

Today is the second screening of this season, “Last Year in Marienbad,” for which I will create some chocolate cupcakes with chocolate icing and also tiramisu cupcakes (dark coffee cake with marscapone whipped cream icing). I don’t have a recipe for the latter, but I’m feeling confident.

Last week’s cupcakes (vanilla with vanilla icing and chocolate cheesecake) were a big success. In fact, to stay in keeping with the theme of the movie, “I am Cuba,” I think we have to call it A CUPCAKE REVOLUTION. As the icing on the cake (no pun intended), I even had a t-shirt to announce it so! The one and only Fatima Najm gave me a fabric cut-out of Che Guevara... and that evolved into this nice cupcake revolution t-shirt!

Fatima also gets credit for the other major innovation of this season, namely that all proceeds from cupcake sales will go to charity! My personal mission is “cupcakes for you = batatawada for them!” I’m working with a group called Creatives Against Poverty, which is a collective of journalists, consultants, photographers, NGO workers, entrepreneurs, etc. who pool and contribute skills for social impact. We support many different NGOs, one of which is the MESCO schools and nurseries in Mumbai (http://www.mescotrust.org). This organization works on the quality and affordability of education for children from the slums, who often fall through the cracks of the education system in India. My contribution particularly is towards the daily provision of batatawada (a potato patty sandwich), which is sometimes the only hot meal these kids get in a daily diet of stale bread and chili paste. MESCO started providing food when they realized that faintness and hunger pains were among the leading causes for student absenteeism. Now they include the expense of batatawada in their operating costs and they have a full, smiling class!



My goal is to raise enough money from the Mahmovies cupcakes to support an entire nursery of 20-30 kids with batatawada for 6 months.