This must be the most nutritious sweet of the lot. A mung bean paste coated with a crunchy rice flour paste fried in golden coconut oil. Now doesn’t that sound like fun?
My mother is extremely fond of this and insists she makes this every year. She made these actually. I just watched and helped.
Ingredients
- 250g Mung Bean flour*
- 250g Rice Flour*
- 1 cup Kithul Treacle
- 150g Jaggery
- 1 tablspoon Powdered Cardamom
- Salt (As desired)
- Sugar
For the Batter
- 250g Rice Flour
- Pinch of Salt
- 125ml Coconut milk
- Pinch of turmeric powder
Method
- Combine treacle, jaggery, cardamom and salt in a pan until fully dissolved. Bring to the boil.
- Gradually add the gram flour and the gram flour and the rice flour. Make sure there are no clots.
- Cook until the mixture thickens and turn on to a greased pan. Flatten the mixture to about 1/2 centimetre and let it cool.
- Once cooled, cut the mixture into diamond shapes to your desired size.
- To make the batter, combine the rice flour, turmeric, salt and the coconut milk together. Make sure no clots form. The consistency should be that of a pancake batter.
- Heat coconut oil in a pan. Once it is hot enough, drop the diamond shaped mung bean mixture into the batter and drop it into the oil. Fry till golden brown.
The outer coating is nice, crisp and slightly salty while the middle remains moist and sweet. Laced with the warmth of Lankan spices and the lavishness of Kithul jaggery, biting into one of these is an overwhelmingly happy surprise. Not too heavy and not too sweet either, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are consumed by bagfuls. One bite and you should be hooked. Oh and the colour! It is the colour of sunshine!
Some tips
- To make the Mung bean flour (green gram flour), fry the washed beans in a pan until slightly browned and powder it. Alternatively, you can powder the fram and then fry it later as well. Some make the inner mixture with unfried mung beans, but I have found that the fried mung beans give it a more roasted, nutty flavour.
- To make the rice flour, soak the rice in water for about 2 hours, dry and powder it. Alternatively, you can simply purchase a packet of rice flour at the supermarket, but since at our household we are adamant about quality and going natural, we prefer to do it ourselves.
- When making the mung bean batter, keep some extra treacle on the side just in case the mixture goes dry. Don’t caramelize the mixture since it will be too brittle once it cools. It needs to be soft and moist yet not watery.
- If you don’t have much of a sweet tooth, you can adjust the sweetness by reducing the treacle, jaggery and the sugar. You can skip on the sugar altogether actually. Since we are a sweet toothed lot, we insist on ALL of these sweetners.
