Dubai: New fluffy Korean doughnut spot in town? Meet the 23-year-old bakery owner behind 'Aura'

Starting the journey

When Sree heard of a vacant shop, conveniently located close to her home, she knew this is where she would open the doors to her dream. Prior to this, the young owner said she did not have a fixed timeline in her mind, although she always knew she wanted to do something in the food-and-beverage (F&B) industry.

Trained in a culinary school in the US, she was introduced to a world of new recipes and unique ways of experimenting with food. While she had always been business savvy and knew her forte was in F&B, it was in culinary school that she really got the ingredients to her recipe of success.

Opening her bakery, she initially wanted to create a range of different products, such as bread, croissants, etc. Being practical, Sree recognised that there were challenges to that.

“But when you get to reality, you realise that it is not so straightforward. All different products require different equipment, ingredients, different manpower. As a new business, you just can not do all of that.”

Early on, Sree decided she wanted to remain self-reliant, and sought to create a product that was truly her own.

“The other option would be to source from other bakeries, which I did not want to do. I thought about it, and ended up narrowing down my speciality to doughnuts.”

The 23-year-old never wanted to work a conventional job, and is of the opinion that creativity and freedom often tend to hit a “ceiling” when you work in a company, where you are (sometimes) at the mercy of other's plans.

For instance, recently she wanted to visit a place in India. Sree had the thought, booked her tickets, made sure her employees could manage the bakery and left. That is something you will just not be able to do in a 9-to-5 job, she emphasises.

“I’m a pretty creative person. I like to think of new product, new ideas – which I could not do if I worked in (instead of owned) a bakery, for instance, where I would have to follow a set menu.”

However, there was an “eerie period” just after university when she did not know what to do, and considered working in a company temporarily to gain more experience in the F&B industry.

While Sree enjoys every moment of the time behind the counter – experimenting, baking, taking orders, there are some challenges that come along the way. One hurdle that comes with being so young is making sure suppliers and employees take her seriously.

While negotiating with suppliers, it is essential to make sure they don’t take advantage of her lack of knowledge. Research, research and more research, as well as growing up in a business family, has helped Sree ensure that she can always hold her own in a conversation.

Flavours – classic, nostalgic and more

Having grown up in the UAE, Sree understands the customer she is catering to – since she herself was one of them, savouring doughnuts from different places in her childhood.

From a customer’s point of view, “Why would they come to a small shop in Karama?”

There are big players that are “easy to access – being in every corner, mall, online platform, and also being cheaper than home-made products like mine,” Sree said.

While customers might pop in for one or two months out of curiosity and support, Sree wanted something that would keep them coming back, growing a loyal customer base and ensuring longevity for her business.

That is when she made the decision to go with a different style than the ones typically found in UAE – a bomboloni, which is an Italian doughnut with a hole on the top, and is then filled with cream through piping.

But the young entrepreneur does nothing conventionally, preferring to put her own twist on things.

She decided that instead of going with the usual bomboloni, she would insert a tiny hole in the centre (different from a bomboloni but also different from a doughnut), which she would use to insert the fillings, and then cover the hole-in-the-middle.

This would enable her to still cover the entire doughnut with the beautiful toppings and creamy exterior; something that has become a visual attraction to her customers.

She also retains the original bomboloni, offering three flavours – Nutella, Kinder Bueno, and vanilla custard – for those who want to taste the original Italian doughnut.

The young bakery owner has a menu where she refuses to have “boring or basic” flavours. With an eye and taste for what will work, she uses nostalgia, classic items, and trending keywords to make her doughnuts.

Often, the doughnut’s taste itself is not preplanned, she explained, but come along while she experiments in the kitchen.

For instance, she wanted to create more chocolate-based doughnuts, and while she was stirring, mixing, and tasting in her kitchen – she hit a taste that worked. Instead of labelling it as a white chocolate or milk chocolate doughnut, she decided to use an ingredient that would make it taste similar to the ever-favourite Milky Bar chocolate that many residents grew up eating.

Tiramisu is a sweet that you can not miss when you talk about the UAE, and ‘Aura by Sree’ now has a tiramisu latte that combines the classic coffee-based sweet with even more coffee, resulting in a creamy delight.

Korean products are in right now – Korean food, Korean music, Korean dramas – and she used this keyword to come up with a Korean milk doughnut that does not just use the ‘Korean’ word but remains authentic to its roots.

Having learnt about this in culinary school where she also went to school with Koreans, Sree creates a doughnut that is typically found in the bakeries of South Korea.

“A cream-filled doughnut is what it is – they cut it in half, and then fill it with cream,” Sree explained, almost like a biscuit.

In classic Aura style, her Korean milk doughnut has a slight twist, the cream is beaten to the right extent so that it remains airy, and light, and does not leave a heavy thick layer of residue on your tongue – which is usually seen with normal cream.

The Korean milk doughnut is available in three flavours to cater to people of different tastes – original strawberry, cookies and cream, and blueberry compote.

The unique fusions and her innovative signature flavours – raspberry and white chocolate, pistachio and rose cream, red velvet and cream cheese, chocolate butterscotch, mixed berry and custard, almond croissant cream – remain her USP (unique selling point).

Sree shares a little baker's secret with City Times; many of her flavours do not have the named ingredient. For instance, Milky Bar creameux does not have the actual Milky Bar chocolate.

This is something many bakers do – Nutella-flavoured products may not actually have Nutella – she explained. The magic of combining different ingredients will be used to reach the same taste so that the customer will not even notice the difference, she added.

Keeping her audience as wide as possible, customers can pre-order eggless doughnuts to accommodate different dietary preferences, she said.

Tapping into the power of social media

While social media has become a powerful tool in recent days, it can be argued that it is harder than ever to break through the clutter because everyone seems to be creating content now.

Sree created her account long before she opened the bakery, as a way of documenting the process, and the behind-the scenes: bringing in equipment, painting, cleaning, all the mundane things that go into starting a business.

“I feel like as a customer or viewer, you usually never get to see the real BTS of anything. Like, before I actually opened a bakery, I didn’t know what it would look like.”

So Sree started creating content centred around insights into the routine, not-so-exciting, tasks that go into the opening, as well as what a 'day in her life' looked like after the opening – making coffee, talking to customers, taking orders, etc.

She soon found that people enjoyed watching it, “sort of like a reality show – it is not always about fancy pictures of my product, it is more of how did I make my product.”

After a little over two months of opening her bakery, she now stands at almost 9k followers.

Future plans

The 23-year-old has big visions for the brand. When initially asked about where she sees the brand in 15-20 years’ time, she hesitated for a while, saying “I don’t know…” perhaps because the grandeur of her answer overwhelmed her.

However, she is confident that what she really wants to do is not just be known as a Karama shop or a Dubai brand, but create a multinational company – expanding across different sectors and parts of the globe.

She emphasises that she would still retain the uniqueness of her flavours, although there may be challenges, and would never “do something basic.”

“It would take a lot of figuring out and a lot more work – but I would definitely keep new flavours coming, maybe I could hire teams of chefs that recognise my vision and can carry it out effectively in different regions.”

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