I attempted to make a vegetable biriyani today from a Good Housekeeping book. I increased the ingredients from 4 to 8ish. The original recipe called for 1tsp of cayenne pepper. I don't like things very spicy so I added around 1 1/2 tsp. The dish was far spicier than I wanted. My niece was here and reckoned that the cayenne was too "harsh" rather than spicy. We ended up changing things slightly by adding coconut cream and didn't add the rice to the vegetables but left everything separate so people could take plain rice if they preferred. The dish already had some yogurt in it.
So, my question is, is it possible to mitigate the cayenne by adding anything else?