‘It Took Us Almost Five Years’: Nikita Rathod Bedre On Reviving Her Family’s Iconic Mawa Cakes
· Free Press Journal
For Nikita Rathod Bedre, Mawa Cakes are not just cakes… They are a part of her childhood. Even the smell ignites a nostalgia for her. She grew up eating them, long before she imagined that she would one day become part of the story behind their revival. “I grew up eating the mawa cakes made by grandmother and marketed by my grandfather,” Nikita reminisces, adding that over the years, she kept meeting people who would tell her how much they missed the cakes made by Manohar Bakery. Those conversations stayed with her.
Visit saltysenoritaaz.org for more information.
“I have had people tell me that they remembered my grandfather coming on a cycle with a box full of mawa cakes, coconut biscuits, khari biscuits… before he opened the Manohar Bakery — a small shop on Cadell Road, Shivaji Park,” Nikita tells. “I was very sad when the bakery shut down thanks to family disputes. And that day I promised myself, after seeing sad faces of the family, that one day I will revive it!”
Nikita began her career in advertising, where her first boss, Preeti Nair, played an important role in shaping her understanding of the industry. “She taught me the tricks of the trade,” Nikita says. After gaining experience, she eventually decided to step out on her own and start an advertising consultancy, working with a diverse range of clients.
Baking was nowhere on the immediate career horizon. But life, as it often does, had other plans.
Nikita married a man from the film industry, someone she describes as a creative brain in more than one way. The two shared an appreciation for ideas, experimentation. “Most importantly, he too believed that the family legacy — the cakes made by her grandfather’s bakery — should be revived.”
But it was more difficult than it looked. They decided to begin with just one item — the mawa cake that so many people remembered. Again, recreating was not easy.
Then came Covid, which unexpectedly gave them the time and space to experiment. Like many others, the couple began baking at home. But what started as a lockdown activity soon became a serious project. They tried different recipes, experimented with ingredients and baked batch after batch, constantly tweaking the process.
“It took us almost five years to get it right,” Nikita says.
There were recipes that worked on paper but failed in practice, batches that came close but didn’t quite capture the flavour and texture they remembered, and countless rounds of trial and error. Nostalgia, after all, can be a particularly demanding benchmark. It isn’t enough for something to taste good — it has to taste like the memory people carry of it.
Interestingly, the breakthrough came only a few months ago, during Nikita’s pregnancy. “Actually, my husband got it right,” she says, with a laugh. After years of experimenting, he finally arrived at the recipe they felt captured what they had been searching for.
That moment changed the experiment into something more tangible. What had begun as an attempt to recreate a family favourite suddenly felt like something they could share with others.
And so, after years of baking, testing, tweaking and returning to the drawing board, they decided to float the venture. The Mawa Cake Co.
The mawa cake that she grew up eating has now come full circle: from her grandfather’s bakery, through years of memories and nostalgia, into her own kitchen — and finally, back into the hands of a new generation… and to some old patrons like me, to whom the revival is a journey back to childhood.
“The next step is coconut cookies, another old time favourite of patrons like you!” she says before signing off.