Sweets, Desserts and Festive Recipes

Watalappan

Watalappam

Watalappam, also spelled watalappan or wattalappam, is a steamed coconut custard sweetened with dark jaggery and spiced with cardamom, clove and nutmeg. Often called Sri Lankan jaggery custard or coconut jaggery pudding, it is the showpiece dessert of Eid and every festive table, brought by the Malay and Moor communities. Silky, deeply caramel and topped with toasted cashews, it tastes like a spiced coconut creme caramel.

Sri Lankan Aluwa

Sri Lankan aluwa, also spelled aluva, is a soft, fudgy diamond-cut sweet. You roast rice flour, bind it with a thick sugar or treacle syrup, often with a little coconut and cashew, then press it flat and cut it into the classic diamonds. It is lightly sweet, faintly nutty from the toasted flour and warmed with cardamom. This is the sweet that belongs on the Avurudu table for the Sinhala and Tamil New Year. The whole craft comes down to one moment: catching the syrup at exactly the right stage so the aluwa sets soft and yielding rather than hard and crumbly.

Kalu Dodol

Kalu dodol is the black coconut sweet, and yes, it earns the name. Thick coconut milk, kithul jaggery and rice flour go into a pan and cook down low and slow for a couple of hours. You stir the whole time, no stopping, until the coconut oil separates out and the mass turns dark, glossy and almost black. It's dense, chewy and deeply caramelised, like toffee with warm cardamom and little nuggets of cashew. Kalu means black, and the colour is your reward for patience. You don't make kalu dodol from a recipe so much as from an hour or two of steady stirring until it tells you it's done.

Sri Lankan Kokis

Sri Lankan kokis is a crisp, golden, flower-shaped festival sweet. You dip a hot patterned metal mould into a thin batter of rice flour, coconut milk, egg and a pinch of turmeric, then fry the shape until it crackles free of the mould. It's light, lacy and shatteringly crunchy, the centrepiece of the Sinhala and Tamil New Year sweet tray, and learning the rhythm of dip, fry and release is one of the small joys of the Avurudu kitchen. It belongs to the same family as rosette cookies and achu murukku found across many cultures.

Konda Kavum

Sri Lankan Kavum

Sri Lankan kavum, known as konda kavum and in English as oil cake, is a small dark sweet made by spooning a thick batter of roasted rice flour and kithul treacle into hot oil and coaxing it into a single pointed peak, the konda. Dense, sticky-sweet and deeply traditional, this oil cake is the heart of the Sinhala and Tamil New Year table, where the peak crowning each cake is a quiet point of pride.

Mung Kavum

Mung kavum, also called mung bean oil cake or moong kavum, is a diamond-shaped Avurudu sweet. You knead roasted green gram (mung) flour with thick treacle or jaggery syrup into a stiff paste, cut it into small diamonds, dip each one in a thin rice-flour batter and deep-fry. The outside crisps and turns golden while the dense mung centre stays soft and fudgy. It's a prized, more delicate cousin of the familiar rice-flour kavum, and one of the proudest sweets you can set out for the Sinhala and Tamil New Year.

Sri Lankan Asmi

Sri Lankan asmi is the most decorative sweet on the Avurudu table. It's a crisp deep-fried rice-flour base, drizzled with delicate threads of sweet batter and a coloured sugar syrup that set into a fine, glistening lace on top. The whole thing is made from a rested rice-flour dough and built in two parts: the fried base and the lacy drizzled topping. Asmi is prized as much for its intricate, web-like beauty as for its light, brittle crunch. It's one of the hardest and most admired sweets to master for the Sinhala and Tamil New Year.

Sri Lankan Halape

Halape, also written halapa or kurakkan halape, is a rustic up-country Sri Lankan sweet. Soft kurakkan (finger millet) dough gets folded around a filling of grated coconut and jaggery or treacle, then wrapped in a kenda leaf (Macaranga peltata) and steamed until set. Kenda is the wrapper Sri Lankan kitchens reach for first, and banana leaf is the stand-in when you cannot get it. Dark, earthy and only gently sweet, each little parcel carries the green scent of the leaf that shapes and flavours it. It's a high-fibre wholegrain sweet, made for breakfast, tea-time snacks or a quiet dessert.

Sri Lankan Wandu Appa

Wandu appa is a Sri Lankan steamed jaggery cake: the same fermented rice flour, coconut milk and jaggery batter that makes pani appa, poured into small cups and steamed instead of cooked in a hopper pan. It comes out soft and springy, more like a sweet bun than a pudding, with the dark caramel taste of kithul or coconut jaggery running through it. This is the quick version, raised with instant yeast in about 20 minutes and steamed in an ordinary saucepan with a rack inside, so you need no special equipment at all.

Annasi Dosi

Sri Lankan Pineapple Dosi

Pineapple dosi, or annasi dosi, is a Sri Lankan candied fruit sweet: chunks of slightly under-ripe pineapple simmered slowly in a sugar syrup until they turn glossy and almost translucent, scented with roasted cardamom. It is a fixture on festive tables, especially at Eid and at weddings, and it is one of those old home-made sweets that needs only four things: pineapple, sugar, water and cardamom. Made properly it keeps for months in a jar in the fridge, so most people cook a batch ahead of the day rather than on it.