Cashew Apple to start "A for APPLE" and so on....

My little Pumpkin turned 2 yesterday  🙂 ! Time actually flies! 2 years back when I first hold Pasta in my hand I was a novice then and to be very frank till date it is a journey of learning and experiencing every bit of motherhood and probably daughterhood for both of us! Given Mehebub is not presently in India; both of us (me and hubby) are a bit conscious with the arrangements. We know that in Pasta's age it is not possible to mark the difference of not being with Papa physically on her special day but we are feeling it differently and probably this is the reason I wanted to prepare homemade goodies for my princess and obviously she will be sharing those with Papa over skype 😆 ! Goodie list is though limited as I will have to manage those along with my office core and with limited access to fancy ingredients in Kolkata 😡 . I really miss Gurgaon for this! However, first item that I decided to prepare is a sweet that I used to enjoy in my childhood too and even today: Cashew Apple; colourful cute apple shaped Sweet prepared with Cashew Nut. This is my take on starting A for APPLE….

Cashew Apple is a popular Sweet in India and a hot cake in almost all Confectioner's shop. Cashew Apple is actually prepared with the same dough that is used for making Cashew Barfi or Cashew Katli but look wise it is altogether a different experience. Pasta always felt attracted towards colourful food which is quite obvious in her age! In fact I used to prepare colourful Tutti Frutti for her at home with better quality colour. It is often told that food colours are not good for health but we cannot restrict our kiddos having food with colours every time since it is a general child tendency to attract towards colours. This is probably the reason I prefer to make colourful food at home with good quality food colours in gel base and even sometimes substitute colours with natural colour extracted from different veggies, fruits or flower. For my Cashew Apple instead of using store bought food colour I have used extract of Beetroot to colour my Apples and this is my take on "taste bhi aur healrh bhi" 😎 . You can use normal food colour in case you wish to.

Though it is really easy to make Cashew Apples but there are few things we should keep in mind while making those at home. First of all, Cashew Nuts has to be in room temperature and chunky; else we will not be able make a coarse Powder from it to make the dough. Never use refrigerated Cashew Nut even. I am available with around 750 g of Cashew which I purchased from Kerala few months back and obviously those are not that chunky as required. I have oven roasted my Cashew Nuts for 2 minutes before making the powder. In case oven is not available roast Cashew Nut using a Wok. In confectioner's shop they use normal Sugar for making the Sugar syrup required for Cashew Apple but I found it easy to use Sugar Powder instead of granulated Sugar. Nothing more to be remembered 😀 . Just few minutes of cooking and little painting skill is what you need to make those little cute apples 😛 .