Gova/Khova Karchika (traditional old-time sweet)

DIWALI! If there is one festival I wait for the entire year, it has to be this one. I love everything it involves. The flurry of activity the week preceding the festival – all the cleaning up, planning for and preparing sweets and savoury snacks, the clothes, jewellery, visiting friends and family, the cracker shows – there is not a bit of it that I do not like.

I’ll keep this post short. Real short. In fact, you might actually feel short-changed for the lack of a recipe in this one. But I’ll try to make up for it with pictures of a traditional sweet made in the olden days, called Gova (Khova) Karchika. It is a laddu-like thing with a filling of thengai poornam (coconut and sugar or jaggery) and an outer covering of khova/gova (mava).

Other participants of the Blogging Marathon must pardon me for taking the short route and posting only pictures. But I’ll update this post with the recipe day after for sure. So please do bear with me!

One has to work fast while preparing this one. You prepare the poornam filling first and then get on with the khoa covering. Unlike thirettipal where you don’t add any sugar and simply keep cooking the milk down to a sticky sweet light-brown/pink mass, here, you add the sugar to the milk and then keep reducing it. This results in a white khova/gova.

You let it cool just a bit and pinch out balls while still quite warm, else it starts hardening. You pat them into thick circles, place the filling in and cover it up. It hardens a wee bit as it cools and helps the laddus keep shape. You’ll see in the pics that there are two varieties. I’ll put ip the why, what and how of it in an update, along with the recipe. Till then, enjoy the pictures.

HAPPY DEEPAWALI