Sweet stuff

I did mention in a post not so long ago that I'd been in the business of trying my hand at traditional Indian sweets, and promised to share the results with you. I've been sitting on this one for a while, but without further ado I give you my first attempt at chocolate burfi.

The first challenge was to acquire some almonds produced as close to home as possible. My research turned up that the vast majority of almonds we find in the shops have come all the way from California. This being unnecessary when they grow perfectly well in Europe. Being the lazy so-and-so that I am, I got ground almonds because I can't be bothered to do all the soaking and peeling and grinding myself - not right now, though I'll have a go in future. I got 1kg of the stuff for £14.28 (incl. P&P) from Real Food Source. I buy in bulk when I can online, to make it more worth the delivery charges. These particular nuts were grown in Spain. That's not far - I drove there last autumn! :)

So, I found the simplest recipe with the fewest ingredients and stages. It was a bit tricky because a lot of the ones I found online were sort of half-in and half-out of American measurements. All-in I can handle - as long as you use the same size cup for everything you're alright. But this half-measures thing confused me. They'd say something like "250g almonds" and then "½ cup milk" in the same recipe. So I'm thinking, do they have a specific cup size in mind considering that the weight of almonds is specific and weight-based as opposed to volume? I don't know why people do that!

Anyway, I figured I'd give it a shot. These ground almonds and sugar were added to this milk:

Which made a gooey paste like this:

And when I heated that up, stirring "occasionally" (a lot), it turned into this:

I had a feeling it was meant to be "drier", but I didn't have time to stand there all night stirring it and waiting for it to reach some undefined state when in all possibility I'd use the wrong ratios of ingredients due to the badly-written recipe. So, at this point I cut my losses and spread it in a dish like so:

Approximately a geological age later, it had cooled down, so I melted some chocolate and spread it over the top. When that had cooled down, I cut it into squares like this:

It was quite a long way from being the thing it was meant to be - certainly not pick-up-able as we had to eat it with cake forks, but I think I learned from the experience and as you can see by the fact that the dish was half-empty before I even got a chance to take a photo, its lack of resemblance to what it was meant to be didn't prevent us from enjoying what it was - in fact it was pretty damn delicious, whatever it was!

I'll have another go next time, using less milk. And then one day I'll see what difference it makes if I don't use ready-ground almonds.

In the process of this project I learned lots about the nut industry, including the fact that walnuts, cobnuts and various other nuts are still grown in Britain. I plan to investigate these guys' produce when I've got a penny or two spare - at present I'm reeling from the house having been council tax banded at last... !