TIRUPATI LADDU

The holy sweet is a roughly fist-sized shape ball, made of chickpea flour, clarified butter, sugar, cashew nuts, raisins and cardamom

Getting your hands on a Tirupati laddoo is not easy.

To eat the famous holy sweet, given as an offering at one of India's holiest Hindu shrines, Tirumala Tirupati, you don't need to shell out a lot of money.

The temple in southern Andhra Pradesh state provides two laddoos at a subsidised cost of 10 rupees  each, and customers are allowed to buy another two at 25 rupees each.

Actually getting your hands on the coveted sweet involves braving long queues, and procuring a high tech coupon complete with its own security code and biometric details like face recognition.Volunteers from various banks man counters where they check the validity of each ticket and money changes hands only after potential customers pass the facial recognition tests.

The recipe is a closely guarded 300-year-old secret, and only a few cooks are given the honour and responsibility of actually making it.

They do so in a secret temple kitchen called "potu", where they make around 300,000 laddoos every day.

These high security measures are in place to check bootlegging of the holy sweets.

The famed Tirupati laddu -- the most sought-after prasadam for lakhs of pilgrims who throng Tirumala -- too joins the raks of Darjeeling tea, Madhubani paintings and Goa feni after .. after it was granted the Geographical Indication (GI) patent rights.