I'm just back from a wild goose chase through the sillier realms of online Indian humor (not Native American but south Asian), for which I blame my son.
It's not his fault, really. All he did was turn 22, something that was bound to happen with or without my approval. For the past three years he has stayed in Texas summers so I've missed seeing him on his birthday, but more importantly, I have missed baking him an annual birthday cake. One year I actually persuaded a person in Texas to bake him a cake and deliver it on his birthday, but somehow the scheme fell apart and the cake never arrived.
This year, though, I was determined to make up for lost time by baking him a cake to remember.
Well, he'll remember it all right. Its flavor and texture were unforgettable: dense chocolate layers slathered with raspberry jam and rich chocolate ganache and topped with fresh raspberries--yum!
You wouldn't want to remember its appearance, though. The ganache started out a little slippery, see, so that when someone who shall remain nameless picked up the cake platter to move the cake, the top layer started to slide first in one direction and then in another and a bunch of ganache went sloping down the sides and landed in a heap. We finally managed to stabilize the construction with toothpicks, but the finished product looked like the sort of unwholesome fungus you'd find growing under damp leaves in a graveyard.
Reluctant to let this little incident fade into the dim and distant recesses of memory, I've been busting rhymes related to birthday cake, but my attempts at doggerel have been hampered by the dearth of words rhyming with "ganache." Where do you go after "panache"? Moustache? Go smash?
"Funtoosh" has the right kind of sound to describe what happened to the cake, but first I need to find out for certain what it means. I've seen it in Salman Rushdie's writing in contexts suggesting something like "kaput," but Rushdie has been known to take the Humpty-Dumpty approach to words so I've been searching online to discover a definition for "funtoosh."
Go ahead, give it a try. Dictionary.com has no record of the word, suggesting instead "fantoosh," an adjective of Scots origin meaning pretentious or ostentatious. Wikipedia informs me that Funtoosh is the title of a 1956 Bollywood film. (Clips are available on Youtube.) A site called Funtoosh.com claims to be "India's biggest jokes and fun portal," and it certainly is big. There's a whole section devoted to jokes about cricket.
Chirp, chirp.
If I were at my office surrounded by reference books and plugged in to an excellent high-speed internet connection, I would work a little harder to find the definition, but there's a limit to how long I'll click and wait and click and wait on my slow dial-up connection at home and I have reached that limit. I don't know what "funtoosh" means and, frankly, I don't care. It sounds right so I'm using it.
Ahem:
Oh gosh! Ganache
went gush and smoosh,
and with panache
plopped down. Funtoosh!
Guard your moustache
from gloppy goo!
What's this? Delish!
Ganache por vous.
Now it's your turn: cook me up some tasty rhymes or serve up some stir-fried haiku. As long as it's memorable, who cares how it looks?
2 comments:
London Calling
‘aving set out to give the whole cake project plenty of welly
imagine my surprise when the actual result turned out to be smelly
a gooshed ganache like unto an ‘orse which, because it’s been knobbled,
limps past the post last, useless, like this load of old cobblers
D.
Thanks! I like the way you slipped "past the last post" in there (a little sideways). Apparently it's a postcolonial ganache.
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