5 Ingredient Malai Peda (With Milk Powder)

Malai peda is an Indian sweet made with milk solids, sugar and flavors like cardamom or saffron. It's super creamy and melt in the mouth. The ingredients needed for this milk powder malai peda are simple as compared to traditional method that requires long hours of cooking down the milk to turn it into khoya, which is then sweetened and rolled into small flat discs (peda).

Indian festive season is around the corner and this is the time when I make a lot of mithai(sweets). This easy malai peda recipe taste about 20-30 minutes to and few basic ingredients. Malai in Hindi means cream or creamy and peda is a popular mithai on festivals such as Diwali & Rakshabandhan.

About My Recipe

Here in this recipe, I have simplified the process by using milk powder. The mixture of milk powder and whole milk when cooked for a few minutes turns thick like mawa or khoya and eliminates the traditional long process of reducing milk.

To mimic graininess like traditional pedas (where they add citric acid), we'll start by curdling the milk with lemon juice. This process helps develop a more textured consistency which combined with creaminess of milk powder gives these pedas a halwai (sweet shop) like texture.

This is a small batch recipe and makes 10-12 peda of good size (about 30 g each). These keep good for 2-3 days in the fridge and you can freeze them for 3 weeks. Let thaw at room temperature for 2-3 hours or overnight in the fridge before serving.

Ingredients

Instructions

• Add ¼ cup milk to a shallow pan or kadai and bring to a slow boil on medium heat.
• Reduce to low flame and add lemon juice to the milk. The milk will immediately curdle. Mix to break the curds into small granules.

• Add the milk powder and ¼ cup milk to the pan. Using a spatula mix very well.
• Start cooking and stirring the mixture on low flame. Don't walk away. Cook the mixture on low heat for 2-3 minutes. Slowly as the mixture heats up it will first become loose.

• Add the powdered sugar and mix well. As the sugar dissolves the mixture will become runny. Keep cooking on low heat and then in 2-4 minutes you will see that it slowly start thickening. In a few minutes, it will be pasty and sticky. 
• Mix in the green cardamom powder and ghee.
• Keep stirring and scraping the sides (don't scrape the dried hard milk on sides) till it becomes a thickish mass and starts clumping around the spoon and leaving the sides of the pan. You will be able to fold the peda mixture over itself. Once that happens, don't stir a lot else pedas will become chewy.

• Transfer the peda mixture to a plate.Let cool down slightly so that its comfortable to touch. 
• Once the mixture is cooler to touch(but not cold) using a soft spatula knead it 2-3 times.
• Then, divide into 10-12 portions. Smear some ghee on your palms and roll each portion into a smooth ball. Press the ball slightly to flatten it to resemble traditional peda shape. Repeat for all the portions.

• You could add nuts on top or some dried rose petals.
• Store in fridge upto 2-3 days. These can be frozen upto 3 weeks, thaw before serving(do not microwave).

Recipe Tips

1. Choose a milk powder with high fat content. I use Nido brand, its easily available in Indian stores and has 28% milk fat. If your milk powder is tasty, pedas will be tasty.
2. Use full fat milk. And good quality ghee. When a recipe has few ingredients, the quality of ingredients is even more important.
3. Use powdered sugar and not boora or plain ground sugar. Powdered or confectioners sugar has little corn starch mixed in which makes the texture fudgy and smooth.