Vettu Cake | Kerala Tea Time Snack

Vettu cake is a delicious tea time snack of Kerala. This deep fried snack is made using maida, sugar and egg and flavored with cardamom. It is very crisp from outside and soft and crumbly inside. 

 

Ingredients:

1. All purpose flour - 1 cup (plus few more tablespoons as required)
2. Sugar - 1/2 cup
3. Cardamom - 6 pods
4. Egg - 1 
5. Baking soda - 1/4 teaspoon
6. Ghee - 2 tablespoon
7. Salt - 1/8 teaspoon 
8. Turmeric powder - 1/8 teaspoon (for color)
9. Oil for deep frying

Method: 

1. In a chutney grinder of mixer, take sugar and cardamom seeds. Grind till cardamom seeds form fine powder. Take only seeds of cardamom and discard the skin.
2. Add one egg to this powder and pulse couple of times until egg is well combined with sugar powder.
3. In a large mixing bowl, combine all purpose flour, salt and baking soda. Add 2 tablespoon of ghee and mix well to get a crumb consistency.
4. Add the egg-sugar mixture and knead well to make a dough. If the dough is very sticky, add couple of tablespoons of all purpose flour. 
5. Set the dough for resting for half an hour.
6. Divide the dough into two parts, make each part into a long log of 1.5 inch diameter. 
7. Using a knife, slice the dough into 1 inch thick pieces. Make a deep cut in the shape of a 'x' at the center of each piece.  
8. Heat oil and deep fry the pieces in low-medium flame until they turn golden brown color. 

Note: Never fry them on high heat as inside of the cake will not be cooked. 

For the month of October, the theme for "Shhhh Cooking Secretly" challenge is "Diwali Sweets and Savories". As part of this challenge a theme is selected at the beginning of the month by one of the participants. All the members are grouped in pairs. The participants will exchange 2 secret ingredients with their partners who are suppose to prepare a dish that matches the theme of that month.  October month challenge was suggested by Poonam Bachhav who blogs at Annapurna. Her Easy Motichoor Ladoo which is a No-Fry recipe is in my to-do list. Do visit her blog for a huge collection of traditional vegetarian dishes. 

My partner for this theme is Swaty Malik who blogs at Food Trails. She gave me cardamom and sugar as my secret ingredient and I gave her ghee and milk. She made these delicious soft melt in the mouth Kesar Pista Burfi. Meanwhile do check out her Crispy Masala Papdi and Custard Trifle recipes which caught my eyes.