A Dessert That Kept Me Alive

ডিমের জর্দা
Dimer Jorda

Dimer jorda, or halua

This is basically how I liked my eggs done as a child. Not that my family would let me have this regularly - with good reason - just look at how much sugar the recipe calls for! But deemer jorda (or deemer halua to some) is very easy to cook, and my mom or aunts would often rustle some up when they needed a quick, fuss-free dessert. During my university years, the cheap and common ingredients meant it often featured in my diet. A healthier home cooked substitute to store bought desserts, or so I told myself.

Nowadays I'm a little more restrained, and I see dimer jorda as an occasional indulgence. The easiness of the dish makes it a great go-to for when I've just cooked a large meal for guests, and need a little less stress with dessert. During our various lockdowns, I found myself eating it on occasion to give myself a reason to live break up the monotony of store bought treats - though before the pandemic I never would have imagined tiring of chocolate and ice cream.

The dish is meant to look a little like yellow rice - and so it's important to watch the egg cook and break it up at the right time. Do this wrong and you end up with a pan full of sweet scrambled eggs. And of course, while I've talked about dimer jorda as dessert, it's often also served as a tea-time snack. The recipe below serves 4. 

Ingredients:

• 4.00 eggs
• 125.00 g white sugar
• 125.00 ml evaporated milk or 250.00 ml whole milk
• 2.00 tablespoons of butter or ghee
• 1.00 "capful" vanilla essence, or to taste
• 2.00 cardamom pods
• 1.00 "capful" kewra water, or to taste, optional
• 2.00 cm of cinnamon, optional

Method:

• Leave the butter or ghee to soften at room temperature
• If using whole milk, begin by reducing this to half in a non-stick saucepan on medium heat. Stir frequently to ensure it doesn't stick or burn. Once done, leave to cool
• Beat the eggs and sugar lightly with a fork until mixed, making sure there are no remaining clumps of egg white
• Follow up by pouring in the cooled reduced whole milk or evaporated milk, and again mix to incorporate
• Put a frying pan on medium low heat, adding the butter or ghee. Once warm, add the cardamom and (if using) cinnamon - then continue frying for a couple of minutes  
• Transfer egg, sugar and milk mixture to the frying pan
• Mix everything together, and let cook on low heat, stirring continuously
• Add the vanilla (and kewra water, if using) at the 5 minute mark, and continue cooking
• After 10 minutes the mixture should start solidify into loose, slimy clumps - break these up by stirring, and ensuring the clumps look like approximations of rice grains
• Cook until all of the jorda clumps into something that looks like mushy rice - this can take up to another 20-30 minutes
• Cooking times will vary based on the size of the saucepan - a larger, wider dish will let the jorda cook faster
• Once done, transfer out of the saucepan immediately to halt the cooking process
• Serve as a snack during tea or as a dessert, garnish with raisins and crushed pistachios

Additional Info
Dim (or should it be deem??) is the Bengali word for egg, and there are countless variations of this recipe, often called dimer "halua" rather than "jorda", based on national and regional variations. People have numerous methods of manipulating the texture, from the use of breadcrumbs to the addition of powdered milk, or adding food colouring to make the dish pop. I've kept this recipe very simple, but do look around for other versions to find what you personally prefer.

Sweets From Meherpur

গুড়ের সন্দেশ
Goorer Shondesh

Goorer shondesh - baked and slightly caramelised on top

Shondesh has been such a staple in my life. During my childhood in Dhaka, Nani would provide a steady supply from her favourite sweet shop in Meherpur, couriered over on a semi-regular basis. If it wasn't her, it would be my dad or uncle bringing some back from their trips to the countryside. Unfailingly, each would point out that shondesh made in their hometown was the best. Shondesh keeps well in the fridge, so even after a week we'd be digging some out to have with tea. As a voracious and indiscriminate eater, shondesh was just another sweet I stuffed myself with, but I do remember it being a favourite of my brother's - the picky eater in the family. 

Shondesh comes in a few different forms, but basically it's yet another curd-based Bangladeshi dessert. If you're unfamiliar, imagine something a little like halwa, but softer and creamier. Making it involves sweetening and cooking curd on the hub, an easier process than cooking roshogolla or golap jaam. There are slight variations: you can sweeten the curd using sugar or goor, and you can opt to use spices or not. I prefer a version very lightly spiced with cardamom and sweetened with goor. The bones of this recipe comes from a friend's mom, who recommended that I just mix all the ingredients together before popping them into the oven. She served me a version of this one Eid, and I loved it, so I've now adopted her recipe. 

