Baked by Gargi Chhoker

SugarTime started the way most good home bakeries do — with one cake, for one child, that had to be exactly right. It was a solar system, and it had to have Pac-Man in it too, because that was the brief and the client was five.

What stuck wasn't the baking. It was the two seconds before the candles: the pause where a kid registers that someone made the thing they've been talking about for weeks. That's what we're actually in the business of. The cake is how you get there.

Everything is baked to order in a home studio in Gurugram — no display case, no batch sitting from yesterday. Sponges go in the oven the morning of delivery. Modelling and structural work happens the day before. Nothing is bought in.