Arusuvai: Broken Wheat, Coconut Ladoo (Dalia Coconut Laddoo)

The “Arusuvai Friendship Chain” was started by Latha and Lakshmi at The Yum Blog along with Bharathy of Spicy Chilly and Bhags of Crazy Curry. Latha from “Masala Magic” continued the Arusuvai friendship chain in USA. Thanks to you all for this wonderful idea.

The Arusuvai Friendship Chain is all about sending a surprise food ingredient to friends so that they can prepare something tasty with it, share the recipe and pass on the surprise ingredient to other people.

Thanks Seema for thinking about me and sending me this “Surprise Ingredient”. Seema had sent this to me promptly almost a month ago, in fact at the right time to participate in Sunita’s Think Spice… Think Star Anise Event. But I was not able to blog about this as the camera was not at my disposal and I was mainly working off of my draft section (err, that is a valid excuse isn’t it?). Sorry about the delay Seema. But I do have to mention that it was a very special and warm feeling opening the packet and the fine aroma of the surprise ingredient “Star Anise” that filled the room was just heavenly.

I was excited as I have/had never used Start Anise in my cooking before and so I dutifully googled for some recipes over the internet. I was looking for something that was sweet, easy, did not involve baking and had some Indian touch to it. But unfortunately did not find anything appealing and so came up with this idea of making laddos.

Please let me know if anybody is interested and I can send over the ingredient to them.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup shredded coconut (fresh/frozen)

• 1/4 cup broken wheat

• ½ cup sweetened condensed milk

• ½ tsp star anise powder (substitute with cardamom powder if not available)

Method:

• Soak the broken wheat in enough water for about 1-2 hours.

• Drain the water completely and spread it over some paper or cloth so that the remaining water content is gone.

• In a heavy bottom pan, on a very low flame first add the coconut and stir until it gets toasted and a wonderful aroma of the coconut fills in.

• Be very careful as the coconut gets browned very easily.

• Next add the condensed milk and broken wheat and mix well.

• Continue to mix for about 10-15 minutes until the mixture almost dries up.

• Add the star anise powder and allow to cool. Take a handful of the mixture each time and shape into laddos.