Diwali boxes are a thing in India during the festive season. They are everywhere, in all shops, where customers put in orders for giving Diwali boxes to their friends and family. It consists of mainly mithai or Indian sweets, along with nuts like cashew nuts, almonds, pistachios and raisins in different containers. The boxes are beautifully decorated, and you can go as small or as big you want to. 🙂 As kids we would love receiving these boxes cause it meant we could have all the mithai in that season! Those were fun times. My mom would make a lot of sweet and savory stuff herself, to serve guests, who would come visit us during the Diwali holidays. She would put together a plate full of the sweet and savory foods in a lovely way and serve it with masala chai to the guests. I loved moms snacks, they were always the BEST! I would help her make all the food items like ladoos, chevdo, mathiya, chakri, mohanthal, chorafadi, ghughra etc!

I really wanted to implement a Diwali box concept/idea for this Diwali. Hetal from Milk and Cardamom and I had been talking over summer, to cook together, or collaborate together and it seemed the timing was just right with Diwali a few weeks away! We spoke about recipe ideas, and decided to do 3 sweet and 1 savory recipes, each for the Diwali box. It was a really nice mutual collaboration, where we both loved each other’s ideas, and we went ahead and did our recipes, made the sweets and savory foods. Hetal and her cutie daughter Elara came over one Sunday, and we spend the whole Sunday together, chatting, and eating, and then we put together the Diwali box with our sweets and savories, along with some pistachios and cashews, and sprinkles for fun! The sweet recipes are fusion Indian desserts, and the savory recipes are riff on Gujarati snacks that we grew up eating.

I wanted to share some details on how to put together the Diwali box. I am a weekly customer to Michael’s thanks to my kids, especially my daughter who wants to buy the whole store!! So do I secretly lol. We love the store, and love to browse around, and I know every aisle, nook and corner of the store. They have some of the cutest wooden boxes as well as the aluminum boxes that work great for cookies. The wooden boxes have covers too, for transportation. They have different sizes as well, in case you want to prepare a smaller one with a variety of 3-4 cookies for instance. I created dividers for the cookies in the box with wooden plaques. The wooden plaques are simply long strips of wood that can be cut using a sharp Exacto cutter, that you get at Michael’s too. You get specialty Exacto cutters that are specific to cutting wood. I used those and a ruler to measure out the compartments that I wanted to create in the wooden box. I then glued it together using a glue gun, also available at Michael’s.  You can use card stock paper for a faster option, and cut it by measurement to create the compartments.

8 compartments were created, for all the 8 food items, and 3 compartments for pistachios, cashews and sprinkles. We filled in all the compartments, and did a simple decoration on the photography surface, with diyas. If you would like you could actually use a pretty ribbon, also available at Michael’s, to decorate the rim of the box, with pretty embellishments, also available at Michael’s. Joan Craft Store is also another great source for DYI, gift boxes, pretty ribbons and embellishments for the box. You can get smaller boxes too, to put in perhaps 3-4 items per box. There are plenty of options always and it just depends on what you ultimately want to gift.

I heard about Teal Fire Fly Creations from Hetal, and they make these cute Diwali decorations that can be put on the boxes too, along with some pretty ribbons. They have an Etsy shop that I have linked as well. Be creative, and mainly have fun with it! 🙂

Here are some of the Diwali box pictures, and I hope this provides inspiration to you all for creating your own little Diwali box for your loved ones! 🙂

I also wanted to mention that the Diwali box is a derivative of the Christmas cookie box I did last year in December 2018, which was totally inspired by my uber talented friend Erin from Cloudy Kitchen! I do give full credit to her in my Christmas cookie box post 🙂 and her Christmas box was absolutely beautiful and I was inspired by her box to create my own Christmas cookie box. And that is how the Diwali box idea emerged, apart from the fact that we used to get Diwali boxes every single year from friends and family, growing up in India.

Here are the link and list of recipes included in the Diwali box from the top:

1. Mango-Saffron Henna Macarons
2. Rose Meringue Kisses
3. Ghughra or Fried Hand Pies with Chocolate Walnut Semolina Fudge
4. Orange Tutti Frutti Icebox Cookies
5. Spiced Bajra(Pearl Millet) Crackers
6. Carmelized White Chocolate Penda Bark
7. Achaar Masala Crackers
8. Khajur Kopra Roll Pinwheel Cookies

Hope you all have a wonderful and safe Diwali, and have a joyous and colorful celebration with your family and friends. May you always be blessed with health, wealth and happiness.

HAPPY DIWALI AND SAAL MUBARAK FROM OUR HOME TO YOURS!

XO

Amisha