Malpua of Ujjain

Few sweets say "temple town" quite like the malpua of Ujjain, the plump, golden-edged pancake that has fried and bubbled in the old-city lanes for generations.

• This is not a single shop but a living craft: a batter of flour, milk (and often mashed banana or a touch of khoya), sweetened and perfumed with cardamom and a thread of saffron, ladled into a shallow pan of hot ghee where the edges lace and crisp while the centre stays soft.
• Straight from the pan it is bathed in warm sugar syrup, sometimes finished with a scatter of chopped pistachio or a spoon of rabri.
• The version you find here is eggless, in keeping with the devotional register of a Shaiva pilgrimage city where sweets are made to be offered as well as eaten.
• The malpua's rhythm in Ujjain follows the calendar of Mahakaleshwar.
• It appears in everyday sweet-shop trays year round, but comes into its own during festival weeks — Mahashivratri, the processions of Sawan, and the great Simhastha Kumbh gathering, when the town swells with pilgrims and the halwais work through the night.
• Watching a maker judge the ghee's heat by the hiss of the batter, then flip and lift each disc at the exact moment, is a small piece of theatre worth pausing for.
• Alongside the malpua you will usually see its cousins on the same counter: jalebi coiled bright orange, mawa-bati (Ujjain's signature ghee-fried dumpling), and thick, plain thandai and lassi.
• For pure-veg eating, the malpua trail itself is the meal.
• Graze the halwai stalls in the Daulatganj and Gopal Mandir bazaar lanes near Mahakaleshwar for fresh malpua, jalebi and mawa-bati; long-standing pure-vegetarian sweet shops around Chhatri Chowk and Freeganj serve syrup-soaked malpua with rabri, while nearby udupi and Gujarati-Rajasthani thali houses round out a full pure-veg meal with dal-bati, poha and kachori.