Soon after Coimbatore’s cream bun burst into the news, my friend Brijeshwar Singh called me to grumble about Indian tax collectors’ general knowledge. They don’t know what a cream bun is, he said.

Brij, a former member of the IAS, is also an early version of Google. So I googled cream buns. And lo! He was right.

What passes for a cream bun in Coimbatore and the rest of India isn’t a cream bun at all. In fact, it’s no longer made in India, except perhaps in some bakeries in Kollam, Kerala. The pictures on the website, however, suggest that it’s more of a brioche which is a French pastry. I will have to go there and find out.

A cream bun, unlike what the tax fellows think, isn’t a bun with cream spread between its two cheeks.

No Sir. It’s a bun in which the cream, along with egg yolk and sugar, is mixed in the flour before the batter is baked.

The recipe according to Food.Com is 4 cups of plain flour, 60 grams of butter, 1⁄4 cup of sugar, 1⁄2 cup lukewarm milk, 1 cup lukewarm water, 30 grams of compressed yeast, 1 egg yolk and 1 teaspoon of water. Then you bake the mixture and voila! you have the real cream bun.

Different countries have different versions of it. But they all have one thing in common: the cream is mixed with the flour before it is baked, not after. That’s where the confusion lies.

So when it comes to taxing a poor old bun we have to see the value added to it.

If it’s just cream that’s been applied between two halves of a bun there’s not much value that’s added. If not, there’s quite a lot of value added. After all, if you ordered the bun and the cream separately, would the government still call it a cream bun? Or, as Orthodox Jews sometimes wonder, is electricity fire?