Former MasterChef Season 6 contestant Hetal Vasavada, nostalgic for the desserts she grew up with, shares a versatile selection of classic Indian recipes and creative interpretations. These desserts are more than one-note sweet treats; they’re complex creations, relying on a wide variety of spices, nuts and fruits for incredible flavor. Readers will learn to work with superb combinations like pistachio and rose, chocolate and ginger, fennel and almond, citrus and sesame and more. Hetal makes it easy to create unbelievable treats with simple instructions and easy-to-find ingredients. Readers new to Indian sweets will be introduced to traditional rice puddings, lassis and biscuits. Those already familiar with the go-to treats will be delighted to discover Hetal’s riffs on the classics.…
"Yes. She’s a first generation American and it feels like a timely book, not just thinking about the food itself. Obviously, there’s a big immigration debate going on in America and she gives a sense of what it’s like straddling two worlds. I think that will really appeal to a lot of people . There’s a little bit of a memoir, but it’s really about the food. I’m really passionate about baking and desserts, and I think Indian desserts are totally under-appreciated in the US. Americans aren’t really familiar with them. I love them. They tend to be a little bit on the sweet side, but I’m okay with that. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I remember flipping through this book when it first came out and I wanted to make almost everything, which is always a good sign. She has this nice mix of traditional Indian desserts and then dishes that are more of a mash-up or ‘inspired by’. So the recipe I’m going to be featuring in our package is a gulab jamun Bundt cake . Gulab jamun are basically doughnuts that are first of all fried dough balls, which are then soaked in a syrup. They’re a pain to make and you have to fry them and so she gets those flavours and applies them to a bundt cake, which you soak in a syrup. So you’ve got that flavour and texture of gulab jamun but in a much easier-to-execute format. And, like Adeena, she also had a little bit about introducing you to ingredients that you can incorporate into your cooking."
