Churma Ladoo – Baked version with Jaggery

1. Add all the dry ingredients (regular whole wheat flour, coarse wheat flour, semolina (rava), chickpeas flour, almond meal/flour, and salt) to a mixing bowl and mix.
2. Add ½ cup of ghee to the flour mixture and mix again; it should be crumbly in texture after mixing.
3. Now add milk and knead it into a stiff dough. TIP: If using a stand mixer, the dough would not come together for stiff consistency, use your hands to bring it together at the end.
4. Cover the dough with a kitchen towel and rest for 30 minutes.
5. Divide the dough into small equal-size balls/muthiya and flatten them a bit.
6. Either deep fry or bake to cook these batis/muthiyas.

To Bake:

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees, place all the prepared batis/muthiyas on a baking sheet, and bake for 18 minutes.
2. After 18 minutes, check if the bottom of batis/muthiya are cooked and brown, then flip and bake for another 15 minutes.
3. Once all the batis/muthiyas are nicely cooked from the outside, carefully crumble them using a kitchen towel and bake for another 5 minutes. Make sure that all the batis/muthiyas are cooked well from the inside as well.
4. Let the cooked and crumbled batis/muthiyas cool down to room temperature.

To deep fry:

1. Heat ghee in a deep pot (kadhai) for frying until medium hot or, if you have a thermometer then heat the ghee until it reaches 350 degrees F.
2. Deep fry a few batis/muthiyas at a time at medium heat until they turn golden brown. Keep flipping them during the frying process for even cooking and browning. Medium heat is important to make sure that thick bati is cooked all the inside.
3. Let the fried batis/muthiyas cool down till they are easy to work with. Then, break them by hand into smaller pieces.

Now follow the rest of the method whether you have baked or deep-fried the Batis/muthiyas:

1. Transfer the crumbled Bati pieces to the food processor pulse a few times and keep aside.
2. Heat 1 cup ghee in a pan and roast roughly chopped nuts, chironji, and melon seeds for 5 minutes on low heat.
3. Switch off the heat then add ground churma to roasted nuts-ghee mixture and mix thoroughly.
4. Now add cardamom powder, dry ginger powder, fenugreek powder and mix thoroughly.
5. Let the mixture cool down to a temperature where you are comfortable to work with bare hands.
6. Add jaggery powder and thoroughly mix the mixture. While mixing keep rubbing them in between your palms to break any lump of jaggery powder, if there is any.
7. The mixture is ready to make laddu. To make ladoo, take a handful of portions of the prepared mixture and start binding it together using a fist. Once the mixture starts taking shape, roll them between your palms and keep pressing with the other hand's fingers to give them a perfect sphere shape.
8. Prepare all the ladoos following the above process.