For a kid-pleasing cookie, sweeter is usually better. If chocolate chips are good, chocolate chunks are great. Like Oreo filling? Try 'em double-stuffed. But Krishna Brown, the proprietor of the online bakery ShoeBox Oven (shoeboxoven.com), turns out a pint-size savoury cookie that's tailor-made for grown-ups.

Her spin on the traditional spice cookie, whimsically named A Girl in Bombay, includes ingredients more often associated with nonsweet foods, such as saffron and curry, as well as flavours from around the globe.

The crunchy coating of sesame seeds brings to mind traditional Italian cookies, and shredded coconut blended into the dough adds a tropical flavour.

The ingredient list might suggest novelty for its own sake (isn't there a reason curry is more often found on chicken than in dessert?), but the results are subtle. The curry marries nicely with the more expected nutmeg and clove and the saffron adds a can't-quite-place-it note to the spice symphony.

Brown, a Howard University graduate who left her job as a graphic designer for the Peace Corps to run Arlington, Va.-based ShoeBox Oven full time more than a year ago, says she invented A Girl in Bombay as an homage to her name.

Krishna is a popular name among Indian people, and though Brown, 33, isn't of Indian descent ("My mom was a hippie," she explains), she felt drawn to the cuisine of the country where her name originated.

My attempts, though, to recreate the cookies that had so intrigued me were hampered by faulty kitchen gear. I found out too late that the thermometer I'd placed in my oven was inaccurate.

The result was that I dialed my oven to a too-low temperature, and the cookies, instead of setting up into lovely round balls like Brown's, oozed into flat disks and took way longer to bake than she'd instructed. The flavours, though, were dead-on. I ditched the defective thermometer and cranked the heat up, and the next try yielded much prettier little mounds.

The lesson? Check your equipment -- along with your convictions that curry is best suited to takeout food.