Bhavna
Ok, so this post is going to be very interesting story. Story with all the images and not really need to follow the recipe. What if I told you that you can make your own sweet sour patches at home without any recipe with healthy ingredients? For those who love laddus or ladoos (Indian sweet), they can call these balls dry fruit & nut laddus. Every year, specially during Indian festivals, I buy some great quality dried fruits and raw nuts. Yes, for this recipe I recommend raw nuts to get that milky flavor but if desired lightly toasted nuts can be used and they can be lightly salted as well but not if you are serving during Indian festival.
These truffles can be your perfect lunch box snack as well.
Mostly, I used to combine all dry fruits and nuts to prepare snacks but this time I thought of pairing them up properly to get colorful truffle candy kind balls that kids would even love to try. Just in case, if you want to follow my old recipe of mixing all dry fruits and nuts, you can watch the video below but I am sure you will love the ideas of making these balls colorful instead so keep reading this post till the end.
This Navratri festival, I thought of making Prasad with the following idea. I bought dried fruits and raw nuts. I then lightly toasted all dry nuts just enough to bring their intense flavor. I got colorful dried fruits like kiwi, apricot, cranberries, dates and pineapples. I would also recommend some other dried fruits like strawberries. For nuts, you can use almond, cashew, peanut, walnut, pistachio and also some nuts such as pumpkin, sunflower and so on..and don’t forget coconut as it is so easy to find dry coconut.
I then started pairing them up to get the right colors of my truffles such as pineapple coconut (doesn’t that remind of pina colada?, for white color.
For green color, I chose kiwi, pistachio and pumpkin seeds. You can use matcha powder here as well.
For orange color, apricot with peanut. You can combine your choice of nut here but be sure to think about the color you want.
For red, cranberries with almond. I would prefer to use strawberries instead for vibrant red but I was out of dried strawberries.
And for brown color, date and walnut. Pecans can be used as well.
So you can imagine all these beauty of natural ingredients.
The recipe is very simple, I take the same amount of dry fruit and nuts or you can always adjust as per your preference but in order to make the balls, I prefer to take the same ratio or more dried fruits to get stable binding. Coconut oil can be then added to get moist and smooth balls but totally optional.
Basically, grind ingredients together as much fine as you can. I use my juice blender to get the fine texture. Once you get the mixture ready, prepare the small ball and then roll the ball into granulated sugar to prevent them sticking to each other.
