Delicious, delightful Diwali desserts

Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, celebrates the victory of good over evil, knowledge over ignorance, and light over darkness. Hetal Vasavada, from Season 6 of MasterChef, prepares for Diwali starting with dessert. She shares a few of her favorite recipes from her new book, Desi Bakes: 85 Recipes Bringing the Best of Indian Flavors to Western-Style Desserts. 

Evan Kleiman: I can't tell you how much fun it was to get your book, look at the cover and then open it up. The level of joy in the color palette, it just doesn't exist in every book.

Hetal Vasavada: Honestly, color is my thing, and I really wanted the excitement, brightness, and exuberance fromDiwali and many other Hindu vessels to showcase in the book. And I'm glad it came through.

100% success. You have a background in biochemistry. Were you immediately drawn to baking as a medium for expression in the kitchen?

Initially, no, because I had no idea there was a connection between baking and chemistry at all until my organic chemistry professor made a side comment during class one day, saying, if you know how to bake, you'll be fine in lab. That's when I was like, I really want to do well in lab, so I started baking, initially from box cake cake mix, which is how I think most people start baking. Once I kind of understood why each ingredient existed in the recipe and why the technique or method mattered, I started playing with the recipes and what I would make. It just turned into a full-on obsession.

"Color is my thing," says Desi Bakes author Hetal Vasavada. Photo by Andria Lo.

I love that. You're based in the Bay Area now. Where were you raised and how did your Indian parents and upbringing inform your baking style?

I grew up in New Jersey, in North Jersey, about 10 miles outside of the city, the city being New York. My parents immigrated to the US in the '80s, so a lot of the dishes they made, and a lot of the produce and ingredients they bought were hard to find. The typical Indian ingredients, we'd either have to drive an hour to Jackson Heights or an hour down to Edison to get access. There weren't many places to go and buy a lot of sweets, and if they did exist, they were very expensive. 

So my mom would always make a lot of the maatai or Indian sweets at home, from scratch. Every meal was done from scratch. I don't think my mom, like, we didn't do takeout ever. It was an ingredient household, if that makes sense. We had almonds and cashews, everything. If you wanted a milkshake, we would have to make the ice cream first, then make the milkshake. We would make our own rosewater. We weren't buying the rosewater at the store, and I have a recipe for rosewater. Same with our giant masalas. We would make it at home, we wouldn't buy the mix from the store, so everything was very fresh, and I kept that philosophy throughout my cooking.

You said the word masala. That is all about spice. Talk to us about the two types of cardamom and how each is used in recipes.

There's green cardamom and black cardamom. Green cardamom is grown typically in South India, and then there's also places in, I want to say, Costa Rica and Guatemala that grow cardamom.Costa Rican and Guatemalan cardamom tends to be less mentholy, less savory, definitely more of a vanilla note and floral note, compared to India, where it's way more mentholy. 

Black cardamom is a larger, darker pod. It has a smoky, barbecue savoriness to it. You would typically add that to dals or curries, bases of shocks and things like that or bhajis, to give it kind of like a smoky, savory flavor.

These block print flower cookies are soft butter cookies made with mooncake molds. Photo by Hetal Vasavada.

Is the black cardamom that way as it grows on the tree, or is it processed to give it that color and smokiness?

It's a mix of both. That barbecueiness, there's a little bit of roasting that occurs. But for the most part, it's just the natural flavors of the black cardamom.

Typically, when you use both of these spices, are you using the ground form? Do you buy it whole, take out the little seeds in the middle, and grind them up? Or do you grind the whole pod yourself?

I cannot stress this enough — buy it whole. The reason is because a lot of the flavor compounds in cardamom are really volatile, meaning they're really sensitive to sunlight, heat, and natural exposure. They will evaporate off, which means you need to use a lot more cardamom to get any sort of flavor and you lose the nuances and depthness of flavor that the cardamom has. So I highly recommend either buying just the seeds, which I usually get from Burlap and Barrel, or you can buy the whole pods, which Diaspora Co. and Burlap and Barrel sell as well, then crush them slightly, pick out the cardamom seeds, and grind that up.

Sometimes, what I do is I grind up the whole pod in a spice grinder, and then I put it through a sieve.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. My mom would do that. She's like, it's much easier this way

Yeah, it's way easier. I love it so much. Just the fragrance of it is amazing. I use it in banana bread. It's incredible. The way the book is styled is beautiful. You use traditional cooking implements, different kinds of artisanal handicrafts, and textiles throughout the book. How do these elements inspire you for the bakes themselves?

