Laavy's Kitchen - A food blog by Laavy: Seven cups cake

Happy Diwali everyone :) Hope you all had a wonderful Diwali with your family.Diwali, the festival of lights is really the happiest time of the year when we get together with family to celebrate the triumph of good over evil with colorful dresses and sweets.Bursting of crackers is a tradition followed in India during Diwali and who doesn't love the bright colors in the sky :)

So I thought of making something sweet and unique this time to represent Diwali. I decided to make small lamps or diyas or velaku however you call them ...edible with the sweet.Considering the texture,size and taste,I decided to go ahead and make the 7 Cups cake (aka) 7 cup sweet.

Crunchy on the outside and gooey on the inside

As the name suggests there are seven cups of ingredients which makes this soft mildly sweet delicacy.It consists of 1 cup each of Besan,milk,coconut,ghee and sugar.You can use 3 cups of sugar for authentic recipe but I wanted to make it lightly sweet so made it with just 2 cups of sugar.

This sweet is traditionally made into squares and has a texture of Mysore Pak but I thought of doing it in a different way and make them into small balls so I can shape them to look like a small lamp/diya for Diwali.

Seven cups of ingredients

Ingredients

Besan flour / gram flour - 1 cup

Milk - 1 cup

Coconut - 1 cup

Ghee - 1 cup

Sugar - 3 cups (or) 2 cups if you don't want it to be too sweet.

Powdered cardamom - 1/2 tsp

Saffron strands - 5 or 6

Almonds and cashews - a handful

Sliced almonds - few pieces

Shredded coconut

Besan Flour

Saffron strands makes all the difference

Method:

Take a wide flat bottomed plate or bowl and apply ghee on all sides and keep aside.

In a pan,add 1/2 spoon ghee and roast the besan flour for 2 min until you get the aroma.Do not let them brown.Allow it to cool.

Mix all the ingredients in a large bowl.

Heat a deep bottomed pan in medium high flame.Pour the seven cups mixture and gently keep on stirring.

After 5- 7 min, the mixture starts bubbling.Now adjust the flame to medium heat and keep on stirring.After 20 - 25 min,the mixture becomes thick and starts leaving the sides of the pan.

Now you can do this in 2 ways.You can let it thicken up more for 5 min so you will get hard thick squares of this sweet.(OR) you can switch off now to get a soft ball of this sweet.

Well I did it the second way and lets proceed with that method.Switch off the flame when the mixture starts leaving the side of the pan.

Pour it carefully on the greased plate and let it cool for 10 mins and not much longer.

It is now soft and ready to be rolled into balls.Rolling them while they are lightly warm is very important .that because we are going to insert small sliced almonds on top of each balls to resemble the lamp.If you allow it to cool completely they become hard and you cannot insert almonds into them.

Apply oil in both hands and start rolling them into little balls.Keep the balls aside.

Dry roast almonds,Cashews and let it cool. Coarsely grind them along with a pinch of cardamom and 1 spoon of sugar.Pour them into a bowl.Now our balls are ready to be rolled on the powdered nuts.