My mother loves Milk Cake Sweets! Milk Cake is a sweet milk fudge made with solidified cream milk, sugar, ghee, and some acidic agent like lemon juice.
Milk cake is also called Alwar ka Mawa because it is basically a Mawa ( which means sweet dried milk) and it originated from Alwar, Rajasthan. In Alwar Milk Cake, this mithai is also known as Alwar ka Kalakand.
Milk cake has a grainy, dense, juicy, and melts in the mouth texture. Also, milk cake has a lower moisture content giving it a shelf life of 15-20 days at room temperature.
Did you know it is entirely cooked in a pan? A deep and thick pan is required for setting the Milk cake. This is because this way sugar caramelizes in the centre giving it the shade of two colours. The Indian milk cake gets two shades by setting and cooling in a deep tin that is wrapped in a thick rug. This way the top layer of the milk cake mixture cools down quickly while the bottom cools slowly making it darker. When perfectly made, they look so beautiful. Ahh.
Although traditional milk cake is delicious sweets and needs very minimal ingredients but a lot of patience. So whenever we don’t have that much time to put in, we just get it from Vijay Dairy. They not only make milk cakes but also have a variety like Rajwadi Milk Cake and Punjabi milk cake. It is so fresh and made with their pur Vijay Dairy Milk. An easy solution to our milk cake cravings!
But if you are someone who loves making sweets at home and trying new recipes, I have something for you!
This is an easy recipe for Milk Cake by Chef Kunal Kapur that will help you make delicious milk cake at home!
Ingredients
2lts Milk (full fat) 200 gms or 1cup Sugar 10ml or 2tsp Vinegar 2tbsp Desi Ghee
handful Cashewnuts Chopped handful Almonds Chopped handful Pistachio Chopped
Let’s make it check Milk Cake Recipe
- Heat the milk and bring to a boil. Using a flat spoon keep stirring and scraping the sides and bottom.
- Once the milk is reduced to about 50% add in vinegar and stir. Keep stirring and cooking so that there is a formation of a grain (dana) in the milk. Remember we do not want the
milk to split completely and become cheese but splits enough to start separating the milk solids in the form of grains.
- Cook for another 10mins and add half the sugar. After the other 10 mins add the rest of the sugar and ghee.
- Cook till the liquid evaporates and the milk solids start to come together. The colour of the milk cake at this stage will start turning red as the sugar will start to caramelize. The more you cook the more fudge, nutty, and brown milk cake you will get. The choice is entirely yours on what degree of browning you need.
- Once the mixture gets tighter with specks of ghee oozing turn off the heat. Take the milk cake out on a greased pan that is at least 1 inch in height.
- Let it cool completely and then cut into squares or bars and serve.
(Bonus Tip- Make sure that milk should only slightly curdle, therefore add acidic agents little by little. If you add too much acidic agent at once, then the milk would fully separate from the whey, and we certainly don’t want that.)