Hetal Vasavada - Milk & Cardamom

To my sweet baby girl Elara. I promise to always let you lick the frosting off the whisk and show you the same magic of Indian desserts that my mother taught me.

To my husband, Rhut, you are the spark that ignited my passion and helped me turn it from a hustle to a career. I love you.

Growing up as a first generation Indian-American, I often yearned for the same experiences my friends had. Baking cookies with their grandmothers, frosting cupcakes for birthday parties or simple things like licking brownie batter off a spoon were experiences I wanted so badly. Like most Indian-American kids, I wanted every other food but Indian food. I dreamt of stuffing my face with cookies and cakes, but instead got Parle-G biscuits and sweetened semolina pudding. As a child, I remember promising myself that when I grew up I would bake cookies with my kids and let them lick the frosting out of the mixing bowl.

What I did get were mornings filled with chai and biscuits, holidays like Diwali where I sneakily smashed all the ladvas (also known as laddoos) to find a lucky coin and warm summer afternoons spent with my grandmother where wed quietly sit next to each other enjoying an ice cold kulfi. Indian desserts (mithai) were usually eaten during special events. Boxes and boxes of mithai would be sent to families during religious holidays, weddings or family gatherings. Every sweet I have brings me back to a special memory or moment.

It wasnt until I was older that I realized how special my memories were and how they were so closely connected with the food I had tried so hard to avoid eating. It wasnt until I moved across the United States, from New Jersey to San Francisco, that I realized how much I missed those sweets. I spent hours video chatting with my mom trying to translate her fingers worth of ginger-style notes into an actual measured and replicable recipe.

As my love for food and its ability to bring people together grew, I found myself in the kitchen experimenting more often. My first experience baking was through boxed mixes and canned frosting. When I got to college and started studying organic chemistry, I learned the role of each ingredient and the importance of the techniques used in baking from scratch. There is a method to the madness, and every movement in the process of baking has a reason behind it. I started manipulating the ingredients and techniques to create desserts with unique flavors and textures like the ones you will find in this book.

Later on, I started taking pieces of my American childhood and mixing them with my Indian upbringing, creating dishes that represented me. Not quite 100% American and not fully Indian. I decided to take one of my creations and try out for a cooking show hosted by the famous Gordon Ramsey, MasterChef. Somehow, I managed to make it onto the show with my Indian-style apple pie made with Indian spices and a cardamom whipped cream.

Throughout the show I continued to share dishes that defined my upbringing with American twists. Little did I know that there was a whole generation of Indian-Americans who could relate to me and my food story. There were thousands of people who grew up on cardamom-spiced shortbread cookies (nankhathai) but also ate their weight in chocolate chip cookies.

These recipes are close to my heart. I dreamt them up while going through the food memories of my childhood and the memories I want to create for my daughter as she grows up. Like everything I do, I completely threw myself into this project. I wanted to learn more than just my mothers recipesI wanted to know where these desserts originated and how they came to be. In the process, I figured out shortcuts and mastered the techniques of making various Indian desserts, and now I can share them with you!

In this book, youll find recipes that are brand new and unique and some that are traditional. I always struggled with being too American or too Indian. Luckily with food there is no right or wrong. Are these recipes totally authentic? No. Are they still amazingly tasty and do they remind me of the Indian desserts I grew up with? Yes. I hope you go through this book and learn about Indian desserts, their history and the stories attached to them.

Most kids grow up with memories of licking batter off a spatula while baking with their parents. My childhood memories consist of me licking saffron-scented shrikhand off my fingers and savoring every bite of a pista kulfi in the parking lot of the Patel Brothers after long Indian grocery shopping trips. I can almost taste it now, freshly ground cardamom and crunchy pistachios all swirled with rich full-fat cream!

Its all about creams, custards and puddings in an Indian home, not so much about cookies and cakes. Most homes in India arent equipped with ovens, but they all usually have a stove, refrigerator and, if youre like my family, a cow! Whenever I would visit India, we would get fresh cream from the cow when making any sort of custard or pudding.

Many of the puddings in India are made of various toasted flours. The first sweet dish I ever had was a semolina-based pudding called seero, which is made with ghee and lightly sweetened with sugar. My mom would make it for me when I had a sore throat since it was slick with gheethe panacea to all ailments, according to my mother.

The dishes I share in this chapter like Kheer () were always made at home. I wanted to take comforting home-cooked dishes and tie them in with rich desserts like crme brle, panna cotta and pot de crme. In some cases, I took traditional dishes like kheer and added a Western twist to them! I wanted to create desserts that I, as an Indian-American, could identify with. Using flavors that my mother and her mother and so on used in traditional Indian desserts and transferring them into the American recipes that I was experimenting with opened up a whole new world of possibilities in my kitchen (and now yours too!).

This recipe is the real OG. Also known as sooji ka halwa, its the first sweet most Indian kids have, and is served as a prasad (blessed food), a breakfast accompaniment or a simple dessert after a meal at home. Seero is also the first sweet my daughter ever had when she was a baby. It has a soft, buttery texture with a nutty flavor that comes from the toasted semolina. My version doesnt have much sugar, so feel free to increase or decrease the amount of sugar to your liking.