Wish you all a very happy Diwali.
I finally got to making some dishes for Diwali. My 6 month old was down with cold for last few days and I was really trying hard to keep up with just day-to-day cooking. Since Ishaan is 4 years old, I thought he would have fun during this festival. I had a long list of dishes that I wanted to make, but I am glad I am slowly getting to atleast few of them.
Gulab Jamun is one of my favorite Indian sweets. We usually make these with khova/khoya . I normally make khova at home to make jamuns. But this time I did not have time to make it at home or to run to Indian store to get it. So I decided to try jamuns with paneer, which is readily available in my neighborhood grocery store. I wanted to follow the same recipe but just replace khova with paneer. Then last moment, I decided to add some cooked sweet potato to it to see how it would taste. The result was very soft and tasty jamuns.
Pictorial: Make the syrup Make jamuns
Paneer - Sweet Potato Gulab Jamun
Ingredients
For Jamun
- 1 cup 8oz or 226g crushed paneer
- 1/2 cup mashed sweet potatoes around 150g before cooking
- 1/4 cup all purpose flour
- 1/2 tea spn baking soda
- Oil/ghee for deep frying
For Syrup
- 2 cups sugar
- 3 cups water
- 1/2 tea spn cardamom powder
Instructions
- Heat sugar and water in a pan till it starts boiling.
- Take off the heat and add cardamom powder.
- Cook sweet potatoes in pressure cooker.
- Peel them and grind to a smooth paste.
- Mix paneer, sweet potato paste, all purpose flour, baking soda.
- Make small balls out of the mixture. To make sure they don’t fall apart, apply some pressure with palms to make sure they stay together.
- Heat oil, add 1 tbl spn of ghee to oil.
- Deep fry the jamuns, till they are deep brown.
- Take them out on a paper towel.
- When they are still warm, slide in warm syrup.
Notes
Paneer - Sweet Potato Gulab Jamun
Ingredients
For Jamun
- 1 cup 8oz or 226g crushed paneer
- 1/2 cup mashed sweet potatoes around 150g before cooking
- 1/4 cup all purpose flour
- 1/2 tea spn baking soda
- Oil/ghee for deep frying
For Syrup
- 2 cups sugar
- 3 cups water
- 1/2 tea spn cardamom powder
Instructions
- Heat sugar and water in a pan till it starts boiling.
- Take off the heat and add cardamom powder.
- Cook sweet potatoes in pressure cooker.
- Peel them and grind to a smooth paste.
- Mix paneer, sweet potato paste, all purpose flour, baking soda.
- Make small balls out of the mixture. To make sure they don’t fall apart, apply some pressure with palms to make sure they stay together.
- Heat oil, add 1 tbl spn of ghee to oil.
- Deep fry the jamuns, till they are deep brown.
- Take them out on a paper towel.
- When they are still warm, slide in warm syrup.
Notes
School reopened for my preschooler in August. With that, all the invitations for birthday parties also started. So the child was pretty upset that his birthday is not coming soon enough. April is way too far and he had some meltdowns when I said he has to wait for 6 more months. When he started repeating the same question again and again, I told him I will make him something special for his 4 and 1/2 birthday. So he started counting down days for that. He wanted a big party, so to set the expectations, I told him he will get spiderman cake pops for the special day. (A friend had sent me this Spiderman Candy Apples link , I know he wouldn’t care for candy apples, so I thought of cake pops instead). He gladly agreed. He told me, “I will taste one, if I like, I will take to school and share them with my friends!!”. Lets just say I was really glad that day his school was closed, so I didn’t have to make some 20+ cake pops.
Most of the cake pops I have seen are prepared with crumbling a cake, adding some buttercream to it and then forming balls. I did not want to make that this time since I felt buttercream makes the pops very sweet. My child is not too much into sweets. He eats cakes once in a while, but not too much. He loves chocolates though. So after a lot of googling, I found out about cake pop pans which I got at Target .
I used eggless chocolate cake recipe for my pops. I used half the quantity which was perfect for the pan. The cake pop pan is greased with butter and sprinkled with flour. Unlike a muffin pan, each pop mold is filled completely (only one half of the pan) and then the other half is kept on it and locked. So when the cake bakes, it fills up the other half to get perfect rounds. I baked it for 15mins. The I let it rest till it was cooled completely and then removed the pops from pan. Then with a sharp knife, removed any round rings on the pops that were caused by oozed out cake batter.
In a cup, I melted some white chocolate chips. Each pop stick was then dipped into chocolate and inserted into pops. Then chilled in fridge till the chocolate is completely set.
Here is where the problems started!. I melted some chocolate and then colored it red. I kept mixing it and it all became mushy. Then I remembered something that I had read somewhere. Do not mix white chocolate too much!. So next batch I was lot more careful. Once the chocolate was melted, I dipped each pop into the colored chocolate. I had to be really careful here since they started falling apart, so I had to move quickly and carefully. Then I refrigerated them back till the chocolate was set.
Then I drew eyes with white buttercream and webs with black buttercream.
