Building a hamper from ₹1,000: what to expect
How a custom hamper works, from your first message to the photo we send before we seal the box.
Ellu bella for Sankranti: our January boxes
The sesame, jaggery and sugar figures of Makara Sankranti, and how we pack them for families who exchange them.
Deepavali is our busiest season, but the second is Makara Sankranti in mid-January, when families in Karnataka visit each other and exchange ellu bella.
Ellu bella is a mix of roasted white sesame, dry coconut, groundnut, fried gram and small cubes of jaggery. Each family has its own proportion; ours, from one of our three kitchens, is roughly equal parts sesame and coconut with a little less of everything else. It is usually given with sakkare acchu, the white sugar figures shaped like elephants, temples and fruit, and with a piece of sugarcane and a banana.
Our Sankranti box has 250 g of ellu bella in a small steel dabba, eight sakkare acchu, two bananas and a short piece of sugarcane, at ₹490. For families exchanging with ten or twenty homes, we pack ellu bella in paper cones of 50 g at ₹45 each, with the figures wrapped separately so they do not chip.
Sugar figures are fragile and sensitive to damp, so we pack them on the morning of delivery and do not ship them outside Bengaluru. Ellu bella travels well and goes across India in two to four days. Orders open on 1 January and close on 12 January. If you need more than 50 cones for an apartment association or an office, tell us by the first week of January so our kitchen can plan.
