Bakery items!

One of those moments of hunger pangs and i was transported back to childhood days.
A walk to the nearest bakery and there are so many varieties to choose from.

This is not the high-end fancy place where you get pastries, croissants, quiche and other unpronounceable delicacies.
This is good old Mr L J Iyengar's bakery whipping out yummy stuff using his imagination. Such bakeries are common in the city where i live.
Slowly being replaced by high-end pastry shops and cafes. For some reason, most of these bakeries are named after L J Iyengar.(who is this guy anyway?)

The most common one was the vegetable puff with the palya* in it.
And who can forget the Alu bun. Back in school days i stopped eating it for a while when someone told me that they actually put all the potatoes in a sack and stomp on it to mash them! Then there is the "toast", so called because it is made of a slice of bread toasted and covered with the yummiest onion palya.

And then there is the dil khush, dil pasand, our own desi version of pizza with a filling :D The filling is a sickly sweet combination of tutti-fruity, coconut, raisins. Just thinking about is makes my mouth water.

It was a Saturday morning ritual in school for us to go the nearest Nilgiris(the slightly upscale version of an LJ Iyengar bakery!) and ask for apple cake. This black-brown round cake-thing was rumored to have been made from leftover of other cakes. And then there are the honey cake and sponge cake. Oh the sheer joy of biting into one of these :)

I haven't even gotten started on the biscuits** and rusks. Benne biscuit, khara biscuit , koppri biscuit.

My cousins born and raised abroad never miss an opportunity to eat the milk/sweet bread which is not available in their countries!

You won't get to see any of the multi-grain/ brown-bread/low cal/no trans fatty acid stuff here. There is only place for heavenly mouth-watering goodies made of maida/vanspathi. And yes, they are always called bakery "items".


* filling made of vegetables
** cookies