My Cheerful Kitchen: Traditional Boondhi Laddoo (A treasure from the kitchen of my great grand mother!)

Diwali and Laddoo are synonymous at my home! Yes, this is the only time in the year, when mom and grandma prepare this divine sweet. So we tend to call it Deepavali Laddoo rather than Boondhi Laddoo :) This is a traditional recipe that has been passed on from my great grand mother! Every year while making this recipe, my grandma would recall how great grandma used to prepare 200 laddoos all by herself!! I can't even imagine that. Usually we prepare around 50-75 laddoos, during Diwali, for distributing among our relatives/friends/neighbors. But this year, as I am already preparing different types of sweets, to post in the blog, grandma made only 15 laddoos. This recipe was completely prepared by her and my mom helped her in mixing and shaping the laddoos. So my contribution here was to just admire my kitchen queens prepare the sweet and happily click pictures! I am very happy to share this traditional recipe with you all! Just follow the steps and the result would be great!!

INGREDIENTS:

Gram flour (Besan/Kadalai maavu) - 100 grams
Sugar - 200 grams
Kesar food colour - 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon
Cashew nuts - 2 tablespoons
Raisins - 2 tablespoons
Cardamom powder - 1 teaspoon
Nutmeg powder - 1/2 teaspoon (Optional)
Ghee - 2 tablespoons
Oil - for deep frying

One good thing to learn from my grandma is the way she arranges the ingredients and keeps everything clean and ready before cooking! This picture describes her experience! As she can't stand and cook for a long time, she prepared the dish sitting down. While preparing any dish for a festival, it is a tradition to put rangoli below the gas stove and that is the reason for the rangoli in this pic :)

METHOD:

Sieve the gram flour and keep aside
In a broad vessel, take the sugar and mix it with 1/2 a cup of water. Heat it on a medium flame. Keep stirring, once the sugar dissolves and the syrup starts to boil, reduce the flame to low and continue to stir until the syrup reaches two strings consistency. (ie. to check for two string consistency, dip your fingers in water and take the sugar sticking to the laddle in between your thumb and index finger, it should form two strings as shown. Look how well my grandma obliged to show the proper consistency to the camera!!)
Remove from heat and add food color to the sugar syrup and mix well
Heat oil in a heavy bottomed pan
While the oil is getting heated, prepare the batter for boondhi. Mix the gram flour with water to form a thick pouring consistency batter as shown (Similar to the consistency of bajji batter). About 3/4th cup of water was required for 1 cup of flour
To check if the oil has heated enough, put a drop of the prepared batter into the oil. If it sizzles, then the oil is ready
Now take the batter in a small flat bottomed bowl, pour it in the boondhi laddle (You could use any big laddle with holes. Pat the batter with the bottom of the bowl, so that the batter falls into the oil in the shape of small balls or boondhi
The boondhi should not get crisp. So take the boondhi out of the oil within 5-8 seconds and put it into the vessel containing the sugar syrup
Mix the boondhi well with the sugar syrup. You will notice that the sugar syrup would have started to harden now. But this is perfect. Nothing to worry
Repeat the steps 7 - 9 in batches, till the entire batter is completed
Mix the boondhi and sugar syrup very well. If the syrup has hardened a lot, then heat the mixture on low flame and stir well so that the syrup coats all the boondhi evenly
Heat ghee and fry the cashews and raisins separately and add it to the boondhi. Add cardamom powder, nutmeg powder and mix very well
Allow the boondhi to soak well in the sugar syrup for about an hour. Keep it closed leaving a little gap. This is to ensure that the moisture doesn't increase
Once it is soaked well, grease your hands with ghee and shape them into balls/laddoos of your choice! Store in sir-tight containers. It is better to refrigerate them if they still remain after 4-5 days!

Some tips from my grandma:

The consistency of sugar crystallization is very important. Depending on the quantity of sugar, the time to reach two string consistency would vary. For the quantity mentioned in this recipe, it took about 20 minutes. But keep checking after the sugar starts to boil, so that you don't miss it.
Make sure to dip your fingers in a bowl of cold water, before checking the consistency
Reduce the flame while you take the batter and pour it into the oil. Increase it while you fry the boondhi
Fry the boondhi just for a few seconds because if they turn crisp, then they would not absorb the sugar syrup