NOVEMBER 2020 75hetal’s metals & petals
Edible gold and silver foils are a popular way
to decorate sweets in South Asian cultures. They
must be either 24-karat gold or pure silver to be
safe for consumption. They can be purchased from
Slo Food Group (Loose Leaf Edible Gold Sheets,
$42 for 25 sheets; Loose Leaf Edible Silver Foil, $16
for 25 sheets; slofoodgroup.com). Vasavada uses
dried organic rose petals sourced from Morocco
from Rose Dose ($10 for 1 ounce, rosedose.com) on
many of her desserts. She turns to Jacobs Farm del
Cabo in Santa Cruz, California, for most of her other
flowers, like calendulas and pansies, and notes that
fresh petals from Whole Foods or other retailers will
work as long as they are marked as “edible.”Vasavada now lives 3,000 miles away, just south of San
Francisco, with her daughter and husband. She hasn’t been able
to get back to New Jersey in the eight years since she moved to
the West Coast—a fact that weighs on her heavily. “I remember
the first Diwali I was out here, I FaceTimed my mom and just
sobbed for two hours.” She has no extended family in California.
“It’s just the three of us,” Vasavada says. “It makes me sad that
Elara doesn’t get to grow up with the Diwali that I had.”
For many like Vasavada, diaspora is a never-ending fight
to tighten an ever-loosening grip on traditions. “What I do is
diluted from my parents’ Indianness, but what Elara does is
diluted from mine.” So Vasavada has created her own new set
of Diwali rituals. Her mom now mails her Diwali care packages
bursting with Indian snacks, sweets, and spices. “She sends me
a big box of literally as much as she can pack into one of those
single-rate boxes,” Vasavada says. In turn, Vasavada sends a
package of homemade desserts that lean more American in
construction—cookies, cakes, bars—but Indian in flavor and tech-
nique. (It’s an approach that has quickly become her signature
style and is the foundation of her cookbook, Milk & Cardamom.)
And while there is no longer a hundred-person annual feast,
Vasavada started hosting Diwali dinners with her friends nearby.
“They are not all Indian, but they appease me and come any-
way,” she muses. She still dresses up in a new outfit each year,
but the meals are simpler. For dinner, it might be pav bhaji—
richly spiced mashed vegetables with buttery toasted bread—plus
a crunchy Indian snack, like Hash Brown Chaat (recipe p. 78),
or two. The dessert table, however, isn’t any less full. “Everyone
brings dessert,” she explains. Vasavada, for her part, bakes up
quite a few treats that honor her dual-culture approach. This
year, she is going for a coconut burfi cake, which is an ode to
kopra pak, essentially coconut fudge, the one Indian sweet her
dad can make. There will also be crumbly cardamom short-
bread cookies that are filled with a dulce de leche–esque take
on peda, a dessert made from boiling down milk. But perhaps
the star of the table will be her pistachio burfi bark—a thick
layer of pistachio fudge lacquered with just the right amount
of white chocolate, decorated with festive edible flowers and
bursts of gold foil.
Vasavada realized she is not alone in her journey to maintain
and develop new Diwali traditions that straddle two worlds,
like she does. This summer, she launched an online bakery,
also called Milk & Cardamom, so that she can help bring these
desserts—like her burfi barks and popular gulab jamun Bundt
cake—to more tables around the country, especially this Diwali
season. “It’s a way for my desserts to reach more people, and at
the same time, it lets me be a part of a lot of families’ traditions.”For Vasavada, diaspora is anever-ending fight to tightenan ever-loosening grip ontraditions, so she hascreated her own new set ofdiwali rituals.It’s important to Vasavada to
pass on Diwali traditions to her
daughter Elara, age 4, seen here
eating a cardamom shortbread
cookie (recipe p. 100).