With the aim of letting people know baking is more than just combining ingredients together but letting yourself explore the creativity you have. Shristi Joshi and Avinash Pradhan, make a good team not only as partners for life but in business as well. ‘Little Bakers’ which started in 2017 was an idea generated with a fluke when they decided to teach their sister baking while babysitting her instead of letting her watch the television for all day long. Avinash having started baking since 2012 coaches the students that come to learn the joys of baking while Shristi coordinates in managing the programs. Located at Golfutar, near the basketball court the smell of the freshly baked items fills up the street especially on the weekends.
1. Can you tell us a little more about little bakers?
Well Little Bakers is complete spectrum of baking and cooking courses for children and adults. Here, we take great pride in combining playful creativity, charm and dedicated commitment with a heartfelt service ethos, to provide an unforgettable experience for our learners. We organize weekly, weekend, full-time workshops, spring /summer/winter camps for students who want to explore the art of baking as well to those who aspire to become professional chefs. Advanced workshops and courses are available for young chefs looking to upscale their abilities.
2. What is the story behind the starting of little bakers?
It was not something we planned. My aunt used to ask me to babysit my sister and in order to keep her busy we taught her the icing and baking of cake. The way she enjoyed doing it gave us the idea of exploring it with other kids.
A head start on baking goals
3. What is the main aim of Little Bakers?
We aim to give children the space they fear asking at home. At home, children are bounded by certain restrictions. Here at little bakers we try to let children explore things they wish to. We let the children draw on the boards on the walls, they are allowed to play and change music and they keep having chocolate parties. Also we aim to let people know baking is not just like putting in ingredients together and making something it is more about having fun with your creativity.
4. What is kind of response are you getting from parents and students? How satisfied are you with it?
To be honest, we have such cooperative parents who really support their children. At the end of the classes when parents arrive to pick the children up the children hesitate to leave and parents are always asking us about when the next class is.
We are really satisfied with the responses we are getting from the parents and children. Knowing that what you aimed for is getting good response really keeps up moving forward.
5. What are your recent and upcoming programs?
Until now we have been conducting weekend classes, training for life programs, summer/winter baking camps, professional trainings and corporate workshops and baking birthday parties. We also collaborate with different schools to teach children what baking really is at their school premises.
But now we are thinking of organizing parent child baking workshop, one day basic cake making workshop for adults.
6. What are the challenges you faced during the long run?
We want to teach the children everything but at the beginning the time schedule we set was pretty hard to keep up. We learnt with time though. We asked children to take turns to bake and decorate the cake as both can be hard to keep up if done at once.
As we organize baking camps during summer and winter vacations and schools have different closing time which leads us to have a kind of hard time to set the camp date. On a larger scale we wish to expand the learning process.
7. What is helps you lead your programs successfully?
We start every program with the intention of helping people learn the joys of baking. Perhaps this is why we get a good response which helps us in the long run.
