I Am My Own Mithaiwallah

So for the first debates... well, I didn't make anything because we were planning to go to Busboys & Poets (which we didn't because it was too packed).

For the second debates, the VP ones, I made Obama-Biden Pie.

For the third debates I made "Elitist Rice-Krispies Treats," which were rice-krispies treats with chunks of dark chocolate mixed in. (This was mostly because I had half a box of Rice Krispies left over from the last time I made rice-krispies treats, which was when I was entertaining a friend who had just flown in from Bombay and with whom I wanted to share an authentically American dessert. My friend didn't like them all that much.)

And for the final debates I made, or tried to make, besan barfi.

Again, part of the reason was practical: I had a giant container of chickpea flour sitting in my cupboard. The other part was that Madhur Jaffrey made the recipe look so easy.

A (different) friend told me afterwards that most people find Indian sweets too difficult to attempt on their own. I was a little surprised, because Ms. Jaffrey is all "fry up the chickpea flour in ghee until it turns all brown and good-smelling, let it cool, and then stir in sugar syrup and cardamom." In terms of recipes, it is about as "basic" as one can get.

So how did they turn out?


It's pretty clear where I went wrong. Too much sugar syrup. To be fair, I don't have any measuring cups and so I cook using the "eyeball method." (To be fair again, that's a pretty stupid way to cook. [To be fair a third time, this method generally works for most recipes.])

Still, even if they weren't exactly 100% barfi, they had that unmistakable "Indian sweet" taste (which comes, no doubt, from mixing ghee, chickpea flour, and cardamom).

And yes, they were well-received. ^__^