Malaysians Say The Darndest Things!

Happy Deepavali 2008 (And My Gulab Jamun Experience)

October 26, 2008

Happy Deepavali to everyone! May you have an enjoyable holiday with friends and family and spare a quick thought to those that are not able to be with their family for certain reasons (work, foreign country, exile, ISA, etc).

Since I had tons of time on my hands, I decided to try making gulab jamun, which is my favorite Indian sweet dessert. So after some consultation with Togo’s mum, I went off to Giant to get the ingredients. I bought milk powder, self-raising flour, butter, and full-cream milk to make the dough.

For the syrup itself, I was looking for this particular spice called cardamom, and I had no freaking idea what it was and what it looked like. After searching high and low for cardamom and not finding any (also because I had no idea what the Malay name was), I drove to the wet market to and consulted the spice lady, and found out that cardamom in Malay is pelaga. So now you know what to look for if you want cardamom.

Happily, home I went with the ingredients, and making the syrup was awfully simple. Just 2 cups of sugar, plus 1 cup of water, crush the pelaga slightly, and boil until all sugar dissolved. I had a quick taste, and found the taste pretty similar to what I had outside. I was pretty happy that everything had started so well. Unfortunately, it was all downhill from then on.

I mixed 2 cups of milk powder (btw, milk powder is f-ing expensive! I had no idea! Poor parents!), 1 cup of self-raising flour, some butter, and slowly added the full cream milk while mixing it to make the dough. Unfortunately, I added too much milk and ended up with a liquidy paste instead of dough. I decided to throw that away and start again, this time, added milk tablespoon by tablespoon to make sure I didn’t overdo it again.

Once I had the dough and rolled it into balls, I dropped it into the oil for deep frying. After half an hour of experimenting the right temperature and right ball size (I burnt a few balls due to excessive temperature), I finally came up with a few nicely fried balls. Off it went from the wok into the syrup.

So anyway, here is what gulab jamun is supposed to look like:

Pic taken from Wikipedia

Here is the result of my experimentation:

Pic taken from my cellphone, so blur a bit

So how would I rate my creation? Appearance-wise, let’s just say if I get served this in a restaurant, I would throw it back to the waiter. Taste-wise, well, the sugar syrup was pretty overpowering. And I realize I should really keep my day job.

So anyway, I ate 4 biji, and now, I feel sick to the stomach because of the syrup (ugh). Ah well, cooking is fun. And if someone asks what I did during Deepavali, I could tell them I made gulab jamun, instead of telling them I did nothing.

Oh, and by the way, I’m looking forward to the Miss Universe 2008 broadcast on TV tonight, for this reason alone.

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