Hi urmaniac, yes it's been a long time. Hope things are well on your end.
I consider cinnamon, cloves, black pepper as having sweet spices but they definitely are warm spices (with some heat in them).
Ginger to me is also pungent spicy type root. Galangal is a bit milder. I was going by the original request of absolutely no heat and if that is the case I would not use any of the sweet spices nor ginger (so I omitted it from my recipe).
Also as far as curry powders go I have a dislike towards them because they are ground up and have to be used fast. If you don't they lose their pungency. Being Indian I like my spices freshly roasted and ground so I normally go down that path. I also have more control that way in quantity that I mix and the type of spices I use. For example fenugreek does not go well with all dishes and nor does star anise or anise seeds. So I add them if I need to or omit them if I wish to.
Yep we are fine, thanks!! I have been making myself scarce during the spring-summer due to home improvement/moving... we are finally in the new home but the work is still not finished!! Very exhausting, stressful at times, but a nice change, too!!
Thanks for the explanation of the sweet spices, too... yip, you are right ginger has a bit of sting, especially when it is still raw... as for other spices, maybe I don't feel it because I am more tolerant to spiciness than average people
Sometimes I use Jamaican pimento for curry, which works out very well and has a flavour sort of mixture of all those sweet spices, but it DOES have a punch. The same goes for
berbere (a mixture of spice originating from Africa), when we first tried it, we were totally fooled by the sweet smell, and put a generous amount of it in one of our cake recipes... geez were we in for a surprise...
The contrasting combination makes these spices very interesting for experiments though, to say the least!!