Maladu/Pottukadalai Urundai

Weddings! Phew! Tiring, exciting, colorful and family time! I love them. This time it was my sis-in-law who tied the knot and since this is the first wedding we are attending after outs, both TH and I were in the limelight too. And god knows how I love that! It was a typical Brahmin wedding with the works. Ours wasn't, so I was seeing most of the customs for the first time. Can I say phew again?

I wanted to get back after this small and nice break with something sweet. One of the very few sweets I had in my archives - Maladu. I love it and prefer it to the besan ladoos. What makes this recipe even more special is that my mom, sis, niece and I made this two days before my wedding so put in the thamboola pai (a return gift bag for weddings that contains a coconut, betel leaves, turmeric, kumkum and sometimes a small box or steel vessel with sweets.) Mine contained all these things and these maladu. We made around 450 of them, wrapped them in butter paper and put them in small steel containers as a gift.

I have scaled down the recipe to make around 15 balls.

What I Used:

Pottukadalai/Dariya Dal/Pori Kadala/Split Roast Gram Dal - 1 cup
Sugar - 1 cup (you can add more, this is not over-sweet like you get in stores)
Cashewnuts - 50gm, roughly chopped
Ghee - 2 cups (you may not need it all)
Powdered cardamom - 2 tsp

How I Made It:

1. Powder, the dal and sugar fine separately.

2. Heat some ghee and roast the cashewnuts until golden brown.

3. Mix the powders, cashewnuts and cardamom powder well.

4. Heat all the ghee and slowly add to the above mixture till you get the right consistency that lets you make lime-sized balls. Note that heating the ghee makes this job easier and you will need more when it cools down.

Needless to say, there was a lot of mixing, heating and re-heating of the ghee until we finished the 45o maladu. Was back-breaking but fun :)

Store in an air-tight container up to 10 days. Alternately, you can make the powders and store them separately to whip this up even more quicker.

I am sending this to two events:

- Mythreyee's Sweet Series - Chikki and Laddus
- Sunita's Think Spice Think Favourite Event, mine being cardamom.