Enter a fairyland of delightful Sweets or “Mittais” at Moghul Sweets which is tucked at the entrance of Little India Arcade along Serangoon Road. You can’t miss it because the place is crowded with a queue of customers trying to grab the best selection of Indian Sweetmeats freshly prepared daily at Moghul Sweets. A galore of sweets in interesting and exciting colors in the transparent refrigerated glass case meets the eye and your taste buds start craving for a sugar fix when you just see them through the glass case. “Which ones am I going to get they all look so good it is so hard to choose?” but you can’t waste your time this is a busy Sweet Walla in Little India .It is best you make a choice before you queue so you don’t miss out on any thing special for the day. The sweetmeats are gloriously divine just to look at which comes in an assortment of colors like the ivory Burfi orange Carrot Halwa Brown Gulab Jamun soaking in golden sugar syrup .reddish- orange Jelabis and Yellow Rasmalai soaking in creamy yellow as well milk liquid garnished with a tinge of green raw pistachios , beige Besan Laddos, dark brown chocolate Burfi – the list is unending and goes on and on. Although there are hot items like Samosas ,Kachori and Pakoras we will concentrate on the sweet tooth treats Moghuls Sweets has to offer. Incidentally, Moghul Sweets is run by a Punjabi Family who have had roots in Singapore for the past75 years and they also own Moghul Mahal Restaurant.
I am going to choose the most deletable and popular items Available at Moghul Sweets and tell you where it all originated from.
MYSORE PAK
It was another day at the Mysore Palace and the reigning King, Nalawadi Krishnaraja Wodeyar (1884-1940), was about to sit for lunch.
The royal cook, Kakasura Madappa, had just completed the preparation for the royal palate. He liked dishing out different dishes to the King who in turn appreciated them.
On that particular day, Kakasura decided to come out with a new sweet dish. He had just mixed besan, ghee and sugar and was preparing a sweet syrup when he was called to serve the King.
.The King tasted it and was extremely delighted. He had never before tasted the dish and it just melted in his mouth.
What is this dish and how did you prepare it, he asked Kakasura. The cook, thoroughly pleased that his experiment had succeeded, said it was Mysore Paka it means a sweet concoction.
The sweet soon came out of the Royal Palace spread rapidly and became a famous royal sweet and the name Mysore Pak spread beyond the boundaries of Mysore.
LADOOS
Interestingly, the origin of this ladoo was more because of the medicinal properties that the ingredients used proffered than as a sweet. It is said that these ladoos were given to teenage girls to keep their raging hormones under check. In fact treatment, and not indulgence, was what led to the discovery of some of the popular ladoos including methi, makhana and sonth.Contrary to how ladoos may have come to the fore, their evolution was a sweet journey that began with the spice route and through the temples, which found it a much better way of distributing the prasadam
RAS MALAI
Ras malai is an Indian milk based sweet liquid dessert colored white and yellow, if saffron forms an ingredient in the dish. Ras malai recipe is mostly popular during festive seasons like diwali, durga puja, holi among other noted ones. This milk based dessert originated in coastal Orissa. It bears resemblance to another Indian sweet from Bengal, the rasagulla. Both these dishes are milk based. However, there is slight variation in the ingredients. The Rasmalai is either white in color or yellow. It gets the yellow color from saffron flavoring. This dessert is not too sweet in taste.
HALVA
At first in Tirunelveli, halwa was introduced by the Rajasthani people who came to chokampatti (Tirunelveli province) for serving Jamindhars. Those cooks created and presented the wonderful halwa to chokampatti Jamindhar.By the year 1882, Mr.Jegan Singh, a father of Halwa opened the first halwa shop in Tirunelveli named “Tirunelveli halwa”. The rest of the country knows the Rajputs for their fighting skills, in Tirunelveli they are known for their culinary skills.Tirunelveli halwa is golden brown, has a jelly-like texture and contains a ghee, which gives its distinctively greasy appearance
JALABI
The oldest reference of jalebi was cited in 13th century in a cookbook written by Muhammad Bin Hasan from Iran. In Iran, this sweet was traditionally prepared on the occasion of Ramadan to distribute among the poor. At that time it was known as ‘Zlebia’, but later the name become ‘jalebi’ as most Indian languages replace ‘z’ by ‘j’. In context of Indian cuisine, the reference of the sweet was first seen in ‘Priyamkarnrpakatha’and is a Jain work composed in 1450 AD. So it can be assumed that the relation of this sweet with Indian Subcontinent is almost 500 years old.
GULAB JAMUN. The term Gulab jamun comes from Persian, Gulab means rosewater referring to the rosewater scented syrup and jamun from the hindi language, a South Asian fruit with similar size and shape.
The history says that Gulab jamun originates from an Arabic dessert called Luqmat Al-Qadi and became popular during the Mughal era
LASTLY A SPECIAL MENTION OF MOGHUL SWEET’S DOKLA
This one is a savory but a rarity in Singapore. Perhaps it is only available at Moghul Sweets but what ever the case it is awesome and tantalizing to the palate. Piquant, with its sweet sour taste and garnished with green chillies this one is a specialty and only available on Thursdays and Fridays .
Dhokla (Gujarati🙂 a vegetarian food item that originates from the Indian state of Gujarat and can be eaten for breakfast, as a main course, as a side dish, or as a snack. Dukkia, a pulse-based precursor of the dhokla, is mentioned in a Jain work dated to 1066 CE. The earliest extant work to mention the word "dhokla" is the Gujarati Varanaka Samuchaya (1520 CE).
It is traditional for Indians to have sweets for happy occasions like weddings birthays etc and the significance is that if you have sweet you will know happiness and success all the way and it will sweeten your life.
Believe me all the sweets and the savories like Dokla. Samosas and Kachoris are just wonderful stuff .You get more than your money’s worth in this gastronomical journey. However the large assortment of sweets is the true icing on the cake and proof of the pudding is in the eating. You take one bite and then you want another one and then it is all gone and you feel just great!
