A few days ago, I chanced upon this new bakery in the Western Mumbai suburbs: Bindaas Binge. I have never heard anybody bemoaning the fact that the suburbs do not sell cheesecakes. But Mona and Vikas, the couple that started this swank new place, most unexpectedly nestled on Film City road, Goregaon East, seriously, seriously love cheesecakes.

 

Mona, who is a baker at heart and Vikas, who has always wanted to get into the food business, decided that they were tired of making trips to town or at least to Andheri, to get a decent cake. Especially decent cheesecake. So one day, they decided they had had enough. They had to introduce the suburb and lesser mortals to the culinary pathway to immortality: cream cheese. And no ordinary cream cheese at that. We are talking Philadelphia Cream Cheese.

While Mona and Vikas seem to have given us a dose of the usual, like the Philly Cheesecake and Blueberry Cheesecake, they have also played around with possibilities. They have introduced their own cheesecake inventions on the menu, which they change every 10 days, to keep up with seasonally available fruit. Which means you run into a Mixed Berry Cheesecake, Cranberry Cheesecake, Sangria Cheesecake, Green Apple Cheesecake (our personal favourite) and Alphonso Mango Cheesecake. Each cheesecake is a work of art, striking the right balance of flavour, texture and drop-dead good looks.

Then, of course, there’s cakes. Mona and Vikas tell us that they keep experimenting with flavours and their menu – they may be all of three months old but they have already changed the menu several times – right from a Bubble Gum Cake, which is a hit with kids, to Watermelon Cake, which is a heat blaster perfect for summers, they have done it all.

Bindaas Binge also supplies to several restaurants and up-market hotels because although new, they’ve committed to one thing: the best of ingredients. They make their own fondant instead of buying the commercially available cardboardy fondant, they import the best of preserves and fillings and they add no preservatives. This means that shelf life is limited and they work with lemon juice as the only natural preservative.

This place gets dead crowded as there is high demand for a place starved of seriously good bakes. And considering this is the only place from Jogeshwari to Borivali doing such mind blowing cakes and cheesecakes at such awesome rates, we predict they are going to go a long, long way.

Mona and Vikas are seriously passionate about their food and their bakery – so if you drop in, give them some solid feedback. Tell them you love their stuff if you do and you will have made two artists very, very happy.

 

Reema Prasanna is a Search Engine Marketing expert, Xoogler, baking expert and blogger. More about her here http://about.me/reema.prasanna