LOL :) Remember, some of those comments are MY answers, so it's not that twenty people have commented on this post, exactly :) Don't they use any kind of syrup in Nepal for baking? They have a light syrup they use here in Sweden, but nothing as dark as blackstrap.

I don't know about the rest of Nepal, but the family I stayed with used the oven of the stove for storing pots and pans. They don't bake at all. They don't have baked bread, except what the entrepreneurs have taken up to serve the foreign market. They have chappatis or roti, which is like tortillas, cooked on dry skillets on the stove-top burner. Now that I think about it, the farming family I lived with had no baking facilities at all.

I don't think there was much sugar of any kind. There was a shortage while I was there because of Divali being a time of what THEY call sweets, which weren't very sweet to me, not compared to chocolates and candy. They don't eat chocolate, by the way, except as a Westernized treat, like going out for Chinese food.

It's a very rice and lentils and vegetable curries culture. In fact, out in the mountain villages, people have corn meal mush (or to give it the fancy European name, polenta) and rice is considered a grand luxury. The poor eat a lot of potatoes along with their rice or corn meal mush.

That's really interesting. We were talking with a woman from Malaysia the other day, and they apparently don't bake either. Their sweets are all concocted in other ways.