Coconut Burfi

It is the peak of the festive season here, Diwali is in the air, young girls & boys are on a shopping spree buying clothes, accessories, electronic gadgets, fireworks, etc. to celebrate this Diwali grander than the previous years. Men are looking forward to spend this weekend with his near & dear. Women are toiling away in the kitchen to treat her family & guests with scrumptious goodies. We usually prepare coconut burfi a couple of days before Deepavali as it is made using fresh coconut meat that won’t stay fresh longer.

My mother-in-law used to make perfect coconut burfi using refined sugar, and she serves us her snowy white burfi with crunchy savories as tea-time snacks. It has been difficult for me to match her sublimity whenever I tried to replicate her burfi.

Now I used coconut sugar for the first time in this burfi as I feel coconut sugar as a perfect sweetener for coconut based sweets & desserts. Coconut sugar is obtained by boiling coconut sap drawn out from coconut flowers nectar just like the palm sugar obtained from the sap of palm trees through palmyra flowers and the maple syrup from the sap of maple trees.

Coconut sugar contains a special nutrient called inulin which is good for gut health and also aids in slow absorption of glucose. So I feel it is ideal to use coconut sugar for making desserts and sweets especially in this festival of sweets.

Incidentally I found my coconut burfi made using coconut sugar soft, chewy & crumbly with delicious caramel flavour. You can also treat your family & friends with these caramel flavored coconut fudges in this Diwali, and the recipe is as below:

Ingredients:

Coconut	1 (large)
Coconut sugar	as needed
Roughly chopped cashew nuts	as desired
Ghee	1 tsp
A pinch of cardamom powder

Coconut burfi making:

Shredding coconut meat is the most difficult part of making coconut burfi. Generally people prefer to shred it using coconut scraper, but I prefer to cut the coconut meat into pieces, remove its brown skin using a peeler, and then blitz those chunks into shreds as below. Now lets prepare coconut burfi.

• Heat a non-stick pan with ghee in medium flame.
• Add chopped cashew nuts and fry for few seconds.
• Add shredded coconut meat and saute for 1-2 minutes.
• Add coconut sugar into the pan and saute until the sugar melts away.
• Now reduce the flame to low and keep stirring until we could smell the aroma of roasted coconut (it took about 10 min. for me).
• Remove from heat.
• Grease a square dish with ghee and transfer the coconut mixture onto the dish.
• Spread the mixture uniformly using the back of a measuring cup.
• Draw lines using a knife when the mixture is warm so that we can cut them into squares after an hour or more.
• Serve coconut burfi at room temperature.

Tips & Tweaks:

• I don’t like sugary coconut burfi, so I used coconut & sugar in the ratio of 2:1, but you can check the sweetness of the mixture when sugar is melted away so that you can add more sugar, if needed.
• Some may not like the crumbly texture and they may like to see a neat square. In that case we can add some cocoa powder/ cashew powder/ roasted chickpea flour into the coconut mixture as a binding agent.
• You can also refer the gif below for the coconut burfi recipe with refined sugar replacing cashew with pista, and I have grated coconut using coconut scraper for this recipe.