Sweet Success

Within hours of posting a photo of one of her Indian fusion creations to an online foodie group, Meghana

Vallurupalli ’17

received dozens of messages and requests from people clamoring for her Indianinspired pastries. Since launching her baking business, Pastries by Pono, nearly a year ago, Vallurupalli has fielded hundreds of orders— and she only has plans to expand.

QWhat made you gravitate

toward baking?

Food has always been a really important part of my life, ever since I was a kid. I’m South Indian and cultural foods growing up were a really big part of my childhood. During COVID, I didn’t have any family going back and forth from India to the U.S. anymore. I was craving and missing the sweets they used to bring back from home. I tried to make the traditional sweets myself, which I utterly failed at, but cookies and cakes and cupcakes had been more sort of my thing. I started off with box mixes as a kid and have evolved to doing things from scratch now. And I was like, “It would be really cool if I could replicate the flavors that I would find in a traditional Indian sweet, but it might take your cupcake form.”

What made you decide to turn baking into a business?

I started playing around with flavors really just for me and my friends for parties that I hosted. It was really just an interesting dessert that I’d put on the table when I was at get-togethers.

One time I had made a really interesting cake for a party. It’s called a gulab jamun cake. The American way of describing it is it’s like a deepfried Munchkin that's been soaked in sugar syrup. It's essentially this deep-fried donut heaven of goodness. Everybody just loved it so much. I didn't even have a slice to myself at the end of the party. And someone said, “Wow, I wish you would sell this because I would totally pay money for this.”

I live in Tampa, and there’s a large Indian community, and there’s a hunger for new things. I posted [one of my cakes on social media]. And I was booked solid for a month. Every single weekend, I was receiving 20, 30, 40 orders. People could not get enough of it. Eventually I ended up doing baby showers and weddings. It was a little bit out of control! This December will actually make it a year officially that I’ve been selling sweets and taking customer orders.

You earned your bachelor’s degree in management from UMass Boston. Did this play a role when starting and growing Pastries by Pono?

UMass Boston set me up for success from the get-go. My focus during my undergrad was international management. And so a lot of what I focused on through college and after was marketing and digital marketing. Being able to give me access to internships to really figure out where I wanted to grow my career has really helped me. And being in marketing and being able to tap into my creative side is a big part and a big reason as to why I picked up this hobby and why my business is doing so well. I’ve been able to scale it by marketing it very efficiently and creatively.

What Indian flavors do you replicate in your baking?

Traditionally, in Indian sweets, we use a lot of cardamom, rose—like rose essence—saffron-infused sugar syrups. I add them to a traditional vanilla base. Sometimes a saffron poundcake base. A good example is a rasmalai flavor, which traditionally is a milk sweet. It’s like ricotta cheese soaked in three different types of milk. The way I’ve turned it into a cupcake is that it’s a vanilla cupcake that has a ricotta cheese filling in the middle. The ricotta cheese is infused with heavy whipping cream and cardamom to give you that rasmalai flavor and taste. And I top it off with a really light whipping cream frosting. So when you bite into it, it tastes like a little bit of everything.

What’s your most popular item?

I would say it’s definitely the gulab jamun cake or cupcakes. People tend to really like them. They fly off the shelves every time.

What’s your specialty?

My specialty is cupcakes. I do a lot of developing different types of flavors, and I have gotten a lot of requests to develop fun flavors. My favorite flavor that I’ve developed is probably the rasmalai cupcake.

Do you have a recipe you're wanting to try?

Currently, I don’t offer anything chocolate on my menu, and there’s been a hunger lately from people who really want chocolate. I’m developing a cupcake that’s called the “hide-and-seek” cupcake. It’s based off of a biscuit cookie that you get back in India.

Can you give us a baking tip?

To keep your cakes really moist— even after they’ve come out of the oven, while you’re decorating them, or whatnot—the trick is to poke holes in the top of your cake and lightly pour a little bit of plant-based, unflavored, unsweetened milk on top of it. It’ll keep it moist for days.

What are your future plans for your baking business?

I’m actually hoping to launch an e-commerce website by December—sort of like a one-year anniversary kickoff of the business. My hope is to be able to take online orders and ship my products. I get a lot of requests from all over the country. They’re becoming really popular. So the hope is to be able to scale it.