Shakkar Para / Khurma

Shakkar para is nimki's sweet twin, and in most houses the two are made on the same afternoon from the same rolled dough. Cut into diamonds, fried, then turned through a sugar syrup that sets into a thin white frost as it cools. In eastern India the same thing is called khurma and nobody argues about it.

The pleasure of it is the double texture: hard and biscuity underneath, brittle and sugary on the outside, so it cracks rather than crumbles. It is a tea sweet, a festival tin sweet and the thing that disappears from a Diwali box before the barfi does.

Small batches, because the syrup is the difficult part — a degree too far and it goes grainy, a degree short and it never sets. Packed the day it is made.