Weetabix Barfi

We made Weetabix Barfi for my son’s Diwali & Eid party at school. Making food should be fun, especially when doing it with children. I love recipes where my son can enjoy making it and at the same time he is learning all the time yet he thinks it is fun, because for a change I am letting him play with food 🙂 We worked together as a team and he really enjoyed crushing the weetabix and biscuits, then mixing all the dry ingredients together. Learning about texture, size and how to measure ingredients together, are just a few of the things we talked about as we were making this easy sweet dish.

I have adopted this recipe to our taste from ‘The Ultimate Collection – A Vegetarian Cookbook’. The taste is a cross between a cereal bar and an Indian sweet.  I wanted to try this recipe as it seemed like an interesting mix of ingredients and felt kind of healthy because of the use of Weetabix, hence we made it as one of our Diwali sweets this year. In case you don’t know, Weetabix is a popular breakfast cereal – more info at Wikipedia here. It also goes by the name of Weet-bix.

I tweaked the recipe by reducing the amount of dessicated coconut and using chocolate flavoured Marie biscuits as opposed to the plain ones. When we made a second batch I also added some orange essence and dried orange zest, and it tasted good, so you can experiment with different flavours.

Ingredients

Preparation time: 30 to 40 mins      Setting time: overnight    Makes: 75 1” square pieces

220g Weetabix roughly crushed (this is 12 biscuits)

125g Marie biscuits roughly crushed

80g mixed nuts (I used almonds, pistachios & cashew) coarsely ground

50g dessicated coconut

2 tsp ground cinnamon powder

397g condensed milk (one can)

125g butter

1 tbsp ghee (clarified butter)

Method

1) Crush the Weetabix and Marie biscuits in a large bowl (we did it by hand). Grind the mixed nuts in a food processor and add to the bowl with the other two ingredients. To this add the remaining dry ingredients and mix well and keep aside.

2) Melt butter and ghee at low heat in a heavy bottom pan. Grease the thali or baking tray to be used and keep aside. Once the butter and ghee has melted add the condensed milk and mix switching off the heat. Once combined, pour over the dry ingredients and mix well.

3) Spread and press the mixture into the greased tray. I used the back of a small flat bottomed bowl to do this after initially using my hand to spread it evenly in the tray. Leave overnight to set fully and cut into pieces, store in an air tight container in the fridge. It keeps well for about a month (if it lasts long enough and not eaten), enjoy 🙂