Delicious Christmas Coconut Candy Recipe

Easy Goan Coconut Candy Recipe

With Christmas just a month away, it’s time for me to get going with my series of Christmas recipes for this season. My first recipe is for perhaps the easiest Christmas sweet – melt-in-the mouth-delicious, Christmas Coconut Candy.

Also called coconut toffee, it needs just a handful of ingredients and unlike the super-tasty Goan milk toffee or milk creams that need loads of patience and time to prepare, this Christmas treat needs barely 25 to 30 minutes of cooking time. My recipe may be lower on sugar as compared to many other recipes for this sweet, but it will be the tastiest coconut candy you could have tasted. I can assure you of that. My recipe has the right balance of the taste of coconut, sugar, and milk. You absolutely should give it a shot.

This is one of those sweets for which you have to keep everything, including the pan you’ll be setting it in, ready, right at the start. Once you start making the candy, you can’t stop to take care of anything else. This candy or coconut toffee sets rapidly and so you have to act quickly once you take it off the heat.

Another coconut-based Christmas treat is my recipe for tasty Goan bolinhas. Make sure to check it out.

Ingredients

2 ½ cup (250g) grated fresh coconut

½ cup milk powder

¾ cup milk

1 ¼ cup (260g) sugar

¼ tsp salt

1 ½ tbsp ghee

3 tbsp finely grated almonds

1 tsp vanilla extract

Pink and green food colours

Procedure

1. Line a pan (7″ x 7″) with parchment paper and grease the bottom with ghee. Or grease a tray liberally with ghee. Keep this ready before you start making the coconut candy, which is made with just the white part of the coconut kernel.
2. Heat 1 tbsp of ghee in a non-stick pan on medium-low heat. Transfer the grated coconut to the pan and roast it lightly for 3 to 4 minutes till it loses some of its moisture.
3. Let the lightly roasted coconut cool completely and then grind it for a few seconds in a mixer-grinder. (It shouldn’t be ground to an oily paste.)
4. To the same pan, add the milk powder and milk and stir the mix well till no lumps of the milk powder remain.
5. Grind the sugar to a powder and dissolve this in the milk. Stir in the salt.
6. Turn on the stove and bring the sweetened milk to a boil with the flame on medium. Once it starts boiling reduce the heat to low or medium-low and stir it continuously for the next couple of minutes till it thickens slightly. Take care to see it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan and start browning.
7. Next, add in the ground coconut. Mix everything well and continue cooking the mixture on low or medium-low heat, stirring continuously.
8. When it starts thickening and seems like its coming together, add in the ground almonds, the vanilla extract and  ½ tbsp of ghee and continue stirring the mix for a couple of minutes more.
9. By now, the candy mixture will leave the sides of the pan, but will be a soft sticky mass.
10. Turn off the heat. From this stage onwards, you have to work very fast because the coconut candy begins to set in minutes.
11. Then divide the mixture into three parts. Colour one part pink, the second green, and leave the third one uncoloured.
12. Transfer spoonfuls of the thee portions in a random fashion to the prepared pan to form a sort of marbled pattern.
13. Smoothen the top of the mixture using a greased spatula and finally with a piece of parchment paper smeared with ghee. At the same time, press the mixture down firmly into the pan. You could also grease the underside of a small bowl and use this to smoothen the surface of the candy mixture.
14. After around 15-20 minutes, when the candy mix is still slightly warm, make markings on it with a knife for cutting out square or diamond shapes.
15. The candy has to be cut before it cools completely, so go ahead and cut out the diamond or square shapes and then let the candy cool for around two hours at room temperature.
16. Store it outside the fridge in an airtight container for around 10 days and after that in the fridge.

Enjoy!

Tips:

1. Cook the candy on medium-low heat throughout and preferably in a non-stick pan to prevent it from sticking to the bottom of the vessel and getting burnt.
2. Do not overcook the candy. If you dry it too much before taking it off the heat, it will set too fast and you won’t be able to make clean square or diamond cuts. Instead, the candy will be crumbly and won’t hold its shape. On the other hand, if you take the candy off the stove a little too early (say, 2-3 minutes earlier), that would be OK. It would just need a little more time to set properly and you would have to wait a little longer to cut it.
3. Take the candy mixture off the stove the moment it starts leaving the sides of the pan, but is still somewhat sticky.