The egg listed in the ingredients below is very non-traditional - the result of her experimentation with texture and consistency. I've kept it in because I quite like the resulting squidginess. Baking gives the top of the shondesh a slight caramelisation, in case you're into that kind of thing (I am). Make this in the right dish and you can serve it as is, rather than chopping it up into smaller pieces (which is traditional). Shondesh can be eaten as a dessert after a larger meal, but more usually in my family it was reserved for tea time snacking. 

Breakfast during Mango Season

আম দিয়ে দুধ-ভাত
Rice with mango-milk

Rice and mango-milk, topped with mango
What's not to like? :) 

It's mango season! In Bangladesh this means a glut of mangoes everywhere. Their sheer number has people scrambling to find ways to use them up. On top of cooking, pickling and drying, making mango-milk is another common way we at the fruit growing up. We mixed the pulped flesh of a sweet, ripe mango into hot milk, creating a warm alternative to the mango lassi. Sometimes, we would pour this onto rice - the result of a family habit of pouring any kind of milk onto rice. In fact, whenever we didn't like the food on offer for a particular meal, rice with milk was the go-to substitute dish for the kids in my generation. 

Of course, unconventional meal replacements aside, this dish makes a great breakfast. I also have it for seheri (the pre-fasting meal during Ramadan), as it makes a nice change from cereal. Folks who've had Thai mango with sticky rice will be familiar with the flavour and textures. To make this, you want mangoes that almost melt when crushed, rather than those with firm, springy flesh. In the UK, safe bets are South Asian mangoes sold as Alphonso or Kesar. When fresh mangoes aren't in season, tinned mangoes are another option. The recipe below makes a full "meal" for one, or serves two to three as a snack.

Ingredients:

• 1.00 small South Asian mango (around 175.00g whole, unpeeled)
• 150.00 g cooked rice
• 100.00 ml whole milk
• Sugar, to taste

Method:

• Heat the milk in the microwave for a minute
• While the milk is heating, peel and slice the mango
• Crush the flesh to form a pulp, and remove any overly large pieces of fibre 
• Mix the mango into the milk, and taste for sweetness. Add sugar if desired
• Place the cooked rice in a bowl. Pour in the mango-milk and mix
• Serve while warm

Additional Info

If you want something a bit richer, heat and thicken the milk on the hob before adding the mango. For a different flavour, swap the mango for banana, something we would also do quite commonly in our family. 

Completing the Classic Sweetmeat Trio

গোলাপ জাম 

Golap Jaam

Golap jaam in rose and cardamom syrup,
served with crushed pistachio

This post about golap jaam (and by extension kalo jaam) feels like a big milestone. Being able to cook these sweets, along with roshogolla, completes an important trio of Bengali sweetmeats that I grew up with. Roshogolla, golap jaam and kalo jaam were the safe, go-to desserts in our family, bought en masse for special occasions, celebrations and the traditionally Asian practice of delivering sweets with good news. They are rarely cooked at home in Bangladesh. All three are milk-based, but while roshogolla is traditionally made from boiled cheese curd, golap and kalo jaam are made from deep-fried milk solids. The difference between golap and kalo jaam is the sugar added to kalo jaam, which creates a dark, caramelised outer layer during the frying process. Some sweet shops even add purple food colouring to their kalo jaam, making it look more like the fruit it is named after. This recipe is obviously not all that traditional, constrained by ingredient availability and practicality outside Bangladesh. It grew from a mishmash of recipes collected by word of mouth, with ingredient amounts cross-referenced from various sources online. As such, I don’t really want to claim it as mine. I do, however, want to highlight a few things I learned from cooking these sweets multiple times. First, to address the various horror stories of disintegrated dumplings or sweets with uncooked centres: I think these are more the result of our habits – not writing down recipes and estimating ingredients! If you’re a beginner, then yes, these sweets will be a challenge. But if you’re a fairly regular cook, used to forming dough and deep frying, there’s not much to worry about here. The “dough” from the recipe below doesn’t disintegrate easily, even with slight cracks, as long as you add enough milk to hold it together. 

