Well, if upon seeing this title you think I’m a dud at Maths, I won’t blame you. I have never really been good at maths and once I ran out of 10 fingers, I just couldn’t add any more – especially not in school when it was compulsory to wear socks and shoes. Of course I could resort to making lines or other such signs to help me count but everyone knows that there are just so many lines you can draw on a line/page before having the sum drowned in lines. Besides, this post is not about my mathematical ability, it is about how 2 + 2 doesn’t always add up to five. At least not in my kitchen.

Way back in school when we had just learnt baking, I decided to make a cake at home. I followed the recipe to the last comma and full stop being a newbie cook. But when I went to remove it from the oven after the required time I found that the tray was empty. Till today I can’t figure out what happened to make the cake evaporate/sublimate or whatever – but vanish it did.

Yesterday I had a strange experience when I was making Shrikhand – a dessert made of hung curd. Now if you want to know how this is made, please visit my other blog where I’ve given the recipe of this delicious, creamy dessert.

However this blog is not about the recipe. It is about a strange phenomenon that made the total weight of the dessert less than the individual weights of the ingredients. In other words, how did

1 kg hung curd + 500 g grain sugar = 1 kg Shrikhand?

Mathematically speaking since you can’t add apples and pears, hung curd and grain sugar can’t really be added hence you can’t get a total weight or combined weight of two dissimilar entities.

On the other hand, physically I did manage to combine 1 kg of hung curd with 500 g grain sugar – spending a good hour in the process – so what happened to the 500 g of sugar? How did I still land up with only one kilo of Shrikhand?

For that matter, even the volume remained the same, so did that mean that the sugar that dissolved actually had no weight? If that is the case, why does the 1 scoop of icecream reflect on my total weight when I stand on the weighing scale?

Someone, please do tell me!