Delhiites, is there enough alcohol for your Christmas dessert?

Home bakers dealing with liquor shortage in the city rue about not being able to find rum, red wine and brandy to prepare the Christmas desserts that are in much demand during this time of the year.

It’s the time to order plum cakes, puddings, ginger breads, stollens, and everything Christmassy. But, just when it’s time for the home bakers in the Capital to bake these treats, it’s also time for them to struggle with procuring a crucial ingredient for Xmas baking, that is alcohol. The liquor shortage in Delhi seems to have found its way to the shops of home bakers who are ruing about the hard times they are facing to find wine, brandy and rum to make Christmas desserts. Some are sourcing it from areas around Delhi, some are opting for expensive variants to be able to stick to their original recipes, and some are altering their recipes to make do with whatever is available. So will your Christmas cake and desserts be enough gooey this year?

From using more expensive variants to buying liquor, for rum cakes and other desserts, from Gurugram and Noida, Delhi based home bakers are trying to cope with the liquor shortage in the city. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Rum, wine and whine

Gaurri Gupta from As Simple As Pie says that she faced a major issue in sourcing rum, and had to bring some changes in her recipe to avoid using alcohol. “This liquor shortage in Delhi is a big problem. A few days back, I could not find something as normal as one specific brand of rum, and ultimately had to alter my recipes. In fact, it became so bad that I was forced to turn back customers who came with high hopes to indulge in delicacies. With wine there’s a similar,” she says.

Gurugram, Noida come to the rescue!

With empty shelves at liquor shops in almost every part of the city, home bakers have started exploring shops outside the city, to meet the high demand for bakes at this time of the year. “Be it rum, brandy or red wine, nothing is available readily for professional bakers like us in Delhi. In fact, I couldn’t just sit and do nothing so at one point decided to source my stock from Gurugram. But that too was possible with great difficulty. It’s quite a challenge to bake to perfection the Christmas delights, if an important ingredient is missing,” says Shikha Sachdeva from The Culinary Courtyard.

With only a few selective brands available in the liquor shops, some home bakers are being forced to use high end, expensive brands to bake the Christmas cakes. “We use the regular rum, which is not available at all. Only the gold version is available, which gets expensive when we need it in higher quantity. And we can’t increase the cost of the desserts we make since the market is already so competitive,” shares Sachdeva. And Deeksha Dhingra, from Zana Patisserie, adds, “Being a small home baker it’s really difficult for me to manage this because it’s costing me double of what it was earlier! Sometimes I have to bear the excess cost because when I confirm an order for a cake, I have to quote the price to them at that very moment. And having already quoted the price, I can’t change it later else people will feat cheated. And I have tried to increase the price as well, but it has only lead to some cancellations, which is sad. It’s a tricky situation to be in.”

The essence of it all

With limited quantity of alcohol available, using rum essence is another option that some home bakers have taken to exploring, in the need to deliver their Christmas orders in time. Ritu Dutt from Essenzaa, says, “For the rum cakes, I am using essence. A lot of other home bakers are also doing this to deal with this crises. So, either you use a less quantity of rum and use these essences instead or you could also just use the essence; like how we do it for those customers who don’t want alcohol in their cake. It gives a flavour of the rum cake without the rum. We are of course informing the customer that we are not using rum or using less quantity. But this has an automatical impact on the prices as well, and decreases them.”

Author tweets @anjuri

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