Wishing you all a very Happy and Prosperous Diwali! Diwali is one of the biggest festivals celebrated in India. It is celebrated over 3-5 days depending on which part of India you come from. I remember my Mom making a variety of dishes, both sweet and savory for Diwali and each day it was a different treat! We used to look forward to this particular festival more than the other ones because of the new clothes, crackers, sweet and savory dishes, gifts etc that we would get. One of the dishes I remember my Mom making was Malpuri and for this Diwali, I wanted to try my hand at making this and here we are! These sweets are disc shaped, crispy around the edges and soft in the middle. This is the way my Mom makes it and I am sure there are different variations to this, but this is how we like it at home. This is one of the most simplest desserts that I have tried. Only the frying takes a little bit of time and patience as it has to be done on low to medium flame.
Ingredients
- Maida/all purpose flour - 1 cup
- Water - 3/4 to 1 cup
- Sugar - 1 cup
- Cardamom powder - 1 tsp
- Oil or ghee(clarified butter) for deep frying
Instructions
In a wide bowl, put in 1 cup of flour and slowly add water little at a time. Using a whisk, mix well so that no lumps are formed and the batter is smooth. It should have the consistency of pancake batter.
Once the flour and water batter is smooth and there are no lumps, add sugar and mix well. Whisk till the sugar blends into the batter. This should take atleast 4-5 minutes.
When the sugar crystals are dissolved and no longer visible, add the cardamom powder and mix well.
Heat oil/ghee (clarified butter) in a frying pan and drop a ladleful of batter into the hot oil. Fry on low to medium heat, allow it to turn golden brown and then flip the disc over and let the other side turn golden. Using a slotted spoon, pick up the cooked Malpuri off the oil and using another spoon, press it, holding over the pan so that you get the excess oil off the Malpuri.
Repeat for the rest of the batter.
Note:
- People also add yellow food coloring to the batter, some people add Kesar (saffron threads) too to the batter. One of the recipe books I have asks you to mix the batter using yoghurt/ and also to keep the batter aside for 4-5 hours or overnight.
- Ghee (clarified butter) is normally used to deep fry the Malpuris. But given this day and age, I don’t think that’s adviseable. But if you are game and want authentic tasting Malpuris, then I would say “go for it”!
- After getting excess oil off the Malpuri, I let it drain on the slotted spoon for a couple of minutes and then put it on an absorbent paper. I initially put a piping hot Malpuri on paper and it stuck to it like glue and it was difficult to get the paper off it. That’s the reason I started leaving it on the spoon for a few minutes and later moved it onto paper. If you think its still oily, you can also put another paper on top and keep a heavy object on top of that to absorb even more oil.
- This is also one of those desserts that absorbs oil and no matter how hard you try, it will be oily, but delicious!
1 Comment
Navdeep
June 22, 2016 at 7:57 pmDelicious indeed! This is similar to “Malpua” which does not have sugar in the batter. The puri ( or pua) is dunked into a sugar syrup after frying to give it a very sweet taste.