Sweets of India Archives

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!

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.

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.

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.

When whole milk is curdled nicely, pour immediately in the strainer which is covered with muslin cloth and 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!!

February 4, 2022February 4, 2022

Deeksha Pathak72 Comments

Mohanthaal

Mohanthaal is a traditional Rajasthani and Gujarati sweet dish prepared with (besan) gram flour and clarified butter (ghee). It is a kind of besan ki barfi but mohanthaal has very fine granules of roasted gram flour. If you love gram flour sweets then definitely you should try this recipe. When you just gulp one piece of fine granules of besan roasted in desi ghee along with cardamom flavour settled down with sugar syrup, I bet you can’t stop with one piece only!!

My love for mohanthaal goes back to my childhood. This is one consistent mithai my mother used to prepare every year for Holi and Deepawali festivals. It is a sugar syrup based sweet dish and some people find difficult to prepare the right consistency of syrup. So my mom used to be in high demand during festival time in the neighborhood to help with the last step of mohanthaal when sugar syrup is getting ready! I was amused when my mom told that this year also during Deepawali that was called by next-door house aunt saying that mohanthaal has not come well, please do something…

Don’t worry, it is not really that difficult to prepare. Actually, mohanthaal is prepared in two different ways. One method is lengthier than other. My mom follows the first method, and I, being my mother’s daughter, am also used to the slightly longer process. I will post the short method too sometime in future.

A few points to remember :

While frying besan mathri, keep the heat somewhere between sim and medium as besan gets fried faster . Don’t worry much if Mathris remain slightly raw from inside. While roasting, we will take care of this.
Oil can be used in the whole process, but ghee gives wonderful taste. So decide as per your preference. I have used oil only for frying mathris .
Two thread sugar syrup (do taar ki chashni) is the right consistency for this sweet dish. But if you add roasted gram flour slightly early in sugar syrup and mohanthaal is not set firmly even after a few hours, don’t worry. Once again, add the gram flour in kadhai, stir it for 5-7 minutes on medium heat till the batter is thick and that will make it set nicely.
Mohanthaal will be very dry and brittle if sugar syrup becomes thicker than two-thread consistency. Again, don’t panic, collect dry mohanthaal, grind it in coarse powder, heat 1/2 or 1 cup milk in a wok/ kadhai and add powdered besan. Stir the batter continuously till it becomes thick and leaves the sides of wok/kadhai and then set it.
Reduce or increase sugar quantity as per your taste.
Ready gram-flour batter will be very hot when we shift to the greased plate for it to settle down. Because of heat, while cooling down, mohanthaal will change its colour and become bit more dark. But this will not affect the wonderful taste!
If gram flour is roasted nicely, you don’t need to keep mohanthaal in the fridge for a week.
Sweets of besan are usually very delicious and pure ghee will make mohanthaal irresistible. So, be aware of calories! Do some exercise and relish this homemade traditional Indian sweet to satisfy your sweet cravings this winter.

I have a few more posts on Indian sweets in the blog. If interested, you can take a look…

Seven Cups Burfi

Rasgulla

Rasmalai

Naariyal ki burfi (coconut burfi)

Naariyal Ke Laddoo

Rabdi / Rabri

Ingredients :

For muthiya/mathri

Gram flour (besan) 250 grams
Ghee/oil 6 tbsp
Water 1/4 cup
oil for frying
35 to 40 gms muthiya 10

For roasting

Ghee/oil (melted)1/3 cup

For sugar syrup

Sugar 300 grams
Water 1 +1/2 cups
Milk 2 tbsp

Cardamom powder and some chopped dry nuts of your choice
Ghee to grease the plate

Process :

Thoroughly grease a plate having edges with desi ghee and keep it separate.

In a broad vessel, mix besan and desi ghee together. Then slowly add water and prepare tight dough.

Divide this dough in equal parts and prepare these flat rolls as shown in the picture. We call these flat rolls Mathri or Muthiya.

In a wok/kadhai heat oil or ghee and fry these mathris.

When mathris are fried break them into pieces and grind them till you get coarse powder. Sieve this powder in a slightly medium-sized-holed sieve.

Add ghee and coarsely grinded powdered besan in a wok/kadhai. Roast it on medium heat till you get a nice aroma of gram flour. Shift this roasted gram flour to a separate vessel.

Heat water and sugar in the wok/kadhai to prepare sugar syrup .

Add milk the moment sugar gets dissolved completely. All the impurities of sugar will float on sides of the wok. Discard them with the help of a spatula. Let the syrup boil on high to medium heat till it reaches two-thread consistency. Add powdered cardamom in sugar syrup.

The moment syrup is ready, add roasted gram flour. Be quick here…mix it thoroughly in sugar syrup and shift this batter to the greased plate and spread it evenly. Sprinkle cardamom powder.

Spread finely chopped nuts and press them slightly with the back of a spoon so that the nuts settle down.

After one hour, when mohanthaal is still little warm, cut it in desired shape and size. Let it cool and settle down completely.

Very difficult to hold our temptations, right!! Till then satisfy your craving with the scrapes of mohanthaal from wok/ kadhai😋

Because of hot batter, besan gets roasted even while cooling down and turns slightly darker in colour and this enhances the taste a lot 😋😋😋

December 16, 2020October 27, 2021

Deeksha Pathak84 Comments

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.

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…

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 …..

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 .

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.