Kaatil (Killer) Kaju Katli
These kaju katlis were made to celebrate my younger daughter’s birthday. This is one of the very few mithais she really enjoys. I make many types of burfis, but had never tried to make kaju katlis at home.
I looked around some recipes on the Internet, but most of them had ghee or milk or milk powder, so I had to devise this recipe, which turned out perfect in the very first attempt.
Ingredients
2 cups cashew nuts (yielded 250 gms of cashew powder)
1 cup (200 gms) caster sugar
½ cup (120 ml) water
4-5 green cardamoms, powdered
1 tsp rose water
Method
Grind the cashew nuts in a mixer batch by batch, taking care not to let it become oily. Sieve the cashew meal or powder and grind the remaining larger pieces again till you get a uniformly fine powder.
In a heavy bottomed pan dissolve sugar in half a cup (100 ml) cup of water and bring it to boil. Allow it to form a syrup of two thread consistency.
Add cashew nut powder, cardamom powder and rose water and mix with a spatula. Leave it to cool a little and harden without covering the pan.
When it is sufficiently cool, knead the dough for 4-5 minutes, until you get a smooth and oily dough. Place this ball of dough between two large sheets of slightly greased butter paper and roll out into a thick rectangular shape.
Remove the top sheet of butter paper and with a spatula or dough cutter shape the rectangle more accurately, then replace the top sheet and roll the dough into a uniformly thin sheet. This should be about 5 mm thick.
Remove the top layer of the butter paper and trim the ends of the rolled cashew dough sheet into a neat rectangle, and then further cut it into diamond shapes or squares.
I did not use any ghee or milk, nor any silver virk –as I wanted to make this a vegan kaju katli, but this was better than the best kaju katlis I have ever tasted.
It wouldn’t be overstating to call these killer or kaatil katlis.