Rajbhog

Rajbhog

To celebrate the festival of Basant Panchmi this year, I decided to prepare Rajbhog. The below pictures of Rajbhog are when the first time I had successfully prepared this sweet dish. I was so thrilled with the outcome that I had clicked and sent these pictures  to my mother!

Rajbhog

Rajbhog

Basant Panchami festival in India signifies the arrival of spring season. Goddess Saraswati is worshipped and everyone wears yellow coloured clothes. One dish is cooked which has yellow colour – either savory or sweet. In North India this time mustard crops are in full bloom and fields are full of yellow mustard flowers.

To carry on this yellow coloured sweet dish preparation, Rajbhog was perfect .It is prepared with chenna/ paneer (curdled milk). It is very close to Rasgulla (Rasgulla) , and the only difference between these two is that Rajbhog is slightly stuffed with dry nuts and saffron is added for colour and fragrance.

Rajbhog

Ingredients:

1 litre       full fat milk
I lemon juice (can be replaced with 1 tbsp vinegar)
2 cups       sugar (granulated)
4 1/2 cup    water
1 tbsp  finely chopped mixed dry nuts and cardamom powder
a few strands of saffron
Seeds of 2-3 whole cardamom
Keep ready one tray of ice cubes

Method:

In one tbsp of hot milk, add some strands of saffron in a small bowl and keep it aside. Cut dry nuts finely and keep them along with cardamom powder in a bowl. In a separate bowl, keep whole cardamom seeds.

preparation for Rajbhog

Take one big bowl and on top of it keep strainer covered with muslin cloth to sieve curdled milk. The whey water can be used to knead dough or use it for curries.

Squeeze out lemon juice, sieve it, add equal amount of water to the lemon juice and keep it separately.

Boil milk, switch off the heat and pour lemon juice or vinegar. Milk will curdle as it is very hot.

boil milk

curdle milk

When whole milk is curdled nicely, pour immediately in the strainer which is covered with muslin cloth and add ice cubes.

add ice cubes

Let the chenna remain in muslin cloth and wash it nicely in the running water so that no taste of lemon or vinegar remains. Squeeze out all water from chenna.

Now hang this chenna in muslin cloth for 15 min, so that the rest of the the water drains out. If you feel that chenna still has moisture after hanging also, squeeze it with your hands along with muslin cloth.

Now chenna is completely dry. Sieve saffron milk (keep saffron strands safe) and add this into chenna to add moisture and beautiful yellow colour. Mix it properly so that whole chenna gets absorbed in yellow colour.

Rub it nicely with your palms so that all the grains of chenna become soft and it can be collected  like a dough.

Prepare equal sized small balls from this whole chenna dough. There should not be any cracks in the balls. If you are getting cracks, rub the chenna ball between your palms and again make the ball.

Press the chenna ball with your finger and add little amount of finely cut mixture of dry nuts mixed with cardamom powder and again roll the ball neatly to seal the stuffing.

Now in a big size vessel or pressure cooker add water, sugar, saffron strands and cardamom seeds. Switch on the heat on high flame.

Keep stirring water till whole sugar is dissolved. The moment water starts boiling, add all chenna balls into this syrup and cover the vessel and keep some weight on the cover (if using cooker, let it boil till first whistle and then sim the flame for next 5-7 min.) Gas flame should be high for the first five minutes – then reduce it to sim for the next 5-7 minutes.

Switch off heat and let the steam cool down completely and then open the lid of the cooker. You will see that small balls of chenna have doubled in size.

Shift them to another bowl along with sugar syrup. Let them cool down completely. Once cooled, keep them in the fridge for 3 to 4 hours.

Serve chilled and garnish with dry nuts.

Spongy bright yellow coloured Rajbhog is ready to relish!!

Rajbhog

Rajbhog

 
Rasgulla

Rasgulla

I am a complete chenna based dessert person who doesn’t need any excuse to gorge on Rasgulla or Rasmalai sweets. And if I have homemade dessert, I just keep on searching for an excuse to go again and again into the kitchen.

During summer you just don’t feel like having high calories sweets. You crave for something light which can be digested easily. So I prefer to prepare sweets from paneer during the summer season.

Rasgulla from paneer can be the base dish for many sweets. So you first learn to prepare Rasgulla (believe me, its not so difficult as it seems) and the rest of the varieties will be very easy to prepare.

Rasgulla

The secret of preparing the best spongy Rasgulla is in the right technique for preparing paneer. While searching for a good recipe for Rasgulla, I found a video by Vahvah chef about preparing Rasmalai. After watching this video i mastered (not at all exaggerating) the way to prepare Rasgulla. This is the picture of when I made Rasgulla successfully for the first time…

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Later I tried rasmalai, rajbhog and cham- cham (malai-sandwich) successfully with the base of all these sweet dishes as rasgulla with little variations. I will be posting all of them in the blog, but first I am starting with Rasgulla recipe …..

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Ingredients :

I kg full fat milk
I lemon juice(can be replaced with 1 tbsp vinegar)
2 cups sugar (granulated)
4 1/2 cup water
Seeds of 2-3 whole cardamom(optional)
Keep ready one tray of ice cubes
Method:
Squeeze out lemon juice, sieve it, add equal amount of water to the lemon juice and keep it separately.
Boil milk and pour lemon juice into it..
The moment milk starts curdling switch off gas…milk is so hot that it will curdle.

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When whole milk is curdled nicely, immediately pour this in a strainer which is covered with muslin cloth and add ice cubes.

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Let the chenna remain in muslin cloth and wash this nicely in running water so that no taste of lemon or vinegar remains. Squeeze out all water from chenna.
Now hang this chenna in muslin cloth for 10-15 min..so that rest of the water drains out.
Still If you feel that chenna is too wet, squeeze it with your hands

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Mash chenna properly.
Rub it nicely with your hands so that all the grains of chenna become soft and you can collect it like a dough.

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Prepare small balls of this whole chenna dough. There should not be any cracks in the balls.
And still if you are getting cracks, rub the chenna ball between your palms and again make the ball, or give it any other shape.

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Rasgulla balls from chhena is ready
Now in a big size vessel or cooker add water, sugar, and cardamom seeds. Switch on gas on high flame.
Keep stirring water till whole sugar is dissolved, and the moment the water starts boiling, put all your chenna balls into this syrup and cover the vessel and keep some weight on the cover (if using cooker, let it boil till first whistle and then sim the flame for next 5-7 min). Gas flame should be high for the first five minuets and then reduce it to sim for next 5-7 minutes .

rasgullas are ready for boiling

Let the steam cool down and then open the lid of the cooker. You will see that your small balls of chenna have doubled in size.

Your spongy Rasgullas are ready….!!
Shift them in another bowl along with sugar syrup. Let them cool down completely and later keep them in the fridge for 3-4 hours.

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Serve chilled.

Rasgulla

Oh, you cook  different dishes also other than just baking bread….!!

This was the instant reaction I got from my dear hubby in the evening when he saw the bowl of rasgullas on dining table … 😀😀😀

Rasgulla

Would love to hear from you about this  spongy paneer sweet dish ❤️❤️