Golpapdi - Wheat flour sweetened with jaggery

A quick look at my recipe index or the labels, will tell you my love for sweets. I have a special affinity to jaggery based sweets. I feel jaggery based sweets are generally healthy compared to the sugar ones. Jaggery is rich source of iron and sweets with this, doesn't call for loads of fat. Golpapdi is one sweet that caught my attention for the simple ingredients and the easier method of preparation. I have tried it few times and not once the jaggery melted from the heat of the flour mix. And every time, I will put the pan back to stove and melt it and then proceed further. The result was still good though it may not come close to the actual golpapdi.

Cut back to January and news paper carried articles on Makarashankaranthi festival and various delicious treats specially made for the festive season. In one of such articles, I read about a variety of jaggery which is soft and suits for til/ellu ladoo. It then dawned on me that such kind of jaggery is required to make golpapdi too.  I found that the jaggery block which I had purchased then was the soft kind. I had casually picked it from the grocery shop and did not find any difference. Then I tried again and finally met success. I followed Tarla Dalal's recipe. 

You need


Whole wheat flour/Atta - 1 cup
Grated Jaggery - 3/4 cup
Ghee - 4 tbspn
Poppy seeds - 1 tspn
Cardamom powder - 1/4 tspn

Method

Heat the ghee in  a pan/kadai. Add the wheat flour to the melted ghee. Keep stirring till the wheat flour turns into a brown color and the aroma of roasted wheat flour in ghee will fill your entire kitchen. Make sure, you don't burn the flour. Remove the pan from fire. The rest of the steps doesn't require any more cooking. Quickly add the grated jaggery and cardamom powder to the roasted wheat flour mix. Keep stirring.The jaggery will melt and it will comes to semi solid mass. Transfer the mix to a greased plate, sprinkled with poppy seeds.  Press and spread the mix evenly with a flat based cup/katori. Mark squares while warm. When cool, store in air tight container.

Please check what my blogging marathon buddies have cooked for the day.