In general, food in Bangladesh wasn't much to write home about. There were a few interesting dishes, some of which I'll blog about soon, but most of our meals seemed to be endless but eerily similar variations on mutton and rice. The one area we were most impressed with was sweets. These ranged from syrupy-sweet golab jam, below:
to milky shondesh (background, image below) and the slightly more savoury mishti (foreground):
After a great deal of 'research', I realized that my preferences lie somewhere between the above, and this dish, taken at the sweets shop pictured at the beginning of this post, combined my favourite Bangladeshi sweets:
tender (and not overpoweringly sweet) carrot borfi, slightly firm and cardamom-rich laddu, and an unidentified one, which was remarkably similar in taste and texture to what we call 'old fashioned' donuts in the US.
There were even some great sweet-ish snacks, including poori (deep-fried bread) and semolina halwa:
And although jilapi, strands of dough that are deep-fried before being soaked in syrup, certainly looked interesting:
the combination of oily and sweet was just a bit too much for me.