This past Saturday was Rakhi but AK & I were headed to the hills for the long weekend. I couldn’t bear to not tie the Rakhi for my brother, Adit. So I called him over on Friday night after work.
Having done that, I panicked! What about home-made sweets? I wouldn’t have enough time and energy to bake a cake at 9 pm. And I definitely don’t believe in buying chocolates or sweets from a shop for Rakhi. So I thought of the link that my friend Revati added on my Banoffee Pie post! An alternative method of making Dulce de Leche. This got me so excited that I immediately ran off to buy 3 cans of Nestle Milkmaid (condensed milk).
As soon as I got home, I placed all 3 cans on their sides in my 5 litre pressure cooker. I added enough water to cover the cans and an extra 3 inches for buffer. You must make sure that the water should not surpass the maximum limit of the pressure cooker, i.e. 2/3 of the depth of the cooker.
I placed the lid and the weight on it and put it on the stove on high heat. After one whistle, I lowered the heat to minimum and let it steep away for an hour. I gave it one final whistle on high and turned off the stove. This is one of the cooled can, just weeping to be opened!! (Disclaimer: Make sure you handle the cans with oven mitts or you WILL burn your hand).
This is what it looked like when we opened it…
OMG I wanted to stuff the whole gooey, sticky, caramel-ly mess in my face all at once. I know that sounds wrong, but hopefully you know what I mean.
Moving on… I roughly chopped up a cup of walnuts.
I placed them in a bowl and spooned the Dulce de Leche (yes, I like using fancy words) over them.
Mixed it all up with a spoon.
Then I lined a cookie sheet with butter paper and placed the mix in rough mounds (by the tablespoon-full) on it.
Allowed it to chill for an hour and then arranged some on my Rakhi tray!! And obviously ate it all up VERY quickly.
Didn’t I mention that I had 3 cans? I thought of taking the 2 leftover ones with us on the road-trip cos this is so awesome straight out of the can. But AK wouldn’t let me pack more than 1 (greedily wanting to save the last for when we get back home!!!).
So we had it straight from the can on our cottage veranda in the hills…
And added it in place of milk in our cups (or glasses) of black coffee…
My verdict of the walnut toffee was that it was TOO sticky to handle. So with the balance can, I wanted to try an improvement/ variation: mix 1/2 cup fine(r) chopped walnuts and 1 cup of digestive biscuit crumbs and set it flat on a tray. The biscuit crumbs would absorb some of the hard-to-handle stickyness. Chill for at least 2 hours and cut (fudge-like) squares. But by the time I returned from work on Tuesday, half the can had been consumed by you-know-who!!
Better luck next time, I guess!