Sweet Surprise
Bite into a pale coloured cupcake and you’ll taste flavours of fresh jackfruit and banana. Moist and mildly sweetened, Senthil Kumar Balu, 34, will quickly give away the secret ingredient and assure you refrigeration won’t leave it dry and crumbly. If you thought a diet and dessert don’t go together, Wholesome Rhapsody will make you rethink this. Made using millet, ragi, buckwheat and amaranth flour and sweetened with coconut or palm sugar, they also come in unusual flavours like sapota, carrot and jackfruit.
Balu, a cancer researcherturned-baker, didn’t set out to make a career in food. A cake baked on a whim while he was working as a professor in Australia got him thinking about ‘food as therapy’ and all the people who couldn’t have dessert because of dietary restrictions. “I used my research methodology to arrive at recipes. First it was the major ingredients being replaced for healthier alternatives, then minor things like flavour came into place,” he says. Fruit puree is used for flavour and homemade cream cheese work well as a topping. At Wholesome Rhapsody you can order cakes, cupcakes, jar desserts, sweet and savoury cookies with no preservatives or artificial colouring and customised desserts based on your diet. “I’ve made cakes for cancer patients using ingredients like turmeric and citrus pectin that are anti-cancer actives,” he says. tel 9176728176 price rs 1,650 per kg onwards