Shakkar Para

Shakkar Para are very tasty deep fried sugar crisps and is one of my favourite munching snack.

Ingredients :

• All Purpose Flour ( Maida ) - 1 cup
• Semolina ( Sooji ) - 1/4 cup
• Cooking Oil - 2 tbsp
• Oil - For deep frying
• Water - About 1/2 a cup

Ingredients for syrup:

• Sugar - 3/4 cup
• Water - 1/2 cup
• Coconut Powder - 2 tbsp

Directions :

• In a mixing bowl, take maida, sooji and oil and mix them adding wated slowly as needed and make a stiff dough. Knead it well and let it sit for about 15-20 minutes.
• Take some dough and make a ball out of it , and roll them into circles ( just like how we do for chapati )
• Prick them with fork all over the rolled dough so that they don't puff up while deep frying.
• With the help of pizza cutter or any knife cut the rolled dough into small squares of about an inch.

• Take a frying pan, and heat the oil for deep frying. Let it be on medium heat.
• To check if the oil is at the correct temperature for frying, take a small piece of dough and put it in oil. It should neither come up too quick nor should it take too long. It should first sizzle in the oil, then come up in few seconds.
• Put those cut paras ( pieces of rolled out dough ) into the oil for frying. Keep tossing them untill you see them golden brown from both the sides.
• Remove them from oil and place them on kitchen paper towel, so that extra oil can be soaked out. Keep them aside and let them cool.
• Repeat the process for the remaining dough.

Now let's make the sugar syrup .

Directions for syrup :

• In a souce pan, take water and sugar and bring it to boil on medium heat.
• Keep stirring and let the sugar dissolve completely.
• Simmer it and let it heat till the syrup reaches the thread consistency. Turn the heat off.
• Add coconut powder and cardamom powder to the syrup and mix well.
• Now put all the paras into this syrup and mix it making sure all the paras are well coated with this syrup.
• Take a greased tray and spread these shakkar paras onto it. Make sure they are not clumped .

• Let it cool before you eat them.
• They can be stored in air tight container for few weeks.

Variations : The Similar recipe can also be made with jaggery syrup intead of sugar syrup.

Just replace sugar with jaggery . It tastes totally different and absolutely yummy.