Bollywood Cooking: An Assortment of Burfi with Mowie and Me

 

 

There’s a special treat in store for you all today. For this session of Bollywood Cooking I have some great support. Today Mowie and me are doing a double feature of a classic Indian sweet with a spectacular German twist. While Mowie shares his pretty Pink Almond Spekulatius Barfi here, I am over at Mowie’s presenting my Chocolate Lebkuchen Fudge Burfi.

Mowie steal the show!

Welcome Everyone!

My name is Mowie and I'll be your dessert technician this week. I've taken over Meeta's blog and will be whipping up a fabulous sticky and sweet concoction where India meets Germany in a delectable delight for your culinary senses. Meeta is doing the same over at my blog Mowielicious.com, so do hop on over there when you've finished reading this to see her *amazing* creation.

I'd been reading Meeta's blog for a while and loving it up until we 'met' online. She'd accepted an invitation to give a talk about food photography & styling at our Food Bloggers Connect happening next week in London. We'd been emailing, getting to know one another, and from then on it was just inevitable that we would guest post for each other, and I have to say, when I found out it was for a Bollywood cooking series, I didn't have to think twice about what I wanted to try out as I'd been meaning to make it for ages: Burfi!

 

Before I go on, I have to say a big thank you to my friend Fariya for her tips, tricks and recipes - I couldn't have done it without you!

I'd never made burfi before and the first thing that came to mind was thinking up extravagant and spectacular ways of presenting it in my photos. I had the perfect image in mind, but I learned the hard way to not think too far ahead when trying out a new recipe for the first time. The first attempt turned out really delicious, but too sticky, not allowing me to mould it into what I wanted. The second attempt yielded something slightly more on the liquid side of caramel, at which point I may have started panicking *just* slightly. However, at my third attempt, everything turned out better, and much easier & quicker than I could have imagined - phew! By this time I'd changed my mind about how I wanted to serve it. I did toy with the idea of serving the burfi traditionally, but I decided to plate it in dessert dishes instead. The original way of serving burfi is akin to brownies: big, chunky squares of nutty goodness (to see what they traditionally look like and for a bit of burfi history, take a look at Meeta's burfi on my blog HERE).

 

Being this close to Christmas, I'd been craving spekulatius biscuits almost daily. Those of you familiar with my blog know that I love combining two or more recipes, like my Belgian Speculoos Tiramisu Verrines (speculoos is the Belgian name for spekulatius). I had a recipe for some spekulatius cookies I'd been meaning to try out for a while now (and I will be doing those shortly on my blog) but to add a twist, I thought I'd go ahead and add some of the main spekulatius spices to the burfi, and together with the almonds, it turned out to be the perfect combination.

So, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I present you with my interpretation of burfi, where India meets Germany, sticky & sweet, sugar & spice and all nutty things nice. So simple, so quick, and so utterly delicious. Enjoy! 

Pink Almond Spekulatius Barfi

Ingredients

200ml sweetened condensed milk (you can make this yourself by boiling down 400ml of milk with 150g sugar for 30 minutes, stirring constantly, or you could just buy the ready made version)
100g butter
450g finely chopped almonds (you can also use pistachios or a combination of the two)
1tsp ground ginger
1tsp ground cinnamon
1tsp ground cardamom
[optional] 2tsps natural pink food colouring (for this recipe I used organic beetroot juice)

Method

1. Heat condensed milk in a large, deep pot on a medium to high heat, stirring constantly to make sure it doesn't burn. 
   
   
2. Add the butter, colouring and spices, and keep stirring. 
   
   
3. Add the almonds and stir until the mixture forms a ball in the pan. If the mixture is still too liquid or sticky, add more almonds. 
   
   
4. Plate the mixture into dessert dishes. 
   
   
5. Refrigerate and serve cold with sprinkled almonds or pistachios. The colder the burfi, the better it tastes!

Note: If using pistachios, you might want to consider leaving out the food colouring as the nuts will naturally turn the burfi green.

 

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Thank you Mowie for sharing this moment of Bollywood Cooking with me. To all of you I hope you will have a grand time with both, slightly different but very fun recipes for burfi.

Wishing you all a grand weekend! See you next week as I share a delectable dessert and many Thanksgiving menu ideas.

Happy Weekend and lots of

Hugs! 

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All photographs and written content for this post courtesy of Mowie @Mowielicious. Published with permission.