Shrikhand (Sweet Yogurt)

A wonderful dessert and simple to make too! Shrikhand is a yogurt dessert. It has minimal ingredients and requires no cooking. It can be made well in advance. In fact it tastes much better when the flavors have had a chance to marry. This is a popular dessert made in Western India, specially in Maharashtra and Gujarat. The recipe that follows is the basic Shrikhand recipe. You can very easily change an ingredient to make this into Amrakhand.

Ingredients
2 - 3 cups of yogurt
1 cup powdered sugar
4-5 strands of saffron
1-1.5 tbsp mix  of sliced blanched almond and pistachio
1 pinch of powdered cardamom
1/8 tsp water or milk

Method
Tie up the yogurt in a fine cotton cloth/cheese cloth and hang it overnight or about 6-8 hours to drain the liquid part of the yogurt.  The yogurt should be as dry as possible so that it doesnt become runny when you add the sugar. Once all the water is drained, it will come together in a ball. The resultant yogurt volume will be about 1 to 1.5 cups of drained yogurt. To this add the sugar.  The sugar will get assimilated immediately. Soak the strands of saffron in about 1/8th tsp of milk and add this to the yogurt sugar mix. Add the nuts and cardamom powder. Stir everything together and refrigerate. Serve cold. Enjoy with chapati/puri or just on its own.

Tips
There is a lot of water in yogurt and you should be prepared that the remaining volume will be half of what you started out with. So be careful with your estimations. Use powdered sugar so that a lot of heat is not generated when you mix the it together with the yogurt. The powdered sugar will melt into the yogurt immediately. If granulated sugar is used, it will take a while to dissolve the sugar and will make the shrikhand runny or watery.