[Double-meaning perverted male culprits out there who’re snickering at my post title, stop that thought process right THERE. This is just a foodblog remember?]

Anyhoo, let me present to you my super scientific taxonomy for bread…

• The Crispy and Crunchy. Begs for you to jangle and crackle your jaws through. scrunch. <example of the Crispy and Crunchy somewhere in here>
  
• The Poofy. Lusts for your finger to pierce right through and deflate it like a puffed-up balloon. pooofff. <example of the Poofy somewhere in here>
  
• The Floofy, or more lovingly called, the Flllooofay. Asks that you first step away, and then come dashing towards it with full force and pounce on it with claws outstretched, sending smithereens of pillowy bread floof into the air. fllll-oooof!

[We also have the granite-rock category that is proprietary to my oven alone. Perfect for hurling across at those annoying skateboarders who slam their godforsaken skateboards against the pavement under my building every evening. thud.]

While I love bread under all three of the above categories, buns should necessarily be floofy. When I scrunch into a bun, I don’t want it to just scrunch back at me. Nor do I want that anticlimactic de-pooof where the bun is full of nothing but hot air. What I want is that soft, happy, floofy feeling, like the kind you get when you fall backward and flop onto a soft down mattress, bouncing back up a bit before sinking all the way in. That’s exactly what the buns at PappaRoti’s are – super dooper faal-looofay.

I credit this discovery to both Rads in my life - two radically awesome ladies with the same first name, one of whom I’ve known from high school in Dubai, and the other from college in the US who visited me in Dubai last year. The three of us were walking back after dinner in Dubai Mall, totally stuffed and just strapping ourselves in before we’d burst, bee-lining it towards the car so that we could wheel ourselves back home in time before passing out in a state of food coma. Until the two of them came to a halt right outside this stall, demanding that we make tummy space for whatever was giving off that frigging awesome baked buttery smell.

A bun later, I knew that this was the Best Decision Ever. Totally worth snapping your jeans zipper over. Hell yeah, I’d know.

What’s awesome about PappaRoti’s is that the buns actually incorporate a bit of scrunch along with the floof. The top of the bun is swirled with caramel coffee cream, which doesn’t really have a strong flavor, but that crisps up into a baked crunchy skin when it’s pulled out of the oven.

Check out how they achieve that crackly crunchiness...

Now here's the best part...as you crunch through the thin caramelized outer casing, this cottony pillowy fluff just gushes out of nowhere, pumping out this warm happy fresh baked aroma right into your mouth. As you bounce through the floof within, you hit the hollow core, and there, whatever is left of the bun just collapses into a stream of buttery syrup that’s been waiting to trickle out from the centre.

I like to eat the buns Indian-style, dipping them in something like a warm chai or cappuccino so that it sponges up the warm liquid, and the now soggy bun morsel gives me this breakfast buttery caffeinated blend of awesomeness all in one go.

What was a bit off-putting is that these buns come frozen and shipped all the way over from Malaysia. Supposedly they start out as teeny balls and it takes up to eight hours for them to do all that caramel coating up top and for the buns to expand into optimal floofiness…which for some reason that escapes me, cannot be done in Dubai. The only thing left to do is to bake ‘em up at the stalls. It’s exactly one of those franchised fast food commercial concept that I typically diss out. But still, even I’ve got to admit that PappaRoti’s got that feel-good fresh floofy tea bun experience pretty much nailed down.

I promised the college-Rads – a die-hard dessert addict and phenomenal cook, who’s now miles away in India and woke up last week thinking about PappaRoti – that I’d go back and write her a post dedicated to these floofy buns. So fellow foodster in crime, this one’s all for you.

PS - I was so inspired by my bun experience (and also desperately seeking out excuses to delay proofing this post. Proof reading just has to be the most blitheringly boring and thankless part of writing...I always find that evasive typo or embarrassingly meaningless sentence just seconds after I publish. And especially months after I publish, which is why I try to forget about old posts altogether)...that I tried to create the Floofay Bun Man...or Woman. Voilà:

PappaRoti Cafe
Dubai Mall, Level 1 (above the ice rink)
Phone: +971 (4) 330-8377