Wheat Flour Laddoo (Poori Idicha Unde)

Here comes another traditional sweet that my mother made. We call it 'Poori Idicha Unde'. It is very similar to wheat flour laddoo except that we make pooris and then use those pooris to make the laddoo. You might say that why do this extra work when you can just roast the wheat flour and mix it with sugar and make laddoos. Taste of these laddoos is different compared with the plain whole wheat flour laddoo. Not many people know about this sweet and that prompted me to blog about it.

Ingredients:
Whole wheat flour - 1 cup
All purpose flour - 1 cup (You can use wheat flour instead)
Sugar - 1 1/2 cups - 2 cups (I used just 1 1/2 cups)
Cardamom - 6 - 7 powdered
Dry Coconut - grated and measured 1 cup (optional)
Ghee - 1/4 cup + 2 TBSP
Broken Cashews - 1/4 cup
Raisins - 1/4 cup
Oil for deep frying (Neutral flavored oil will work here. I used double refined peanut oil which has no smell of peanuts whatsoever)

Method:
Make a soft dough with flours, 2 TBSP of ghee and water. Let it rest for about 5 minutes. Then knead the heck out of it. Believe it or not I used my bread machine to knead the dough for me. When the kneading is done, heat oil in a pan to deep fry. Make small balls of the dough and roll into thin discs. Deep fry. When you deep fry, do not press of the poori to make it puff up. We need them to be as flat as possible. When deep fried to golden brown on both sides, take out and drain on a paper towel. When you are done making a few pooris, take the pooris into the blender / mixie. Add part of the sugar and keep pulsing till you get coarse rava consistency. You might have to push the poori in couple of times (remember that the poori is still hot/warm). When you are done powdering all the pooris and sugar, take them into a big bowl and mix very well. Add grated dry coconut, cardamom powder and mix well. In a small pan, heat remaining 1/4 cup of ghee (You could use more than this). When hot, fry cashews and raisins and add this entire mixture to the poori and sugar mixture. Mix one more time and start making balls/undes/laddoos. You will have to make these when they are still warm. Otherwise you won't be able to make balls. They will crumble. If it happens, warm the mixture on a big pot of hot water (like a double broiler) and when it gets a little warm, start making balls. Another way to fix it is by warming some milk and sprinkling on it and making balls. Set them on a plate and let it set for about 20 minutes and cool down. When completely cool, store them in an air tight container.

Veganizing this sweet:
Since the main part of fat here is oil, just use shortening in place of ghee and you can make a vegan laddoo. Increase the cardamom a bit and you could try adding edible camphor to it to mask off the shortening smell if you are sensitive to it.

Enjoy!!