Dessert love

You can take a fish out of water for a minute, but the sweet tooth in me - nope! No trying. As much as I endeavor to stay away from the dessert territory, my genetic makeup keeps pushing me deeper and deeper into it. As a result of which, I get myself into trouble doing weekend projects - such as the one you see in the picture. After being oven deprived - I have not baked a dessert for over 365 days now. Somehow with our eating habits and such here, things like a brownie or tiramisu have become an occasional treat. Even a chocolate chip cookie or a muffin for that matter, is a luxury. Costs about 130 rupees a piece at a Barista, and is half the size of what you typically see in the west. Which is a very good thing - out of reach price-wise and availability-wise means out of mind. However, each culture has its own way of getting spoilt - and on my menu for the time being, is fresh and hot Indian sweets. It does not help that we live close to the awesome Mahalakshmi Sweets and the place is staring at my face each time I walk out of our local grocery store :( But I love love love the portion sizes - bite sized jamuns and itsy bitsy pedas and burfis. They even sell in quantities of 100 gms or priced by piece. Therefore, you can walk away not feeling guilty and without buying a kg of sweets. Anyways, at least that is how I convince myself when I wander off to the guilty borders of dessert land. Another big fat lie I tell myself, is the use of jaggery instead of white sugar. I try and use the black jaggery with ginger (karupatti) even in tea instead of sugar. It is an acquired taste though. So, then I gave a shot at many health desserts - using "healthy" ingredients like jaggery, dates, almonds, walnuts, raisins, besan, sesame seeds, peanuts, grams and so on. Basically I collect a list of "protein" items, dry roast on the stove, powder in the blender, add in some powdered jaggery and cardamom, roast everything together again, pour fresh hot ghee and press roll into balls. Sounds pretty healthy- right? Home made snacks. Kids have eaten them for the most part. But they somehow know - that it is not your regular sinful ladoos, they sulk but eat the "health stuff" - usually brown in color with a chalky taste despite the sweetness. Jaggery does not equal the pleasure white sugar provides - at least in their minds.

Thus, I keep justifying my love for the dessert Gods.

Coming to the picture, it is called Pottukadalai Urndai (Split roasted gram balls). Takes just 2 ingredients to make this - the gram and jaggery. Now that seems simple, but only in terms of the number of ingredients. Quite complicated otherwise. I might do this again possibly with peanuts, maybe in a chikki form - if I get the mood someday. But I will skip writing down the recipe for now.