Chatti Pathiri for Indian Cooking Challenge

It has been a very eventful day today. I thought it was going to be a quite sunny day and had plans of making 'Chatti Pathiri' for this month's Indian Cooking Challenge in the afternoon. But one phone call changed it all. It changed my mood from sunny to gloomy and I didn't feel like doing anything. I knew it was a problem that could be fixed but still was antsy until it was fixed.

I gave up on participating in this month's ICC, even though I had been anxiously waiting to make this delicious baked dessert from Kerala. Then came the second phone call saying that the issue is solved and there's nothing to worry about at least for the next couple of months. It brightened my mood, but it was almost late after with sunset around 4:30PM, I had less than an hour to make the dessert and then take pictures.

I'm so glad that I did because both my husband and I liked the dessert a lot. My husband said the best part was the nut filling and I have to agree I loved the crunchy poppy seeds & nutty sesame seeds in the filling.

Since I only had about 45minutes to actually make the dessert, I took the shortcut and made pancakes/ crepes instead of rotis for layering. I am happy that for once my theory knowledge paid off - I usually read any recipe LOT of times before actually making the dish, especially with baking recipes. So for month's challenge I was prepared with the theory part and I remember going to Shab's space from Anita Menon's space. Shabs mentioned in her post that the roti layer can be substituted with pancake layer and that is exactly what I did to save time.

One mistake I made was to use the wrong size baking pan. I used a 6" round pan whereas the ingredients in the original recipe were for a 8" pan. So I had a few pancakes, a little bit of filling and some of the coating leftover. I drizzled the sweet coconut coating/ syrup on the pancakes and gave to my 14month old and she loved it. I rolled the leftover filling into laddoos and gobbled couple of them as is. All in all a very delicious dessert, so thank you to Valli for choosing this for ICC.

Recipe adapted from Shabs & Anita Menon:

Ingredients:

For the Crepes:

All purpose flour - ½cup (use 1 cup APF if not using ww-pastry flour)
Whole-wheat pastry flour - ½cup
Water - 1cup
Salt - pinch
Egg replacer - 1tbsp whisked in 3tbsp water (or use 1 large egg)

For the Filling:
Grated Coconut - 1cup (I used dry grated coconut)
Almonds - 3tbsp
Cashews - 3tbsp
Raisins - 3tbsp
Poppy seeds - 3tbsp
Sesame seeds - 3tbsp
Ground Cardamom - 2tsp
Condensed Milk - 6tbsp

For the Coconut Syrup Coating:
Coconut milk - 1cup
Powdered Sugar - 4~5tbsp (adjust as per taste)
Ground Cardamom - 1tsp

Method:

• Make the Crepes: Combine all the ingredients for the crepes, whisk well to make sure there are no lumps. Set aside for 5~10 minutes.
• Heat a small nonstick pan, lightly butter it and pour a ladle-full of batter, swirl the pan to form a round pancake. Cook for about 1 minute until the pancake starts to slide off the pan, flip and cook for 30 seconds. Remove onto a plate and repeat with rest of the batter. You should be able to make about 6~8 medium size pancakes.
• Make the filling: Heat 2tbsp ghee/ clarified butter in a saute pan, add all the ingredients except for the condensed milk and cook until they start turning lightly browned. Turn off the heat and add the condensed milk and mix well. Set aside
• Make the Coconut milk Syrup for Coating: Combine all the ingredients in a small bowl and set aside.
• To Assemble: Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter or apply ghee to a baking pan. Make sure that the size of the baking pan is almost same as the size of the pancakes that you made. I have a small 6" nonstick omelette pan that I used to make the pancakes and I used a 6" baking pan. If using a 8" pan, then make sure that you make about 8" round pancakes.
• Place one pancake on the bottom of the baking pan; spread the filling on top. Dip the second pancake in the coconut milk and place it on top of the nut filling. Repeat the layers with the nut filling and the coconut milk coating dipped pancakes until the pan is full.
• Pour the remaining coconut milk syrup over the pancake stack.
• Bake for 20-25 minutes or until the top is lightly golden and the syrup is bubbly. 
• Let cool for a little bit before cutting a wedge to enjoy.