In another life, Nikita Rao was an accountant with a passion for baking. After her family moved from England to the United States, she focused on raising her children and fine-tuning her recipes for such delights as key lime pie. When the pandemic hit in 2020, she decided to host a dessert pop-up of sorts, inviting her neighbors to stop by one Friday evening to purchase her cinnamon buns.
“Everyone was doing their social distancing, yet there was this line of customers outside my door at 5 o’clock just desperate to pick up these cinnamon buns,” Rao recalls. “They were just so happy that I was doing this.”
In 2021, Rao relocated to West Palm Beach and launched Nikita Bakes. Now, she offers a curated selection of desserts including key lime pie, a specialty tuxedo key lime pie (with an Oreo crumb crust and a dark chocolate ganache glaze), and Palm Beach Crack (an addictive sweet snack made of graham crackers topped with dark chocolate, pecans, pistachios, sugar pearls, white chocolate, and Himalayan sea salt). All are available to order on her website.
While Rao’s current vocation is worlds away from her work as an accountant, she does see a relationship between the two. “There is a correlation, and it is precision. It is striving for excellence,” she says. “I am a perfectionist. With baking, you have to measure, but I will measure even a teaspoon of vanilla extract. I won’t eyeball it. My goal is to create perfect desserts.”
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