A licence to be creative

Have you ever tried parcelling desserts? If yes, then you know what a pain it can be — the sugary sweet leaks on to your clothes, the cake turns dry and if there’s icing, it will probably stick to the container. This is why dessert jars are slowly becoming popular in the city; they are easy to carry and it’s hard to create a mess when eating them.

Many bakers and restaurants have started serving sweet goods in jars of different sizes. Not a new concept on its own, it is slowly consuming the Indian culinary market now. While mason, Nutella and jam jars are used often to serve shakes and drinks, dessert jars are yet to catch on but it won’t be long before everyone wants a dessert in a jar.

Gauthami Shankar, founder of ‘Sprinkled’, says she first saw desserts in jars when she was travelling abroad last year. “I wanted to try something unique so I decided to incorporate the idea with my desserts,” she explains. ‘Fudgey chocolate brownie’, blueberry cheesecake, red velvet cake with frosting, ‘Cookie monster’ and tiramisu are her most popular jarred desserts.

She adds that this concept has become popular now because it’s convenient for take-aways, easy to consume and recyclable. And since the glass jars are simple and transparent, they allow for artistic intervention. “We bake the cake in a tin and layer the dessert inside the jar.” So for the tiramisu, the biscuit is baked separately but the mascarpone is added inside the jar.

While this might seem a bit tedious, bakers say that it is worth the effort. Mansi Chandan, founder of ‘Cream Castle’, says that assembling the dessert inside the little jar is the hardest but since one can get creative, it is worth the effort.

‘InnerChef’ serves its customers a small, cute jar of rainbow cake, which is not only appealing to the taste buds but also the eyes. Manvi Mahana, head of marketplace at ‘InnerChef’, says that customers love this idea as they can reuse the jars once the dessert is finished. They might be expensive but the prices don’t vary too much, which people seem to like.

Talking about creative license, ‘The Thickshake Factory’ has come with a series called ‘Insane Thickshakes’, which is a beautiful mix of shake and dessert. M Yeshwanth Nag, the co-founder of the eatery, says the ‘Insane Ferrero Nutella Bomb’ is their most popular dessert jar. “It is an insane collage of hazelnut, chocolate ice cream topped with chocolate fudge, Nutella, Ferrero Rochers and chocolate syrup!” he says. The dessert is topped in such a way that it stands much above the length of the jar, and it seems like the glass is only an accessory.

With such innovative techniques appearing, the dessert world is becoming more and more tempting by the day.