Tucked into a residential pocket of Kharghar’s Sector 8, a modest bakehouse has, in less than a year, become a destination for dessert lovers from across Navi Mumbai. At Khari Biscuit, the draw is a compact menu of indulgent bakes, from tiramisu and Basque cheesecake to tres leches and gooey Nutella and brown-butter cookies.

The bakehouse, run by 25-year-old twins Shraddha and Shweta Sunil Paithankar, began as a pre-order operation in November last year. But customers soon started walking in asking for a pastry or dessert to eat on the spot. The sisters initially had little to offer them. That changed when they decided to turn the small space into a neighbourhood bakehouse earlier this year, adding a few foldable chairs, decorative lights and a board listing the day’s specials outside.

Today, production begins well before the shop opens at 1 pm. From one cake every couple of days in its early months, Khari Biscuit now prepares at least six large confectionery items a day, besides smaller desserts, cookies and pastries. By evening, some of its most popular items can already be nearing the end of their batches.

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Among them is the Basque cheesecake, for which the bakery prepares nearly six large cheesecakes every day. Yet by around 6 pm, stocks are often running low. The texture is deliberate. Unlike a conventional cheesecake, the Basque version is baked at a high temperature and intentionally left slightly underdone in the centre, then allowed to set for at least four hours after baking. “We underbake it and then give it at least four hours to set,” said Shraddha, who heads the baking operations.

The basque cheesecake and Tiramisu at Khari Biscuit, a bakehouse in Kharghar.

Getting that balance of a caramelised exterior and dense, custardy centre took nearly two months of experimentation. Temperatures, measurements, and ingredients were repeatedly altered as the sisters tried to recreate the richness they associated with cheesecakes at The Cheesecake Factory in the US.

The tres leches, meanwhile, was the dessert that put the bakehouse on the map. A Latin American sponge cake soaked in three kinds of milk, it found a ready audience in Navi Mumbai, where it was not easily available. An Instagram reel featuring the dessert brought a surge of attention. Customers began travelling from other parts of the city to try it. “For this (tres leches), I had to travel to Bandra twice a month but not anymore,” said one visitor from Nerul.

Tiramisu, however, proved a more complicated proposition. The challenge was not only the technique but finding ingredients that delivered the right flavour and texture — conventional cocoa powder and coffee left it gritty and muted. The search took the sisters across stores in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, until Shraddha recalled a coffee she had tasted in Bengaluru, made with beans from Pollibetta in Coorg. They now source their coffee from the region, while other ingredients, including cacao products and Maldon sea salt flakes, come from different parts of India.

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The menu was developed alongside the search for a location, with the sisters testing recipes and refining portions over nearly two months. The emphasis was on desserts they would themselves seek out — rich, carefully textured, and made with ingredients that could stand on their own.

The making of Khari Biscuit

While the knack for baking was always there, their curiosity peaked around the Covid-19 lockdown, when the twins began making cakes, cupcakes and pastries at home under their mother’s supervision. For Shraddha, the hobby became a professional pursuit after a six-month internship at JW Marriott in Juhu, where she spent her final month in the pastry department. She later worked in professional kitchens in Tennessee for two years before returning to India for a six-month bakery course at Lavonne Academy of Baking Science and Pastry Arts in Bengaluru.

Kharghar was eventually chosen as the location. Originally from Nashik, the sisters had spent much of the previous eight years there and saw the neighbourhood as offering a balance between accessibility and a quieter residential setting. “We found this neighbourhood to be the right amount of calm and chaos, amid Mumbai’s hectic schedule,” said Shweta, who handles the business side of the bakery, including social media, sourcing, inventory and marketing.

Khari Biscuit began as a pre-order-only operation before the sisters turned the space into a neighbourhood bakehouse, adding foldable chairs, decorative lights and a specials board outside.

The name, meanwhile, was decided much earlier. Khari Biscuit is a play on the popular Marathi film of the same name, as well as a nickname their elder brother used for the twins.

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For customers, though, it is the food that has become the calling card. The bakehouse operates from 1 pm to 11.30 pm, but the work doesn’t end with the last customer — from midnight until around 3 am, the sisters prepare desserts and pastries for the following day, a schedule that also allows certain items to rest and set before service.

What began as a cloud-kitchen-style operation has thus evolved into a small neighbourhood destination, one where people come looking for a slice of cheesecake, a spoonful of tres leches or a cup of tiramisu, and often stay longer than they intended.

For now, the sisters’ priority remains maintaining the quality of the Kharghar outlet even as they consider expanding the business later. At Khari Biscuit, the formula stays relatively simple: make fewer things well, source the right ingredients, and let the desserts bring people back.