Payatham Urundai

Buoyed with the success of Mysore pak, M and I started thinking of the next sweet that can be made. We were totally unprepared, so it had to be something that we could make with the ingredients we had in hand (can’t go shopping at 11:00 in the night :) ). After brainstorming a few potential candidates, we zeroed in on payatham Urundai (aka Moong Dhal Balls) - all it requires is payatham paruppu (split moong dhal), ghee and sugar - ingredients that are available in every desi household.

At 11 in the night, M & I started roasting payatham paruppu, as we were chatting or rather reminiscing our (childhood) memories on Deepavali. How our moms had their trademark snacks that they prepared without fail for every Deepavali (for my mom, no doubts here, it was Mysore Pak and for hers it was Chocolate cake, which I am hoping to make soon) and ended up creating their own tradition that we try to follow, tweak to make ours. It was an interesting evening with a lot of girly chatter and catching up that ended in a promise, or rather hope, that we try and do this for every Deepavali.


Dry-roasted and powdered payatham paruppu - 1 cup

Powdered Sugar with Cardamom - 1 cup

Ghee - 1/4 cup

Mix the paruppu powder with sugar well in a wide-mouthed bowl.

Melt ghee over low-heat so that it remains liquid and does not solidify, and is also not too hot to handle.

Add a tablespoon or so of ghee to the mixture, and start rolling urundai (balls) with the mixture and ghee. Add more ghee, as and when required. This way you can control the amount of ghee used (we had about a tablespoon or so left behind). The other way is to mix the ghee completely with the powder and then roll the urundai.

You can roasted nuts (cashews and almonds) to the flour mixture before you make the urundai.

Payatham Urundai

This is my second entry to the November edition of JFI - Festival treats hosted by Srivalli.  Also, hop over here to look at Spillay’s version of, what she calls, Neyyi Urundai.