Learning-to-cook: Indian cookies

Monday, July 30, 2012

Nankhatai / Eggless Indian Cookies

When I announced the event, Dish name starts with N, the first dish that came to my mind is Nankhatai and others being Nutella recipes... So today we will see the Nankhatai and in the coming posts, we will see some Nutella recipes...While browsing for the Nankhatai recipe, I came across recipes which was calling for different ingredients in each recipe... So I called to my North Indian friend, to check with the recipe and decided to go with it... Here is the recipe...

Ingredients

All purpose flour/Maida - 2 cups
Ravai/Sooji/Semoline - 2 tsp
Cardamom crushed - 1 tsp
Baking soda - 1/2 tsp
Butter - 1 cup/1 stick (I used salted at room temperature)
Sugar - 1.5 cups
Pistachios - crushed

Method

Preheat the oven to 150 deg Celcious.
Add the Maida in a bowl.

To this add the rawa, cardamom, baking soda.

Mix/Sift them well.

Beat butter and sugar until fluffy.

Add the butter-sugar mix to the Mixed flour or vice versa.

Mix well to form a dough.

Take small portions of the dough and arrange it in the baking tray with gaps inbetween.
Make small cuts in the top of the balls and just put some crushed pistachios and press gently.

Repeat the process for all balls.

Now keep in oven for 20 to 25 min in the middle rack.
When they slightly start changing its colour, take out from oven and allow to cool for 5 min.

Serve the Nankhatai is a bowl or plate.
Can be preserved if kept in a airtight container. But mine got over by the same day.

Notes:

Instead of salted butter, you can go for unsalted butter. Since I like little salty taste in biscuits, I went with salted butter.
If the dough becomes dry, add little lukewarm milk and make a soft dough.
The other recipes called in

1). addition of 2 tsp of gram flour to the above recipe

2). 1 cup all purpose flour and 1 cup wheat flour instead 2 cups of APF.

3). 2 cups APF, baking soda and cardamom powder alone and no rawa.

So you may try any of the version and let me know ur comments.