Kalo jaam in syrup
Some of these were overcooked, some were burnt
Hard to tell them apart in my opinion

Also, make sure you have enough oil for the dough balls to properly float in; otherwise they will burn at the bottom where they touch your pan. While making golap jaam, you can quite comfortably cook the sweets on medium-low heat for some time without any burning. And if do you start to burn them, it’ll be obvious from the blackening on the dough – immediately take the pan off the heat and scoop out the sweets.  And if you undercook them, leaving a hard, uncooked lump in the middle, boiling and soaking the sweets in syrup will usually soften your centre. It only gets difficult, in my opinion, with the kalo jaam: it’s hard to tell while frying whether the dark (almost black) sweets are the result of sugar caramelising or actual burning. I’ve found no way around this, apart from making sure I have plenty of light directed towards my stovetop! My second note is on ingredients (the below amounts make approximately 20 sweets). I haven’t specified the fat content of the milk in the recipe, largely because I have obtained similar results whether I opted for whole or semi-skimmed. I like to think this is because the fat content is mostly provided by the double cream. Despite the very non-traditional approach here, the end result feels surprisingly authentic (a dangerous word!). Of course, the sweets will be lacking the earthy flavours of ghee made on a kindling stove, and the rich flavours of raw, unrefined sugar – fortunately the rose and cardamom will go a long way in masking those “deficiencies”. And with that, I feel like my Bangladeshi dessert repertoire has grown a strong backbone. Time to move onto shandesh! 

Job Changes

Sticky Toffee Pudding

Sticky toffee pudding, served with clotted cream ice cream.
Would have drenched it in custard too,
but I was too lazy to make/buy any. 

An odd post for a so-called Bangladeshi blog, I know. But I've developed a strong affection for sticky toffee pudding over the last year, at a work canteen no less. Served as part of Sunday lunch, I looked forward to it every week. In theory, I would have eschewed overeating in the previous six days to reward myself on the Sunday, but reality was a little different. Although I did reward myself with the sticky toffee pudding anyway. Unfortunately, I am in the process of changing jobs, and will no longer have access to this particular canteen soon. But I can't imagine a life without sticky toffee pudding anymore, so I've decided I need learn how to make this particular dessert. 

The results are what you see in the recipe below. It's based on a Guardian Word of Mouth post, which in itself is a discussion of various recipes. I've both drawn from and altered them to make something similar to what was served to us at work. The ginger and spicing is as faithful a reproduction as I could manage, whereas the doubled toffee sauce (it'll become obvious from the recipe!) is a luxury we obviously didn't have at the canteen. Beware of this stick toffee pudding's rich and heavy sweetness. I know it's traditionally served warm with custard or ice cream, but why go for half measures - in my opinion it works best when served with both.

Ingredients (for the toffee sauce):

• 100.00 g unsalted butter
• 50.00 g muscovado sugar
• 70.00 g golden caster sugar
• 150.00 ml double cream
• Pinch of salt

Ingredients (for the pudding): 

• 175.00 g medjool dates
• 1.00 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
• 1.00 teaspoon of shredded ginger 
• 300.00 ml boiling water
• 50.00 g unsalted butter, softened
• 70.00 g golden caster sugar
• 90.00 g dark muscovado sugar
• 2.00 eggs
• 170.00 g flour
• 1.00 tsp baking powder
• Pinch of ground cloves
• Pinch of ground cinnamon 

Method (for the toffee sauce)

• Combine the ingredients for the sauce in a milk pan, and place on a low heat
• Allow the ingredients to melt, stirring to ensure they do so evenly
• Once the ingredients are melted and mixed, turn the heat up to medium
• Bring to a boil, and thicken the sauce for 3 or 4 minutes, or to the consistency desired
• Butter a deep, square baking dish and pour in half the sauce. Place the dish in a freezer while preparing the pudding
• Retain the remaining sauce to pour over the pudding

Method (for the pudding):

• Preheat the oven to 180C
• Stone the dates and chop into small pieces
• Add to the boiling water, along with the bicarbonate of soda and shredded ginger
• Leave to soak while preparing the pudding
• Chop the butter into small pieces and place in a large mixing bowl
• Add the sugar, and cream the ingredients together. It may help to add the sugar a little at a time, and bear in mind that the end mixture will be grainy
• Beat the eggs gently, and mix them into the butter and sugar mixture a little at a time 
• Follow up by adding the spices and baking powder into the mixture, and fold in the flour in two batches
• Return to the soaking dates. Mash up their flesh slightly if the pieces of fruit seem overly large after soaking
• Pour the dates and ginger, along with their soaking water, into the batter 

The finished batter

• Pour the finished batter into the baking dish over pre-frozen toffee sauce
• Place in the oven for 30 to 45 minutes, until the pudding is just cooked. When placing a knife through the pudding, the blade should come out moist

The finished pudding before toffee sauce,
scored with a knife

• Take out of the oven, score the surface with a knife, and pour over the remaining toffee sauce
• Serve warm with custard and ice cream

No-Churn Ice Cream

নারিকেল ও লেবুর আইস ক্রিম
Lime & Coconut Ice Cream

Small servings - it is condensed milk & cream after all! 

