Indian · Desserts

Malpua

Small fried pancakes of flour and reduced milk, soaked in cardamom syrup. Crisp at the edge, soft in the middle.

45 min prep and cooking plus 30 min resting 1 hr 15 min start to finish Serves 6 servings Medium
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Malpua

Photograph credit: Indian pancakes-malpua by Heenah · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons · this resized copy is shared under the same licence

What to Put on the Table With Malpua

  • Rabri
  • Masala chai
  • Fresh pomegranate

How to Make Malpua

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  1. Whisk the flour, semolina, batter sugar, fennel, cardamom and baking powder with the milk into a smooth batter the thickness of double cream.

  2. Rest 30 minutes.

  3. Boil the syrup sugar, water, saffron and cardamom pods for 5 minutes, then keep it warm rather than hot.

  4. Heat the ghee in a wide shallow pan to about 1 cm deep, over a medium heat.

  5. Pour a small ladle of batter in — it should spread to about 10 cm with a frilled edge.

  6. Fry 2 minutes, spooning hot ghee over the top, until the edges are lacy and golden.

  7. Turn and fry 1 minute more.

  8. Lift out, drain briefly, and slide straight into the warm syrup.

  9. Soak 2 minutes, then lift onto a plate.

  10. Repeat with the rest and serve warm, scattered with pistachios.

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Worth Knowing Before You Cook

Shallow ghee, about a centimetre.

Warm syrup, not hot.

Two minutes in the syrup and no longer.

Keeping What's Left

Best warm. Keeps 2 days refrigerated in their syrup.

Questions and Answers

How long does Malpua take to make?

20 minutes of preparation and 25 minutes of cooking, plus 30 minutes of resting, so allow 1 hour 15 minutes from start to finish. The recipe serves 6.

What's in a Serving

No nutrition figures are given for this recipe: they cannot be worked out reliably from its ingredient list (how much frying oil the food takes up cannot be known from the recipe). Why some recipes have none.

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Compiled by Turab

Checked by script for timings, diet labels and nutrition arithmetic. How the recipes are checked. Found a mistake? Tell us.

First published ; last changed .