Falooda: Indian dessert drink with Blue Bunny® Ice cream

This shop has been compensated by Collective Bias, Inc. and its advertiser. All opinions are mine alone.  #SoHoppinGood #CollectiveBiasSpring and summer means delicious cold drinks and ice cream, my kids love ice cream even in cold winter days. Still here in Texas we are waiting for spring. When I was young an outing on a hot day invariably ends with dad buying us delicious Falooda from the store. Falooda is a quintessential drink come dessert which is most famous in India and Pakistan. It has everything you look forward in a dessert; it is sweet, smooth, crunchy, velvety pleasing all your taste buds. Blue Bunny® Homemade Vanilla makes very good falooda, as the star ingredient in falooda is the generous scoops of a vanilla ice cream.

Falooda is a combination of silky vermicelli noodles (made with cornstarch) with ice cream( most common flavor is vanilla) , chewy black basil seeds /Sabja Seeds/tukmaria (they looks like chia seeds when they soaked but are entirely different), colorful jelly seeped in with rose syrup and cold milk topped with sprinkled nuts. According for food historian, K T Achaya, falooda began life as a decadent concoction in the royal courts of Mughal Emperors especially Jahangir. "Akbar's son had great curiosity to try anything novel," writes Achaya, in his book, The Story of Our Food. Others say that king Nadir Shah brought it with him when he came to India. No matter who ever brought it, it is a royal kind of dish which we all fell in love with it. Indian falooda got its influence from Iranian faloodeh shirazi; but there are also there other versions of falooda that can be found around Asia. Halo halo is a traditional Philippines dessert with evaporated milk, coconut, ice cream with tropical fruits. Singaporean cendol is made up of shaved ice with coconut and condensed milk with a golden-brown palm sugar syrup drizzled over it. Malaysia has ais/ice kacang that adds jelly, red beans, fruit, peanut, ice cream, sweet corn etc to the cendol. Mauritian bubble tea is made of milk, basil seeds, and agar-agar, strawberry or vanilla syrup and is called alouda.

For best tasting falooda you need soft silky vanilla ice cream like Blue Bunny® Homemade Vanilla, you can grab them from your nearest Wal-Mart store. They have other great flavors too; I love their new clear packaging and that allows us to see the flavors and swirls, is it wonderful.

I bought their Blue Bunny® Butter pecan one also.

You need to plan ahead for making Falooda; first you need to make jelly. I used gelatin free strawberry jelly. Need to soak the basil seeds/Sabja /tukmaria seeds for at least 30 minutes. Also cook the Falooda noodles for about 5 minutes in boiling water. Drain and set aside as you ready for assemble the dish. The fun part of the dish is the assembling each ingredients in layers.

Grab a tall glass add your favorite jelly in the bottom, followed by rose syrup, soaked basil seeds, cooked falooda noodles and chilled milk then finally top with two-3 scoops of Blue Bunny® Homemade Vanilla ice cream and topped with favorite nuts. Then add little extra rose syrup on the top if you want.

That’s all your falooda is ready to dig in. Who can say no to anything with Vanilla ice cream in it give it try you will love it.

Swathi

This is Swathi ( Dr. Ambujom Saraswathy Ph.D) from Zesty South Indian Kitchen who loves to explore cuisines from all over the world. Whenever possible I try to to give an Indian touch to several of the world cuisine, and has weakness for freshly baked bread.  All the recipes you see here are created by me and approved after taste-test by my family.