I'm not sure why I made this ice cream. I felt I wasn't experimenting enough with my own recipes - and I guess this is the result. The methodology is adapted from a BBC Food no-churn ice cream recipe, which I've tried and tested before. The original is simply a combination of 400.00 g of condensed milk and 600.00 ml of whipped double cream, with other ingredients added to create various flavours. This makes a whopping 1 litre of ice cream, so I usually halve the recipe totals, which can be seen from the ingredients list below. 

This particular recipe is a slight modification, replacing half of the proscribed double cream with creamed coconut. This introduces the coconut flavour, as well as adding texture to the ice cream from the solid kernels. I'm quite happy with how this turned out, but note that the coconut flavour outshines the lime. Experiment by reducing the amount of creamed coconut, or by adding more lime zest. For a more intense lime flavouring, I would recommend opting for lime essence, as adding too much juice will turn the ice cream sour. Of course, there's no need to limit flavours to lime and coconut!

Ingredients:

• 200.00 g sweetened condensed milk
• 150.00 ml double cream
• 75.00 g creamed coconut
• Juice from 1 lime
• Zest from 2 limes

Method:

All mixed and prepped for freezing

• Mix the zest and lemon into the condensed milk
• Dissolve the creamed coconut into 75.00 ml of boiling water, and let cool slightly
• While the coconut is cooling, whip the double cream into stiff peaks
• Fold the coconut and then the cream into the condensed milk
• Pour into a freezer proof container, and freeze overnight
• Take out a few minutes before serving for ease of scooping

Coconut & lime ice cream, ready to serve

Additional information:

I used a solid "creamed coconut" dissolved in water as that was what was available in the supermarket near me. 150.00 ml of liquid coconut milk may be a suitable substitute, though using the creamed coconut adds a certain texture from the solids. For other flavours, I would recommend combining fruit pulps, compotes etc. with double cream and condensed milk. I've also wondered whether melting chocolate into the cream and condensed milk mixture will work, though I haven't tried it as I'm not a fan of chocolate ice cream. 

A Childhood Love Affair

চিনির পায়েস
Payesh with Sugar

Payesh - the simple way

My love for payesh started at an early age. My family and friends soon found out about my infatuation, and suddenly at the slightest hint of a special occasion people were feeding me bowlfuls of payesh. And like any relationship that faces too much outside input, my affection for payesh came to an oversaturated end. I quietly moved on to laccha shemai, and kept my newfound love to myself. However, I couldn't quite forget payesh. There is a certain richness to payesh made with jaggery that isn't quite replicated by any other dessert, and so I made sure to learn how to cook this myself. 

Payesh is a dish traditionally served during special occasions and religious festivals, and has many variations. Of course, the jaggery needed for my favourite iteration is hard to come by in the UK, so the recipe I'm posting just uses sugar. Payesh with sugar is in fact what we mostly had growing up abroad, and what our family would serve during special occasions or dinner parties. For my recipe below I use unrefined sugar and powdered cinnamon to give the dish a slight caramel tint. If I manage to hunt down some jaggery from a store near me, I will make sure to update the recipe with new instructions. The ingredients below should yield enough payesh to make modest portions for 4.

