the cake scam

Dec 17, 2020
By Ragini Chatterjee
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College does things to people. Catherine was an enthusiastic Mathematics major I met during the orientation week. She was from Bangalore and we bonded over the weather, as is the ritual for all habitants of the city. However, two semesters and 8 foundation courses later I think, she disappeared. Her place was taken up by this alien with the most peculiar obsession with Maggi. Most people are ‘obsessed’ with some kind of food but her obsession was slowly taking over her personality and her dorm wall. Every time she had a packet of Maggi, she stuck the wrapper on her wall. By the end of the second year, her wall was plastic.

Catherine’s story was tragic but it helped illuminate a bigger problem faced by starving students stuck on an isolated campus. The lack of food options combined with murky waters at the mess led people to desperation. At the start of my second year, I had identified this problem as I too fell victim to the same affliction. Additionally, my economic nose smelled some money to be made.

Growing up, I was a bit of a sugar addict and after indulging in the offerings of every bakery in town, I resorted to baking. I knew that the most delicious cakes were simple ones and they usually required four basic ingredients – eggs, butter, flour, and sugar. To minimise costs, I tried to source much of this from our mess. Luckily, the breakfast buffet gave me unlimited access to three of these ingredients. Breakfast was the only meal the mess didn’t really mess up. Primarily because pouring Chocos from a box wasn’t a culinary skill!

However, there was always some variation of egg they would manage to ruin.This worked in my favour – if I went early enough, the chef would give me raw eggs. The chef knew he was cooking them 5 seconds too long leading to burnt eggs, but he was doing so to prevent any accusations of stomach-aches. The mess also offered sugar for coffee and butter for bread. So, while I wolfed down my breakfast, I would fill my coffee cup with sugar and my Chocos bowl with butter whilst balancing my four raw eggs on my steel plate. I would make sure I ate breakfast at 7.30 am, when most of the campus was asleep, in order to avoid unnecessary judgement. I asked my friends who lived in Delhi for flour and they laughed at me when I wanted to compensate them for it. The only money I saw leaving my pocket was 40 rupees for icing sugar, the odd box of whipping cream, or chocolate.

I tried my very best to utilise all the ingredients offered by the mess. Coffee powder meant coffee cake, pineapples for breakfast led to a pineapple upside-down cake. Soon I realised that the milk we were getting was of a higher fat percentage than normal milk and I used it to make salted caramel cake. I got the word out by sending a blast mail. I remember sending a mail before going for dinner at 8 pm and returning to find a line in my room corridor. Another area I saved money on was disposable plates. Asking people to get their own utensils was not only very economical but also environmentally conscious.

All of this was done on a profitable small scale, using the ovens situated on the ground floor of our dorms. It was extremely profitable as the cakes would sell at 800 rupees, which was cheap enough to ensure they would be sold within two hours. Additionally, the business took almost none of my time because I sold the cakes from my dorm room; the batter and the icing took 15 minutes each; and for the two hours the cake was baking I busied myself with other chores (like laundry).

Scaling the business would have not only taken up some of my time previously allocated for studying but would have also raised questions of thievery. I didn’t think the mess meal providers would take kindly to my parasitic business model. This belief was fortified by the imposition of a ration system a week after the manager and members of his staff caught me smuggling a Kinley bottle’s worth of milk back to my dorm!

And thus my entrepreneurship came to a halt!