You know how you sometimes get that random craving, or see someone post a photo/video of some food online, and you just HAVE TO eat it? Seems to be happening to my husband a lot ;)

The other day he decided he wanted homemade jalebi. Well, challenge accepted!

The thing is, if you look up a jalebi recipe, they all seem a little complicated. Mixing at least two types of flour, adding curd/yogurt, leaving the batter for fermenting... Whaaat? Plus it's still a struggle to get any plain flour, so I kinda needed a recipe that would use self-raising! 

So after quite a bit of search, I finally came across some instant jalebi recipes, and decided it's doable ;) My recipe uses self-raising flour, but if you happen to have plain flour, add 2 teaspoons of baking powder for each 1 cup/150g. It's so easy and my jalebis got a lot of love from you guys on Instagram, so I thought I'll just put it up in time for Eid for those who could fancy trying it :)

Ingredients:

For jalebi:

For sugar syrup:

• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup water
• optional: 1 tbsp kewra or rose water, or cardamom powder

Method:

Start with making the syrup. Place sugar with water in a pan, add the flavouring of your choice. Bring to boil, then lower the heat and gently simmer until the syrup thickens. Once thick, keep aside until cool.

To make jalebi, mix the flour, yellow colour (if using) and water into a creamy batter - a little thicker than you'd do for pancakes. Transfer the batter to the container you'll be using for piping - you could use a piping bag with a small round nozzle, but most common method is to use a sauce bottle like the one below:

Heat up some oil in a pan - we found it best to just use normal, shallow frying pan. If you try to deep fry them, the jalebi batter will sink to the bottom before it floats, and this will stop you from achieving the spiral shape.

Make sure the oil is really hot - test by squeezing a dot of batter out. Squeeze the batter out in the shape of a spiral, starting from the middle and working outwards - don't worry about the perfect shape though, mine were all over the place and still made quite an impression with the family in Pakistan ;)

Once they change colour to golden, take the jalebis out and dip in the sugar syrup for a minute or so - make sure you've let your syrup cool down first! This way they'll absorb enough sweetness, but will remain crunchy.