Ingredients

• 500.00 ml whole milk
• 100.00 ml water
• 60.00 g basmati rice
• 1.00 small knob of butter
• 3.00 cardamoms
• 3.00 pinches of powdered cinnamon
• 60.00 g of unrefined sugar, or to taste
• Pistachios and raisins, optional for garnish

Method

• Pour the milk and water into a heavy bottomed (ideally non-stick) pan, and put on medium-low heat
• Bring the milk to a gentle boil, which should take 10 to 15 minutes. Stir frequently to prevent a skin forming over the liquid
• Gently crush the cardamoms, and add to the milk along with the cinnamon 
• Bring the milk to rolling boil, and let it cook and thicken with the spices for around 5 minutes. Continue stirring throughout
• Rub the butter into the rice, and add to the boiling spiced milk
• Let the rice cook in the milk, which should take 15 to 20 minutes. Stir frequently while the rice cooks - this will stop the formation of a skin over the milk as well as prevent it from burning
• Once the rice is cooked, add the sugar and mix into the payesh
• Continue cooking until the dish reaches the desired consistency - runny or thick and stiff - my personal preference seems to change with the wind
• Pour into a large serving bowl or individual dessert bowls while still hot, so the payesh can set as it cools down
• If desired, garnish with chopped pistachios and raisins before serving. The dish can be had warm or cold. I would serve cold as a dessert or for afternoon tea, and warm for a special occasion breakfast.  

Additional Notes

The recipe above is payesh in its simplest form. As I've written earlier, I actually prefer payesh made with jaggery, and will hopefully posting a recipe for such soon. But the dish can get much more interesting. Payesh holds a special significance for Hindu Bangladeshis, and I've seen their recipes use more complex spice combinations - think bay leaves and saffron. In rural Bangladesh, I've also encountered versions of the dish that substitute rice for wheat, papaya or coconut. 

More Eid: Recreating Falooda

কাস্টার্ড ফালুদা 

Custard Falooda 

Custard falooda, now part of my dessert repertoire! 

I had to think twice before trying falooda for the first time. Someone had brought some home in a plastic container, and the folks were eagerly trying to make me sample a spoonful. I was probably around 10, and had never before encountered noodles floating in milk before. The dish's additional components of bright green jelly and slimy tapioca pearls just freaked me out - here was seemingly a dessert from outer space. In truth, however, falooda is apparently an import of faloodeh from Persia and has mutated into numerous variations in Bangladesh. While toppings can vary (nuts, fruit, jelly etc.), the common theme in almost every version I've had is a sweet rose-milk base, vermicelli and vanilla ice cream. Then last winter I visited Star Kebab, where they served me a very rich version based on custard. I was intrigued - they omitted ice cream to avoid being overpowering, but brought in crushed ice to preserve the cold dessert factor.

I decided to recreate the dish as accurately as possible, partly just to see if I could but also because I thought it would be something special to make around Eid. The custard recipe below is my mom's - in the past cream was difficult to procure in Bangladesh, and leaving the egg white in instead helps thicken the sauce. I also loathe to throw food away, so there's also that. Another thing that surprised me about England was how sugar-free all the custard is, and the extra sweetness is courtesy of the style of custard I grew up with. Bear in mind in this recipe the custard will be providing the majority of the sugar, rather than being an accompaniment for cake or pie. My favourite custard also smells nothing like egg, hence the generous lashings of (weak) vanilla essence and some nutmeg. I limited the rosewater to the jelly, mostly because I thought rose-flavoured custard would be just a little too overwhelming. I was quite happy with the result, although in the future I'll probably skip the jelly and the pearls and just go with fruits, nuts and noodles to keep my life simple. 

Winter Desserts

লাচ্চা সেমাই
Laccha Shemai

Laccha shemai served with raisins. Well, a raisin - the rest sunk!

Despite being such a small country, Bangladesh seems to be home to a unending variety of food. Every time I've moved back home or just dropped by for a visit, I've discovered something new to take back with me and attempt to recreate. Laccha shemai is one such dish, which I first came across while at school in Dhaka during the early 2000s. I'd grown up on another form of the dessert - dudh (or milk) shemai - but I'd never been a big fan. For those of you unfamiliar with the dish, shemai is a form of dried or fried vermicelli, and may be tricky to get your hands on unless you live near an Asian supermarket.

Shemai or fried vermicelli, as seen pre-soaking

However, if you do manage to procure some cooking laccha shemai is the most simple thing. The recipe below essentially calls for boiling some milk, sugar and spices before soaking in the shemai and serving the dish warm. It's the perfect dessert for a cold winter, and its traditionally eaten during this season in my family. It's a casual dessert, served after dinner on a normal day. On the odd occasion its eaten separately as a snack or during tea, but that might just be me. I prefer laccha shemai to dudh shemai as it doesn't call for boiling the vermicelli along with the milk, leaving the strands with a chewy "al dente" quality. This in my opinion makes for a more interesting texture than the mush you're often left with for dudh shemai, but it does mean laccha shemai has to be consumed almost immediately after its prepared.  

