Delhiwale: Old Delhi’s rose-tinted cakes

“Beauty’s rose might never die; roses have thorns… I have seen roses damask’d, but no roses see I in her cheeks.” These are some of Shakespeare’s many literary roses; the rose appears 13 times in his immortal love sonnets.
If Shakespeare, like Ghalib, had been a dweller of Old Delhi, his 154 sonnets would have had far more roses. For cakes and pastries in many Purani Dili bakeries tend to sculpt their creamy icing into the likeness of rose.
This afternoon, at Sikander Confectionery near Kucha Chelan, a creamy white cake is topped with a green rose and a red rose. A cake in Lakshmi Confectionery Shop, on Tiraha Bairam Khan, is decorated with three roses in blue, pink and red respectively. Another cake too has three roses—they are not of cream, they are real roses, blackish red.
The phenomenon is not common to the whole of Delhi. A foray into the major bakeries of Connaught Place and Khan Market failed to show a single cake or pastry showing any hint of rose.
“To us Purani Dilli wale, a cake looks tastier with gulab,” remarks Sabeeha Jhinjhianvi of Chitli Qabar Chowk. Her palate being more exposed to the cosmopolitan influences of her beloved Wenger’s Cake Shop and other iconic New Delhi bakeries, she has grown out of Old Delhi’s “gulab wale cake.” She says: “those gulab have too much cheeni and colours.”
Turning two this Independence Day on 15th August, the modestly named cake shop The Greatest Cake, which replaced an atta chakki (flour mill) on Shah Abul Khair Marg, is aggressively spearheading the heritage of creamy rose. The glass counter displays cakes with roses in white, brown, blue and yellow. The young rose maker’s desk in the back-kitchen is cluttered with a dozen bottles containing various food colours. A large bowl is filled with cloudy swirls of white cream. Muhammed Suhail, whose father too is in “bakery line,” learned “cake icing” in a Noida confectionery. Fresh cakes are supplied to his shop every morning by a distant bakery, which he then decorates with cream and colours. The fresh cream too arrives daily from a “supplier.”
“Gulab is a symbol of love,” observes Suhail, as he quickly rustles out a paper cone, crams it with cream, and squeezes the cream out of a nozzle onto a “flower stand.” A new rose is born in an instant. He sprays it with a shade of powdery red. “Gulab is the raja of flowers, and it is also easy to make.”
Graciously agreeing to a request, Suhail gets all the rose cakes from his counter, arranges them on his desk, and poses for a portrait.