How Not to Cook Dessert.

I love Indian desserts. One particular favourite of mine is a milk based treat known as Burfi. It’s also spelled Barfi, which turns out is particularly appropriate in my hands. I tried to make it today. Well, you’ll see…

Recipe:

KAJU BURFI (Cashew Burfi)

Ingredients:

1 cup raw cashews
1 cup milk
¾ cup sugar, to taste
¼ cup ghee (or unsalted butter), melted
pinch of cardamom powder
2-3 drops rose water (optional)

METHOD:

Soak the cashews in the milk for a few hours (2-3 hours or more). Using a blender or food processor, blend the cashews, sugar and milk together into a fine thick paste adding more milk if needed.

In a deep skillet on medium low heat, add the cashew paste and keep stirring continuously. After 3-4 minutes, add the melted ghee slowly into the pan (in small increments) while stirring. At this point, add the cardamom powder and rose water. Keep stirring until the mixture comes together forming a ball. Remove from the heat and allow to cool just slightly.

Spread evenly on a lightly greased (butter or cooking spray) baking sheet or tray. The thickness should be at least ¼ inch but no more than ½ inch thick. This is easy to do while the mixture is still warm. Cut into diamond shape pieces and refrigerate in an airtight container.

In theory Cashew Burfi should look something like this:

In practice:

As you can see it turned out not so much as barfi but miscellaneous gelatinous goo. It’s something like cookie dough. Well, it tastes about the same, only with chunks of a toffee like substance throughout. That could be the cashews which may not have entirely blended smooth or it could be the sugar hardened on me at some point.

I could probably get away with adding some baking soda to it and trying it out in the oven because for sure nobody around here is going to be conned into actually eating it.

This is what I did to the pan in the process -

I’m really not entirely sure what I did wrong here. Theoretically this was an easy recipe. I followed the recipe carefully but this wasn’t even close to edible, let alone close to what it’s meant to be. Well, OK it’s technically edible but I’d make myself very, very ill. It turned out much sweeter than I imagined and I have a very sweet tooth so… Oops. Yes, one of those very quiet ‘oops’ that you know actually spells total disaster.

Rating: 4 solid spanks.