Mawa Cake

It's that calving time of the year, so once again we have a surfeit of milk. This time thanks to the birth of Musaafir, son of Lakshmi. He's dead adorable and equally useless, another male bovine on the farm only good for dung.

As Nagamma has made enough paneer for a while, I thought I'd try my hand at khoa and it was well worth it, though it took much longer than I imagined. Almost 6 hours to cook down, on a very low flame, a big dekchi of milk for a kilo of khoa. The result was beautiful and fragrant, the colour of a rich toffee latte. I wondered what to make from it...gulab jamuns, gajar halwa.. and decided instead on a mawa cake inspired by my mother's love of a mawa cake she once ate in an Irani cafe in Dadar, Bombay.