Kitchen Experiments : Chocolate-drizzled Shankarpale

Serendipity is a wonderful thing. Especially when one encounters it in the kitchen.

All it took was the sight of Dad polishing off last of the shankarpale my Mami had given us (these days Diwali snacks are available OTC around the year!) and the memory of chocolate chips lying unused in the fridge to hit me simultaneously - and 'Ting!' went the lightbulb in my head as it flooded my conscious with dazzlingly simple IDEA!

Shankarpale are little squares/chips of fried, slightly-sweet dough traditionally made during Diwali as a snack. They are crumbly in texture and yummy with a cup of steaming-hot chai. This piece of GK is for the benefit of my non-Maharashtrian readers - my North Indian colleagues recoiled in horror at the idea of chocolating the already teeth-numbingly-sweet 'shakkarpare' . (The North Indian version of shankarpale is coated in syrup till the sugar starts
crystallizing around the chip)

To come back to the lab..err...kitchen, I rescued the last 10-12 shankarpale from dad's foraging and laid them out on a plate. Melted a tablespoon of chocolate chips (I used dark chocolate) with a splash of milk and 1/2 teaspoon of honey (don't ask me why, just felt the honey would echo the earthy tones of the shankarpale) over a double boiler (chocolate in small bowl kept over a large saucepan filled with boiling water).




Went on adding milk (in stages) till I got a suitable-for-drizzling-over consistency.






Drizzled the chocolate over the arranged shankarpale (with a spoon, nothing fancy) rather generously and dumped them into the fridge.

An hour later, the chocolate had set, and the normally satvik shankarpale had been given a glam makeover. The chocolate complemented the rich buttery biscuit-like shankarpale oh so well!

The only downside was that, to achieve a drizzling consistency, I had added quite a lot of milk to the chocolate, which meant that the chocolate lattice atop the shankarpale was susceptible to melting the moment you took them in yor hand (the temperature of the human body is 37 deg C!) leaving you with messy chocolate-smeared fingers you had to lick clean. (Mmmmmmm...)

A way out of this could be adding very little milk to the chocolate and dipping the shankarpale in the pool of chocolate rather than go for drizzling the melted chocolate on top. My guess is this way, the chcocolate coating/shell atop the shankarpale will be more robust (after all, chocolate chips survive being baked in cookies and cakes in fiery ovens!)

If you don't have access to chocolate chips, a few squares of Cadbury Dairy Milk will do just as well. (Or any other plain chocolate bar, for that matter - chocolate bars dont melt at room temperature either)

So go on, add a little ooomph to your Diwali snacks this year!

N.B. 1: Pardon the foggy pics - the steam rising from the double boiler fogged up the lens quicker than I could wipe it off! :(
N.B. 2: If, like me, you overestimate the amount of chocolate you need and end up with a pool of melted chocolate after the shankarpale receive their chocolate coat, you can do what I did - drop some nuts (I used walnuts - you can use any you like) in the chocolate, coat them all over with chcolate and fish them out with a spoon and arrange them on a tray. Put them in the fridge till the chocolate sets to get yummy choconut morsels. :)