Homemade Gulab Jamuns

Gulab Jamun is the most popular indian sweet which wins hands down always. No matter what the occasion is,  you'll see this sweet everywhere right from birthday parties to wedding ceremonies to dinner parties. I have tried making gulab jamuns using the ready made mixes which are easily available, this time i thought otherwise and made then using milk powder and all purpose flour. The recipe seemed to be very simple and I had all the ingredients on hand. The recipe is adapted from Priya's blog and you can view the original recipe here. I have made few changes to the recipe to suit my taste and the results were very encouraging, I definately will be using this recipe a lot in future. The below recipe yields around 30 to 35 gulab jamuns.

Ingredients:

2 cups Milk Powder

1/2 cup + 1tbsp all purpose flour (Maida)

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 cup milk

1 tbsp ghee or melted butter

Oil for frying

Sugar syrup ingredients:

2 cups sugar

2 cups water

1 tsp cardamon powder

few drops of rose essence or rose water (i used rose water)

few saffron strands (optional)

Procedure:

• Mix milk powder, flour, baking soda and ghee in a vessel. Mix them with your hands until they form crumbs. 
• Add milk little at a time and make soft dough out of it. Cover and keep the dough aside atleast for half an hour.

• In a seperate heavy bottom pan mix sugar, water, cardoman powder and rose water, bring it to boil. Boil this mixture for atleast 10 to 15 mins.

• Make small round balls of the dough, grease your hands with little oil if the dough is sticking to hands.

• Heat oil for frying, fry the jamuns on very slow heat, each gulab jamun will take atleast 5 mins to get cooked. Remove them on paper towel once they turn brown.

• Transfer the gulab jamuns into sugar syrup. It will take sometime for the sugar syrup to be absorbed in gulab jamuns, I would suggest to keep the gulab jamuns in syrup for atleast 4 to 5 hours so that the flavors of cardoman and rose water are nicely absorbed.

• You can warm the gulab jamuns before serving.
• Enjoy these delicious gulab jamuns either hot or cold with vanilla ice cream :)