Heritage From Elsewhere

Apple & Blackberry Crumble

Apple and blackberry crumble served with frozen yoghurt

I first encountered crumble at a pub in Selly Oak during my university days in Birmingham. Served warm with a side of vanilla ice cream, it appealed to my fondness of hot-and-cold contrasting desserts. However, poor iterations over the years have made me wary - sometimes the apples have been a tasteless mush, or a side of custard has been bland and flavourless. I'm sure I've been sampling it in the wrong places (the work canteen is hardly the place to seek out good food), and so I'm glad to finally have a recipe of my own to use.

The instructions below come from my partner, who I called up one evening after having bought blackberries for the first time without knowing what to do with them. I am happy to report I have since found out that blackberries can be eaten raw as is, but more importantly the conversation precipitated a request for homemade crumble from me. Surprisingly my partner obliged - apparently crumble was one of the desserts he grew up on - and the results are what you see in the photo above. The actual recipe is adapted from an original by Merrilees Parker, and is available on the BBC website.

Adding Ingredients

Jaggery-Laced Chocolate & Peanut Butter Cheesecake

Jaggery-laced chocolate & peanut butter cheesecake.
And yes, I did have this for breakfast today.

I'm not a baker, and this is undoubtedly a good thing. I have a sweet tooth and a great love for cake, and if I were a baker I'd have to accept becoming a balloon as well. That being said, baking is a skill that adds a degree of versatility to my abilities in the kitchen, so there are a few things I want to make sure I know how to bake. My first ever attempt at baking involved a sponge cake - a dense mass of flour, sugar, butter and eggs that refused to rise. My baby brother was the only one willing to try it, probably because he didn't know any better at that age. Over the years, things have gotten a little better. I can make a decent pumpkin pie, and am occasionally successful with my brownies and lemon tarts. 

I've always had a thing for baked cheesecake, a dessert I was introduced to in Hong Kong. Last week I decided it was time to add a version of it to my limited repertoire. My childhood memories are of a rich, solid salty-sweet cheesecake, but the recipe below produces something more delicate and definitely sweeter. It is adapted from a BBC Food recipe by Nigella Lawson, and the original can be found here. I am changing the instructions for hand-mixing, modifying amounts and substituting a few ingredients, notably jaggery for brown sugar in the topping as I wanted to use something Bangladeshi. Note that if you do have access to a food processor, use it - it makes life a lot easier! 

Cultural Adaptation

ক্রাম্পেট দিয়ে দুধের পিঠা
Crumpets with Jaggery Laced Milk

This is our New Year meal!

Most of us who travel have things that we miss and can't have from the place(s) we consider home. In Bangladesh, we have various types of 'cakes' called 'pithas'. One of these is the chitoi pitha, made by frying a gelatinous dough of rice flour in oil. This is then soaked in jaggery laced milk to transform it into dudher pitha, or milk pitha. The right kind of rice flour is hard to come by in Europe, and many Asian families have adapted by substituting chitoi pitha with crumpets. This is probably because chitoi has a similar feel to a crumpet - imagine something a little tougher with smaller holes. 

My mom first made this dish with crumpets in Hong Kong, and it has been one of my favourites since. I personally don't miss the traditional dudher pitha, simply because it wasn't what made my childhood memories. Instead, I give you here the very simple crumpet version I grew up with, and also wish you a very Happy New Year.

Texas Done!

রসগোল্লা 

Roshogolla

Roshogolla served in syrup

I'm currently holidaying in Texas. I've flown across the pond because: 

(a) I really needed a break from work and 

(b) I haven't seen my younger aunt in four years, and I've never actually met my baby cousins!

Now that I'm here, I have to say Texas feels very strange. They don't seem to believe in pavements, and even the shops in my aunt's "small" town feel like European hypermarkets. 

Not that I'd let a little oddity distract me from food, however. Everyone in my family seems to have a certain specialty, a fact that I fully take advantage of. My youngest aunt does amazing roshogolla - a traditional Bangladeshi dessert based on curdled milk or chhana. Desserts like these are rarely made at home in Bangladesh because of the complexity of the recipes versus their easily availability in sweet shops. Luckily, my aunt does a relatively simplified version. It relies on double cream, which (unlike in Bangladesh) is readily available from supermarkets in the US or the UK. I enthusiastically took up her offer to teach me how to make these, and the results are what you see here.