Growing up, my mom was in textiles. My grandfather owned a textile mill, and my mom was in handicraft. So she would bead, do embroidery, she would make my clothes. Up until I was seven or eight, she was sewing all my clothes. When we would buy Indian clothes for Diwali or weddings or whatever festivities it may be, my mom would always put in a lot of effort into buying clothing of various textiles. A patola sari, which is a very expensive sari because it's dyed a certain way and woven a certain way, she kind of brought me up to appreciate just how much effort and work goes into making these textiles and the techniques behind them. And partially because both my parents are creative, my mom and dad both work in the diamond industry in New York City. My dad's been in the diamond industry since he was nine years old. And there's a certain level of craft that goes into jewelry-making and a certain level of appreciation and understanding of what's exceptional. My mom definitely used the same thought process in jewelry-making as she did in choosing and working in textiles, and she taught me a lot of those handicraft techniques.

Another layer on top of this is my parents. My dad has a third grade education and my mom has a ninth or tenth grade education, and they didn't speak English growing up, so they weren't sitting with me to do homework or going out and playing sports. But what we would do is we would sit down and craft together, and she would show me the different beading techniques that she knew, and she would show me how to make jewelry with the beads, and how to embroider things with beads, how to add a little shine and pizzazz to my clothes that I would get from the store. I took that and applied it to my desserts.

"Desi Bakes" also includes drink recipes, like this mango jam limoncello spritzer. Photo by Hetal Vasavada.

What a rich childhood, how lucky you were,

Yeah, I think making something with your hands... baking and crafting are so similar in the way that you're making something with your hands and typically, you're making it for someone else or for others to enjoy. A way to identify something being handmade is if there's imperfections in it.

Yeah, it's beautiful. Diwali is celebrated at the end of October this year. What will you be baking?

This year, I will 100% be making my tender coconut cream pie. I'm obsessed with it. It's so easy, so quick. If you don't have time to make a graham cracker crust on your own, you could totally buy a store bought one and make the filling at home and just do that. But there is a different flavor that tender coconut has from regular coconut flakes or a more mature coconut. It's way more tropical. It's just so good. I chop up the tender coconut and I fold that into the cream, so you get moments where you get a bite of a little bit of that soft, tender coconut. That's just unreal. 

I will also definitely be making a good drink. Something you do during Diwali when guests come over, the first thing you do is you offer them something to drink. I have a pineapple ampana, which is a green mango drink where you boil green mango until it's soft. The reason you use green mango is because it's still got a bit of sourness to it and earthiness to it. And that really comes through in the drink. So you boil a green mango and once it's really soft, you strip the soft pulp off of it and blend that in with some mint, spices, and pineapple, and it's just so delicious. It's almost salty, savory, tart, and sweet. It's not fully a sweet drink, because there is a little bit of savoriness that the green mango gives it because of the earthiness, but it's just so good.

I went through the book looking for things that reminded me of the expressiveness and joy of Diwali. One of the things that really leapt out at me were the pineapple lime kisses.

They're such a fun cookie and they're so easy to make. I wrote the book during the summer, if you can't tell. There's so much tropical food in this cookbook, and the pineapples last year were so phenomenal. In India, pineapple is also a very popular fruit, surprisingly, and there is a pineapple lime drink that you can get when you're in India. 

Anytime you get a juice, they typically will squeeze a little bit of lime in. I wanted to take that moment of getting fresh juice in India and bring it into this cookie. So I use pineapple juice in the buttercream filling, and then a lot of lime zest that I rub into the cookie dough itself. I dye the cookie dough three different colors, really bright, fun colors, like pink, yellow, and orange, and I pipe them out using a star tip, so it gives it texture. You have color, you have a really vibrant and bright flavor, and it's just really like a joyful cookie to make, in my opinion.

"Desi Bakes" explores the variety of Indian desserts. Photo courtesy of Hardie Grant.

We love pie here at Good Food, can you share how your mother and aunt's dessert contribution to the Diwali feast, the Gugra Slab Pie, they use something in between the layers of the pastry.

Yeah, so gugra, typically how it's made, is different nuts bound together with a little bit of chickpea flour and usually milk fat and ghee, then it's wrapped in a pastry and deep fried, almost like an empanada. The way I make it is I use pie dough. Then the filling is more of a gugra frangipane. So I'm using the nuts, I'm adding the milk fat, I'm adding the chickpea flour, I'm even adding semolina in, which sometimes is or is not added, depending on where you're from, in India. Then I turn it into a pie dough. The way my mom and my aunts would make it is they would add dried fruit into theirs. It's more of a hand treat. This pie is more like something you could bring to a family event, cut up and share amongst everyone without having to actually deep fry anything.

Hetal Vasavada's Tender Coconut Cream Pie is made with fresh young coconuts and decorated with colored shredded coconut. Photo by Hetal Vasavada.