Nankhatai (Eggless Indianised cookies)

Nankhatai-These crunchy delectable cookies are truely packed with flavours of the East, delicately flavoured with cardamom and garnished with almonds they are truely a Royal cookie that simply melts in the mouth.

This cookie recipe I saw on fellow bloggers blog "CREATIVE SANYUKTA". I instantly fell in love with it and so I decided to give it go. I followed the recipe with a couple of simple changes.They were that I did not add almonds to the dough as stated and totally ommited the pistachio nuts.I also slightly changed the ratio of the flours to make up for cutting out the nuts.

My version:

Ingredients:

1/3 cup butter (room temperature)
2/3 cups sugar
2 tablespoons warm milk
3/4 cup all purpose flour (maida)
1/3 cup besan (chickpea flour)
1/3 cup semolina (fine)
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cardamom
24 almond halves for garnish



Method:

1. Preheat oven to 190 degrees centigrade
2. Sieve the all purpose flour, besan, salt, cardamom powder and baking powder in a bowl. Stir in the semolina and keep aside.
3. Cream the butter and sugar and add the warm milk, beat the mixture till its soft and creamy.
4. Fold in the dry in ingredients and make a dough.It will be very soft don't worry it will harden once it rests.
5. Cover and place the dough in the fridge for 15 minutes.
6. After 15 minutes divide dough into 24 small balls.
7. Place the balls on a baking tray lined with grease proof paper.
8. Using the flat bottom of a glass press the balls to form round cookies approx 5mm thick.
(I used a small piece of grease proof paper in between glass and cookie dough to stop glass sticking to cookie.)
9. Top each cookie with a almond half, push it in slightly so that it does not fall off after baking.
10. I returned the cookie trays to the fridge for chilling for another 15 minutes before baking. (This helps to retain shape of cookie whilst baking)
11. After 15 minutes, I baked the cookies at preheated oven for 15 minutes till they were golden brown.



12. Remove from oven and cool.
Enjoy with a cup of tea. (I served my cookies with saffron ~cardamom icecream recipe to follow)


You may like:
Eggless almond ~ vanilla cookies.

Submitting to;
Stories from my Indian kitchen bake off event.