Coconut rock, version 2 — fresh coconut, milk, sugar. I started using fresh coconut — or more accurately, frozen coconut, defrosted, because actual fresh coconut is not so easy to come across in Chicago, and if you do get it, it requires a lot of grating. But that said, frozen is very good, and is generally easily found in our local Indian grocery stores. This offered better coconut flavor, and I quite like the end result. But there’s a version I like even better, so we’ll wait for that for the recipe…
I also tried using dragonfruit powder to color it, and that worked great — pink / red food color often seems to give people headaches, so I try to avoid it when I can. It’s the lighter pink on the left in the last photo. (The brighter pink is perhaps more classically South Asian, though!)
Dragonfruit powder has a faint flavor that you probably won’t notice in this, but offers really nice color. It’s more expensive than food color, of course, so that may be a factor for you, but worth considering — a little dragonfruit powder goes a long way, so you can use one packet for several recipes, though be sure to squeeze the air out before resealing the package, or the powder will have a tendency to go clumpy, hard, and unusable.