Ingredients (for the roshogolla)

• 1.00 l of whole milk
• 125.00 ml of double cream
• 436.00 ml of buttermilk
• 1.50 teaspoons of sugar
• 2.00 teaspoons of flour

Ingredients (for the syrup)

• 4.00 cups of water
• 2.50 cups of sugar

Method

• Heat the milk and double cream in a saucepan on medium high, bringing it to a gentle boil
• Turn the heat low and add the buttermilk, stirring to mix
• Take the mixture off the heat once it starts to curdle as in the picture below

Curdled milk/cream/buttermilk, aka chhana

• Leave the mixture to strain in muslin or other finely meshed cloth to extract all the water. Do this for a minimum of 3 hours, but overnight works best

 

The mixture being strained...in a Bangladeshi
towel because we didn't have Muslin!

• Once the mixture is strained, transfer to a bowl and add the sugar and flour
• Knead thoroughly as if forming a dough, as in the picture below

The "dough",
ready to be turned into roshogolla

• Divide this dough into little balls - this is what will form the actual sweets

On the left, newly formed roshogollas. This recipe should make just under two dozen

On the right, a close up. Make sure each ball has no cracks, otherwise the roshogolla will crack on cooking

• In a different saucepan, add the 4 cups of water and 2.5 cups of sugar, heating to dissolve
• Once the sugar is dissolved, bring to boil 
• Add the balls of dough one by one, and bring back to boil and leave for 25 minutes

The beginning!

• At the 25 minutes mark, add another cup of water and bring back to boil, and again leave for 15 minutes. The balls should have expanded quite a bit now by absorbing water

Boiling and growing!

• At this 15 minute mark, add another cup of water and bring back to boil, leaving it on the stove for a final 15 minutes. The balls should have lost some of their girth now and are done
• Serve hot or at room temperature as dessert at the end of a meal

And done!

Additional Information

The sweets should keep up to a week in the fridge. However, they will go stiff and lose their soft and spongy texture once refrigerated. Zap them in the microwave for 20 seconds to bring some of the softness back before serving. These can also be used for roshomalai - simply thicken full fat milk with sugar and cardamom to a desired consistency, then scoop the roshogolla out of the syrup and into the malai to soak. 

Some More for the Party Menu

গাজরের হালুয়া 

Carrot Halua

Toffee infused carrot halua 

The word halua applies to a whole group of desserts, similar to how the word cake works in English. Just like you can have different types of cake, you can have different types of halua. In Bangladesh, halua is commonly made from lentils, bread, carrots etc., amongst other things. I'm a fan of most variations, but the carrot halua holds a special place in my heart for its quirkiness - after all, this is dessert made from a vegetable. The idea of carrot halua didn't initially appeal to me, but once I tried it I was hooked. 

The recipe below is a short and simple, substituting condensed milk for the traditional whole milk. This makes it easier to follow than a lot of other recipes but beware - it's hugely unhealthy and full of sugar. However, it works great served in small portions, making it an ideal bite-size party dish. It's usually served with a crushed pistachio or raisin garnish back home, and in British restaurants I've had it warm served with vanilla ice cream. 

More Fusion: An Experimental Sorbet

Spiced Tamarind Sorbet

Spiced tamarind sorbet with henna leaves (because we couldn't find anything else for garnish!)

Tamarind based drinks are pretty common in Bangladesh. They're usually served cold and spiced to provide relief from the summer heat. Summer temperatures easily surpass 35 degrees Celsius here (even though Google lies and insists it's 28 degrees!) and as such, I imagined a sorbet would be an even more welcome comfort. I've been looking up sorbet recipes from around the web, and I'm adapting this recipe from the Coconut Raita blog's Tamarind and Lime Sorbet post. I'm pretty proud of it - it's essentially replica of our family's usual tamarind drink in sorbet form, and it's even been given a thumbs up by my grandma who's notoriously snobby about good food!

A Change From All The Curry

Crêpes With Vanilla Syrup & Ice Cream

I'd eaten quite a bit of it before remembering I needed to take a picture...

I've actually lived in France, but funnily enough I don't remember ever trying a crêpe while I was there. For me, it was all about the the waffles with Nutella or the mushroom and cheese pizzas sold by the Eiffel Tower. It was only after moving to England for university that crêpes registered on my radar. I like the fact that you can fill it with anything, and it happens to remind me of a similar Bangladeshi dessert that I must hunt down the recipe for soon.