Besan Ke Ladoo and Round up of Diwali Desserts

Easy recipe for homemade besan ke ladoo with just five ingredients.

Its festive season in India, with Diwali just around the corner. The markets are crowded with people, who are busy buying stuff for their house, gifts for others and themselves, shopping for clothes, buying sweets to be distributed or just enjoying all the festivities.

I am very selective when it comes to Indian sweets. For desserts I generally prefer baked goods, but there are exceptions where I would go for an Indian sweet over something baked.

Thin crisp Jalebis are my weakness, warm and soft gulab jamuns are the perfect treat and my mom’s atte ke halwa or kada parshad from the Gurudwara will be my choice any day over any sweet, baked or otherwise. Besan ke ladoo, are another favorite and for this Diwali I thought of making them at home.

Made from gram flour and very few other ingredients, besan ke ladoos are bites of heaven, according me. Goldenish in color and rich with the taste of ghee; the trick to making good besan ke ladoos is to make sure that your gram flour is properly roasted. Your house should smell like roasted besan- that’s when you know its done. But be careful not to let it go too dark, else you wont get the nice goldenish color that besan ke ladoos generally have.

My first attempt, which was a combined one with my mother, did not live up to my expectations. When my grandparents were staying in Jalandhar, my grandfather would send us off with boxes of besan ke ladoo from a small sweet shop there, Lovely Sweets, post our stay with them. Over the years we saw Lovely sweet shop flourish from a small space to a whole showroom, and then they branched out to motors and then education, with now their institutes worldwide. For me though, they will always be the best place for besan ke ladoo.

After my grandparents moved to Mohali, Punjab, somehow our connect with Lovely Sweets also ended and its been a while that I have tasted their besan ke ladoos. Determined to relive that taste by making them at home, I searched the internet. I looked at several recipes and found that there are two ways to make these ladoos. One is where you roast the besan/gram flour first and then add the ghee. The other is to roast the besan with the ghee. I somehow prefer the second method, because I had better results with it. This video by Nisha Madhulika helped me a lot.

Most recipes are similar with a 1:1 ratio of sugar and besan (although I add less of sugar) and a 1:2 ratio of ghee to besan. Using coarse gram flour will yield better ladoos, and even though I tried with regular fine ground gram flour- the taste you get with coarse gram four was far superior.

The kind of sugar that you use also makes a difference to the ladoos you will get. I used powdered sugar two times, but the third time used boora, which is what is traditionally used to make ladoos. The boora gives a grainier feel and when I bit into the ladoos made with boora and coarse gram flour, I knew I had the recipe I wanted and my experiments stopped there. To make boora you melt the sugar with water, make a syrup and let the syrup thicken. As the syrup cools, it will thicken and become drier, and the end result is a powdery substance that is called boora or tagaar.

After eating many ladoos and experimenting with the recipe for days, I am finally satisfied enough to share the recipe for these ladoos with you. I have also rounded up a list of Diwali desserts that you can try this Diwali, which I am sharing in this post after the recipe. If you do try any of these desserts/sweets do let me know how it went. Do tag me on my instagram, Facebook, twitter or leave a comment on the blog.

Wish you all a very festive season.

Besan Ke Ladoo and Round up of Diwali Desserts

Prep time: 15 mins

Cook time: 30 mins

Total time: 45 mins

Serves: 24

Ingredients

2 cups coarse besan/gram flour
1 cup (with 1-2 tbsp removed) ghee
1 1/2 cups boora or powdered sugar
8-10 roasted almonds
4 cardamoms, seeds removed and ground
1-2 tbsp water

Instructions

In a thick bottomed pan, or kadhai melt the ghee on medium heat. Once ghee is melted and hot, turn heat to medium low and add the coarse besan/gram flour and stir to mix it in. Constantly stir and cook the besan with the ghee till the ghee separates out and you can smell the cooked besan. It takes about 20-25 minutes. Make sure you keep stirring and the heat is not too high. Once almost done, as the ghee is separating from the besan, add a few splashed of water, making sure to stir the mixture. This helps in the final grainy texture of the ladoos. Stir for another minute. Remove from flame and let this mixture cool completely.
Roast the almonds, and then coarsely grind them in a food processor.
Once the besan-ghee mixture is cool, add the burra, the ground almonds and cardamom. Do not add the burra/powdered sugar to the besan-ghee mixture till it cools off, else your sugar will melt and you will have a difficult time forming ladoos. For me the level of sweetness is perfect with 1.5 cups of boora, but in case you like your ladoos sweeter please add more boora.
Mix together well, and then using both your hands form ladoos/round balls. I generally dont keep the ladoos too big in size and as a result get 24 ladoos our of this recipe. Depending on the size your yield might vary.

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