Gulab Jamuns

With Eid-ul-Adha approaching in a few days, I thought to include a few recipes for mithai or mishit that we all enjoy. I am starting off with Gulab jamun's; small milk balls in a rose water infused syrup, delicious eaten hot with vanilla ice cream. Yum! Now you can cheat a little bit if you haven't much time by getting a Git's Gulab Jamun packet and just adding milk, or you can try to make them completely from scratch and watch people's reactions when you say it is not from a packet mix!

For my Gulab jamun's, I used:

1 cup/225g milk powder
¼ cup/70g self-raising flour
½ tbsp. coarse semolina
½ tbsp. sugar
¼ tsp. ground cardamoms
200ml warm milk
Oil to deep fry

For the syrup:
2 cups/500g sugar
3 cups/850ml water
A capful of rose water

In a bowl, take your milk powder and sieve in your self-raising flour. Add your coarse semolina, sugar and ground cardamoms and mix all the dry ingredients well. Make a well in the centre, and slowly add your milk little by little. You may not need all the milk. Mix the ingredients until you get a soft dough. Leave to rest for 5 minutes.

During this time, in a large saucepan, add your sugar, water and rosewater and out on a medium heat. This should reach boiling, then turn off the heat and leave it.

After 5 minutes, put the oil for frying on to heat. Again put it on a low heat. Then taking some cold oil on both hands, take a small pinch of dough mixture and roll between your palms into a ball. Do this for all the dough, until you have no more dough left. Depending on what size you make them, you should have about 30 medium balls, or about 20 larger balls. Do not make them too big as the insides will not cook when frying.

Drop one ball into the oil. It should stay at the bottom and rise up slowly. If it comes up too quickly, the oil is too hot. The colour of the dough should also not change immediately. If it does, again the oil is too hot. Allow the jamun’s to fry slowly, and they should roll over in the oil by themselves. If they do not, then do help them along!

Once browned, take out on a kitchen towel and allow to cool off completely. Once cooled, heat up the sugar syrup for a minute, and then put on low heat. Add the Gulab jamun’s to the syrup and cook on low heat for 5 minutes. After that time has elapsed, turn off the heat. Garnish with flaked almonds if you wish.

Et voila. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream.

Hope you enjoy!

Yaz ♥