Raj Sweets

Raj Sweets is located in Hinjawadi, which has become a very busy area with all the tall offices and new apartment buildings. We’ve been here since long before a lot of that development happened. We spend most of our day standing around large vats of milk and sugar. Making traditional sweets is a very slow process and you can’t really rush it without ruining the taste. Some days the heat from the big stoves in the back is almost too much to handle, but we have to keep going. We make a lot of different things, from the dry laddoos to the sweets that are soaked in sugar syrup. During the festival seasons, the place gets absolutely chaotic. We have people lining up out the door and we usually don't get much sleep during those busy weeks. The shop itself isn't very large, so we have cardboard boxes stacked up almost to the ceiling sometimes. We use old recipes that haven't changed since we opened. Sometimes the batches come out looking a little different because the milk quality varies from the dairy, but that’s just how natural cooking works. We don't use any of those fancy machines to shape everything perfectly. It’s all done by hand by the workers. The floor can get a bit sticky by the end of the day. It’s just a sweet shop for the people living here.