Dear Italy...Greetings from Sri Lanka!

Dear Italy...Greetings from Sri Lanka!

Hello friends,

Hope you all are doing well,
So today I am going to present to you some famous traditional Sri Lankan sweets.

First of all, I will give you some example sweets.
Kawum(oil cake), Athirasa, Asmi, Kalu Dodol, Halapa, Aluwa, Kokis, Aggala are very famous among Sri Lankans
and they are made at houses all over the island.

Acctualy it takes a real effort and some hard work by hands to make them. So they are not something we daily eat.
They are mostly made at special occasions or festival time.
Basically, there are used rice powder and wheat flour. To get rice powder, rice grains are left to get soaked for some hours in the water. Then, it can be ground to the rice powder. In the old days, they did that using hands and some tool(wangediya). Not that much old, I have seen it how my grandmother was doing it when I was a kid. Nowadays we have grinding machines and some houses still use wangediya.

old grinding tool wangediya. source

This powder is the basic key ingredient of most of the sweet.
After that depending on which sweet is to be made, we can use the rice powder with other ingredients such as sugar, honey, coconut milk, spices, salt..etc.

first of all, I will take Kawum.
After the mixture is done, we get a handful of it and slowly pour it into the boiling oil pot.
Then using a stick it can be shaped and make beautify. It really needs skilled hands to make kawum.

making kawum. source

It is ready to serve. source

Kokis
This is also same as making kawum but we do not add sugar to the mixture. so this one is not sweet but can be bit spicy depending on the pepper dose. and also it is crunchy. I love Kokis.

super tasty. source

Kalu Dodol
One also of my favourite sweets. I think this one requires the most effort and time.
Because you can stop mixing the mixture until it gets done. If you stop in the middle of it is being made, it is not getting successfully done.

making dodol. source


would you like to try some? source

Asmi
This one is a bit, different sweet. The coloured decorations are done using boiled sugar mixture.

would you like to try some? source

Halapa
This one is sweet and also we eat as food. We add some coconut and sugar mixture to the middle of it and leave it in a warm vaporized environment. My mom always makes it once or twice a month.

would you like to try some? source

Tis one is called as Aggala. It is sweet but also spicy because we add some peppers when making it.

source

Athirasa.
It looks like Kawum but totally different.

source
Aluwa.
It is a peaceful sweet like it looks.


source

These are some of our traditional and cultural sweets. I cordially invite you to come to our country and try to enjoy them. I am sure you all will love it. I think the secret of the wonderful taste of them is how they are being made, carved with love, patience and passion of skilled hands of Sri Lankan women.

So I am so much happy to share this little information with you all. And also thank you very much @girolamomarotta for organizing this event and motivating us to do this kind of new thing.

Thank you all. Grazie mille
Have a nice time.
See you.

#dearitaly #srilanka #history