Turmeric, ginger and cardamom are ingredients not typically found in desserts, but at Malai Ice Cream, they're always on the menu.
"It's just a lot of flavors I grew up with that are ubiquitous of my childhood, but even that it's flavor with a twist," said Pooja Bavishi, the owner of Malai Ice Cream.
Pooja Bavishi began making ice cream for a living four years ago.
Using the spices she savored as a child, Bavishi has created two dozen Indian-inspired flavors like Roti, Ghee and Masala Chai.
Malai means "cream of the crop" in north India. She's sold her Malai ice cream at food festivals, like Smorgasburg, and through Whole Foods. But this Cobble Hill shop is her first store.
Not the traditional career path for someone who graduated from the London School of Economics and has an MBA from NYU.
"I loved making desserts for as long as I can remember. I loved the idea that desserts make people happy and so all of my life I always knew that at some point in the future I wanted to have my own dessert business," Bavisha said.
Bavishi's parents emigrated from western India where the cuisine is different than the traditional dishes on the menus of Indian restaurants here in New York.
Bavishi says her mom's meals were creamier and on the sweeter side, providing the inspiration for her mash up of Indian flavors and Ice cream.
"I noticed all these ingredients that I grew up with and so many people grew up with these beautiful aromatic spices where really underutilized in the mainstream market," Bavishi said.
After some trial-and-error ice cream making at home, she enrolled in an ice cream course at Penn State University, to learn how to do it on a commercial scale.
"Ice cream is a super blank pallet, so however robustly you flavor it whatever you flavor it with is the flavor it is going to take on and the better the ice cream going to be," Bavishi added.
And with dashes of turmeric, ginger or cardamom, Malai ice cream could not be fuller of flavor.