Bakeology

For the dessert hungry

Bakeology is a cloud kitchen on Instagram best known for its gorgeously curated cookie boxes, featuring wildly interesting flavour combinations courtesy of its founder and passionate home baker Shanika Yapa.

Shanika shared with us that while she started Bakeology way back in late 2015, life’s beautiful obstacles simply got in the way of her continuing on with the business. She shared that, as we’ve now come to expect from most home bakers on Instagram, her origin story too is that of someone who passionately pursued their hobby and love of baking, their friends inevitably encouraged them to try their hand at doing it professionally, and here they are.

She stated that despite the sporadic yearlong breaks she took, when she had her kids, life’s circumstances presented her with an opportunity once again during lockdown. She found herself with a slightly more flexible schedule, with her day job being a lot more lenient and with having her husband at home, making way for two sets of hands when it comes to the kids, she was really able to apply herself to Bakeology once again.

“I held a sort of soft relaunch during Christmas last year, where I featured Christmas themed cookie boxes,” said Shanika, and added that since then it appears to be full steam ahead.

The curated cookie boxes that Bakeology has come to be known for are particularly special in that Shanika tends to focus more on interesting flavour profiles over the aesthetics of baking. However, despite her claims, her cookies and all baked goods are absolutely stunning, with a clear artistic touch.

One of the highlights in her Mother’s Day offerings was the floral themed cookie box, which featured infused cookies of floral flavours, including rose and cardamom cookies, and lavender and lemon cookies, which was pretty unheard of but executed beautifully.

While there has been a recent focus on cookies, Shanika is known for cakes and cupcakes as well, and she shared that she particularly enjoys doing rustic wedding cakes.

Shanika shared that she would really like to expand Bakeology, but of course as things stand now, as is the nature of operations like hers, it is largely a one woman show; she does the shopping, the baking, the packaging and the cleaning up, so it is a time consuming task and so, for now, she does the best she can as time allows. However, in the near future, she confirmed that we can expect monthly and perhaps even weekly curated cookie boxes as a brand new item to be included in her menu soon.

Considering the nature of Bakeology’s interesting menu, we had to try out as many options as possible and we were able to get our hands on a variety of items, an assortment of cookies, and cupcakes for us to taste.

We tried out a number of cookies, the classic chocolate chip, chocolate and cherry, and the oat, white chocolate, and cranberry cookies. The cookies, for starters, were really pretty and they were incredibly unique in that they utilised texture and flavour perfectly well. A great example was the oat, white chocolate, and cranberry cookies, which to be perfectly honest, we did not have high hopes for, as overstuffed cookies tend to taste a little confusing. However this one worked exceptionally well. The oats added a pleasant chewy texture that allowed us to really enjoy the flavours infused in the cookie, a very pleasant experience we wish to have on repeat. The other two were of course fantastic, neither was overly sweet, which was very welcome and the underlying salty sweetness in all these cookies was lovely.

In addition to what we tried, Bakeology also has several other flavours, including spiced kithul and red velvet sandwich, and many more in its cookie repertoire.

We also tried out a number of cupcake flavours; chocolate and passion fruit, chocolate with chocolate ganache, mint and chocolate, chocolate with coffee, a rainbow cupcake with vanilla frosting, and a perfect burnt cheesecake. The cupcakes were all near perfect, they were airy and soft to bite into, the shared chocolate base packed a strong cocoa flavour which complemented all of the frosting. While all of them tasted amazing, our favourite just had to be the passion fruit one; the tangy passion fruit curd blended perfectly with the almost bittersweet cocoa of the cake base.