The Bakery Trail

Biscuits. Rare is the person who has not eaten biscuits, sweet, salty, or spicy. There are thousands of varieties of biscuits or cookies all over the world. Each country has its own speciality, be it shortbreads, butter cookies, or sandwich cookies, and the list is endless.

Growing up in Pune, our biscuits and cakes were from the famous Parsi bakeries which Pune is famous for, namely Kayani Bakery, Royal Bakery, and Pasteur Bakery, to name a few. These bakeries sell biscuits and cakes with recipes which are handed down over generations, and the best part is that over the years the taste and quality remains the same. Anyone who has been to Pune will vouch for the melt-in-your-mouth Shrewsbury biscuits of Kayani Bakery or the cheese papadi, and not forgetting the khari puff biscuits. It is no wonder that their cakes, biscuits, and breads are sold out even as they are made. Each bakery has its speciality which loyal customers keep going back for.

I remember how Baba wanted bread only from Royal Bakery, and mummy used to tell me to go pick it up, and me cutting across Bhimpura Lane to buy the bread happily because it gave me a chance to go to my favourite library, the Punjab Library, where the owner, Uncle Manguram, had the most fabulous collection of Mills and Boon books and comics. Royal Bakery also had the most amazing glass cakes, so called because of their shape. These buttery milky cakes were super soft. Pune in the 1970s had some pretty well known bakeries, many of them still around even today. Sadly some have shut down, like the Sham Sunder Bakery, where nankhatais were really delicious. Those were the good old days.

I am not too much into baking, but recently my son Sagar encouraged me to start baking cookies, and so began the search for some of my old recipes for cookies. Today I share with you a recipe for coconut cookies. These remain crisp for a long time due to the pure butter used.

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Coconut Cookies

Ingredients

• 225 gms unsalted Anchor butter
• 225 gms sugar
• 1½ cups flour
• 1½ cups desiccated coconut
• ¼ tsp salt
• 1 tsp vanilla essence

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Method

• Preheat your oven to 160 degrees Celsius and line a baking tray with butter paper.
• Beat
  • butter and
  • sugar
    together with an electric mixer until light and fluffy.
• Add
  • salt and
  • vanilla essence
    and mix well.
• Fold in
  • flour and
  • desiccated coconut
    gently until combined.
• Refrigerate the dough for 30 minutes.
• Make small balls of about 4 gms each and place them on the baking tray.
• Flatten them gently with your fingers, leaving some space between each cookie.
  I make these in batches of 30.
• Put the tray into the preheated oven and bake for 12 to 15 minutes.
• As soon as you see the edges turning slightly brown, remove the cookies and transfer them onto a wire rack to cool.
• Bake the remaining batches. From this recipe you will get around 150 small crisp cookies.

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If you like a slightly chewy texture, then do not flatten the cookies.