Pooja Bavishi shares frozen treats from her South Asian-inspired cookbook ‘Malai’

VPM | By Leila Fadel, Mansee Khurana and Adriana Gallardo

Published April 15, 2025 at 8:31 AM EDT

A spread of desserts found in the new cookbook, Malai

Updated April 17, 2025 at 14:11 PM ET

For Pooja Bavishi, ice cream is not just a sweet treat: It’s a mission.

“When I started Malai, the goal was always to change the way that ice cream is perceived in this country,” Bavishi told NPR’s Leila Fadel. “It used to be one of the only categories where you expect to see certain flavors, ” Bavishi said. “But why isn’t it as typical to pull a pint of masala chai as it is to pull a pint of cookies and cream?”

Bavishi is the founder and CEO of Malai, a New York-based ice cream company specializing in South Asian-inspired flavors. The company’s flagship store is in Brooklyn, but it also ships ice cream nationwide. Bavishi’s newest venture is a cookbook with the same name.

“This book is not at all supposed to be intimidating in either the flavor profile or the technique, ” Bavishi said. “It actually is supposed to be an everyday book. So if you have a dinner party on a weekend or a Tuesday night, and you want to make something really, really delicious and really want to wow your guests, you will turn to Malai.”

The cookbook’s recipes range from apple pie ice cream to orange fennel French toast. The flavors are mainly inspired by South Asian desserts, but Bavishi, who was raised in North Carolina by Indian immigrants, said that her goal is never to just cater to people who like South Asian flavors.

“The point of Malai is not to be the best Indian ice cream that you’ve ever had, ” Bavishi said. “It’s the best ice cream.”

Malai CEO and founder Pooja Bavishi with one of her frozen dessert creations. MORGAN IONE YEAGER /

NPR’s Morning Edition visited Bavishi at her store in Washington, D.C., to learn more about her new cookbook and her journey to making ice cream for a living.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Interview highlights

Leila Fadel: I want to start with the name of both your books and also your store. Where did it come from?

Pooja Bavishi: So, Malai, it figuratively means cream of the crop. Malai translates to “the best of something,” but it also means cream. When I started Malai, it was always going to be Indian-inspired ice cream. So it felt like a really appropriate name for the brand.

Fadel: Why ice cream?

Bavishi: Why not ice cream? Ice cream is truly one of the best desserts out there. It’s frozen, it’s creamy, it’s sweet. It’s all the things. There’s literally no one who does not like ice cream.

South Asian inspired desserts take center stage in a new cookbook titled Malai Morgan Ione Yeager /

Fadel: I want to get more into the way that you’ve found and chosen your flavors because they span from an apple pie ice cream and white chocolate cheesecake ice cream to rose almond and saffron pistachio.

Bavishi: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that that’s the total spectrum of what influences me. I think that’s the point that I’m trying to make in the book.

The white chocolate cheesecake ice cream — that’s what got me into desserts and food in the first place. I saw Mrs. Fields making a white chocolate cheesecake on TV when I was 10 years old, and I told my mom that I wanted to make that. She was like, “okay, the kitchen is yours.” So I made it, and it was terrible. I cut the cheesecake when it was still warm, so it was kind of soupy. And to this day, I distinctly remember giving, you know, “pieces” — it was really like in bowls scooped out — to my parents and my sister. And they were like, “This is delicious.” And I was like, “This is kind of amazing.” Dessert will always bring joy, even if it’s soup and it’s not supposed to be soup.

Suzanne Nuyen edited this story.

Tags

NPR News

Leila Fadel

Leila Fadel is a host of Morning Edition, as well as NPR's morning news podcast Up First.

As a national correspondent, Fadel consistently reported on the fault lines of this divided nation. She flew to Minneapolis in the midst of the pandemic as the city erupted in grief and anger over the killing of George Floyd. She's reported on policing and race, on American Muslim communities and on the jarring inequities the coronavirus laid bare in the healthcare system. Her "Muslims in America: A New Generation" series, in collaboration with National Geographic, won the prestigious Goldziher Prize in 2019.

Previously, she was NPR's international correspondent based in Cairo and covered the wave of revolts in the Middle East and their aftermaths in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond. Her stories brought listeners to the heart of a state-ordered massacre of pro-Muslim Brotherhood protesters in Cairo in 2013 when police shot into crowds of people to clear them and killed between 1,000 and 2,000 people. She told the tales of a coup in Egypt and what it is like for a country to go through a military overthrow of an elected government. She covered the fall of Mosul to ISIS in 2014 and documented the harrowing tales of the Yazidi women who were kidnapped and enslaved by the group. Her coverage also included stories of human smugglers in Egypt and the Syrian families desperate and willing to pay to risk their lives and cross a turbulent ocean for Europe.

She was awarded the Lowell Thomas Award from the Overseas Press Club for her coverage of the 2013 coup in Egypt and the toll it took on the country and Egyptian families. In 2017 she earned a Gracie award for the story of a single mother in Tunisia whose two eldest daughters were brainwashed and joined ISIS. The mother was fighting to make sure it didn't happen to her younger girls.

Before joining NPR, Fadel covered the Middle East for The Washington Post as the Cairo Bureau Chief. Prior to her position as Cairo Bureau Chief for the Post, she covered the Iraq war for nearly five years with Knight Ridder, McClatchy Newspapers, and later the Washington Post. Her foreign coverage of the devastating human toll of the Iraq war earned her the George. R. Polk award in 2007. In 2016 she was the Council on Foreign Relations Edward R. Murrow fellow.

Fadel is a Lebanese-American journalist who speaks conversational Arabic and was raised in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon.

See stories by Leila Fadel