Nankhatai is a crunchy & delicious eggless Indian cookie made by using ghee, flour, cardamom powder, and nuts. You can make these bakery-style cookies at home using simple to follow instructions.

Hello friends! This right here is pretty much the only cookie recipe I can’t mess up! My grandmother sent me this recipe and it’s so good I have to share!

Ingredients:

1½ cups all-purpose flour

½ cup besan/chickpea flour/gram flour/whatever name you know it by

⅓ cup sugar

4-8 tablespoons** ghee (clarified butter) or butter

2 green cardamom pods

One pinch salt

¼ teaspoon baking powder

*Note: You need ⅙ as much sugar as flour, no matter what ratio you use.

**Another note: the amount of ghee I’ve added has fluctuated depending on the weather. When it’s colder, there’s more ghee heaped onto each tablespoon because ghee is more solid when cold. When the weather is warmer, I need to add more spoonfuls of ghee because it’s more liquid and runny.

Steps:

Mix the flour, salt, and baking powder in a bowl.

Open up the cardamom pods. Grind up the seeds. (You can use a rolling pin to crush them, that’s fun! Or just use a grinder.) Add them to the bowl and mix well again.

Add the sugar to a different bowl.

Add the ghee to the same bowl as the sugar and mix until it’s fluffier and a lighter color. If you’re unsure of the quantity of ghee you need to add because of the subjectiveness I explained above, err on the side of caution; it’s easier to add more ghee later on if the dough isn’t what it’s supposed to look like.

Add the butter/sugar mix slowly to the flour mix. I recommend using your hands! The dough should be a little crumbly, but it should easily hold shape when you roll it up into small balls in your hand. (See the pics below for a reference!) If you’ve added all the ghee and the dough is too dry, just add more ghee a little at a time. If the dough is the right consistency but you still have more ghee+sugar mix to add, stop and throw in a bit more sugar, then mix.

Once you’ve got the right consistency, roll up small balls and flatten a bit between your palms.

Bake how you would usually bake shortbread. I think it’s like. 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes? If you’re using a toaster oven, probably go for around 250-300 degrees Fahrenheit and maybe a bit longer. There should be little cracks on top, and they should  be a little brown.

The hardest part: wait for them to cool. Then, MONCH.

Variations!

If you don’t have any besan, feel free to go just full-on flour! Also, ladoo besan and kala chana besan work in this recipe too!

Replace part or all of the ghee with butter. Ghee isn’t in the cupboard of every family, but using butter gets great results too! Just soften the butter in the microwave for 10 seconds or something so that you can mix it up with the sugar.

Double/triple the amount of cardamom you add! I actually usually add 5 pods because I like to live my life with maximum flavor.

Check under the cut to see pictures illustrating (and demystifying) the process! (Also take a peek there because it has some good notes about my process.)

Our ingredient lineup! I used kala chana besan instead of normal besan or ladoo besan, but it’s fine in the recipe. Usually I would use one of the other two, but this is totally fine! Note the little steel bowl between the kala chana packet and the baking powder. It’s called a katori, and it’s what I use instead of measuring cups for the flour, besan, and sugar. This is important to note because when I’m talking about “cups” in the recipe above, I’m actually measuring stuff in one of these little guys instead. :

Our two flours in a bowl! This was 1.5 katoris of all-purpose flour and 0.5 katoris of besan. :

The amount of salt I used! I just sorta dumped it onto a tablespoon.

The amount of baking powder I used. I was lazy and didn’t want to pull out a teaspoon, so again, tablespoon was used for this one too! :

All of those ingredients mixed up! :

The amount of cardamom I added:

The ground-up cardamom, mixed in with the flour. Since I ground it up pretty finely, you can’t really see it, but it’s totally fine if yours is a little coarser:

1/3 katori sugar, in a bowl:

The sugar mixed with four heaping tablespoons of ghee. As you can see, it becomes fluffier and lighter than the plain unmixed ghee in the contained to its left. Unfortunately I couldn’t grab a picture of the quantity of ghee I added because my hands were greasy, rip!

The dough after all the ghee was mixed in with the flour. It’s still a little too dry:

I added one large tablespoon more of ghee to fix the dryness of the dough:

And here’s the dough at the right consistency:

And here’s one little flattened sphere of that dough, to know roughly the size and shape you’re going to eventually put on your tray and stick in your oven:

And finally, here’s the cookies after they popped out of the oven, with a lighting change because the sun set while they were baking! As you can see, some of them are a little smaller, because my mom rolled up those ones and she makes them smaller. It’s all good though, and you still get great results! Since I used kala chana besan, these cookies are a little darker and a little less yellow than what I usually get, so don’t be worried if yours aren’t this color! :