Basbousa

October 22, 2016

That beautiful Persian love cake left me with half a tub of soy yoghurt... and I thought it tasted awful! Like silken tofu flavoured with vanilla and a pinch of sugar. No way was I eating that for breakfast. I thumbed through my cookbooks and found another yoghurt cake to bake it into.

This basbousa recipe comes from the Moroccan Soup Bar cookbook. It's a cake I recall eating there and at other Middle Eastern restaurants, served in small dense diamonds and saturated with sugar syrup. I suspect the printed version hasn't been thoroughly tested - for starters, it would have you preheat your oven to 375°C! I assumed this was the temperature in Fahrenheit, and converted back to a more feasible 190°C.

The intended ingredient quantities are a bit of a mystery, too. My cake batter was too runny to press, roll or cut as directed. Even so, I was glad I ran my knife through it to trace diamond shapes before it baked - they were a handy guide when it was actually time to eat! I had about double the almonds and syrup that I thought I needed, and I've adjusted the quantities accordingly in my write-up below. (I've been drinking my leftover syrup a tablespoon at a time in soda water.)

Actually, I suspect the full quantity of syrup does make for an authentic basbousa - I'm just content to make mine a little drier and less sweet than standard. It was a cake we could steal small pieces of for a full week without perceiving that it was stale. I'm most enamoured of its dense semolina-and-coconut crumb, and the subtle citrus. And I love the sticky brown caramelised edges, even though they're drier still. 

Basbousa
(slightly adapted from Hana Assifiri's Moroccan Soup Bar)

cake
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup yoghurt (mine was soy-based)
280g butter
2 cups fine semolina
1/2 cup dessicated coconut
1/2 cup caster sugar
100g blanched almonds

syrup
1 1/2 cups sugar
3/4 cup water
zest of 1 lemon
zest of 1 orange
1 teaspoon orange blossom water

Preheat an oven to 190°C. Lightly grease a large baking dish or rectangular cake tin.

Sift the baking powder and soda into the yoghurt and stir to combine. Allow the yoghurt to sit and expand until it's doubled in size, about 20 minutes.

Melt the butter in a large saucepan, and then turn off the heat. Stir in the semolina, coconut and sugar. Add the yoghurt and stir everything together thoroughly. Pour the cake batter into the baking dish and smooth over the top. Use a sharp knife to 'cut' the batter into diamond shapes. Place an almond at the centre of each diamond. Bake the cake until golden, about 30 minutes.

While the cake is baking, make the syrup. Place the sugar, water and zests into a small-medium saucepan and bring them to the boil. Turn down the heat and simmer the syrup for 10 minutes. Turn off the heat and add the orange blossom water. Let the syrup sit at room temperature.

When the cake is baked, pour the syrup over it. Turn off the oven, but put the syrup-soaking cake back in to caramelise in the ambient heat for 5-10 minutes. After that time is up, let the cake cool to room temperature. (It's not traditional, but it's also pretty tasty when warm!)

Muhallabiya, two ways

December 28, 2015 & January 18-19, 2016

Dinner at the Moroccan Soup Bar usually ends with a plate of little shortbreads and pastries stuffed with dates or nuts and dripping with sweet syrup. The Moroccan Soup Bar cookbook contains a couple such recipes, but also some heartier sweet treats including sfenj/doughnuts and muhallabiya.

As I mentioned in my last Moroccan Soup Bar post, muhallabiya is a dairy-based pudding flavoured with orange and lemon, drizzled with syrup and scattered with pistachios. I made little cups of it to finish a meal with Michael and our two brothers just after Christmas. More recently, Michael's mum and her two sisters visited us for dinner; on this occasion I tried churning and freezing the pudding as an icecream!

Assafiri welcomes adaptations to her recipes and icecream-churning isn't the only change I made. On both occasions I increased the orange and lemon quantities. I should've known it would curdle the milk (!), but thankfully the mixture smooths right out as the cornflour cooks and thickens. I had a lot of syrup left over, and I can recommend it as a lovely flavouring for soda water (vodka optional).

This dessert is delightful in both incarnations. As a pudding, it's creamy and just-barely-set with a strong citrus flavour. As an icecream it's a little powdery and more subtly flavoured. I already have an awfully similar recipe on the blog, actually, and its use of eggs instead of cornflour probably yields a smoother, richer scoop. Nevertheless, it's been fun to get to know muhallabiya better this summer.

Muhallabiya
(recipe adapted from Hana Assafiri's Moroccan Soup Bar)

2 cups milk
1 cup cream
1/4 cup cornflour
zest and juice of 1 orange
zest and juice of 1 lemon
pinch of saffron
1/2 cup caster sugar
1/2 cup pistachios, roughly chopped, to garnish

syrup
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons orange blossom water
juice of 1/2 orange
1/4 cup water
squeeze of lemon juice

Whisk together the milk and cream in a medium-large saucepan and set them over high heat. In a small cup dissolve the cornflour with 1-2 tablespoons of water, then pour it all into the saucepan. Stir in the orange and lemon zest and juice; don't panic if the mixture curdles, it will smooth out later. Stir in the saffron and sugar and bring it all to the boil. Reduce the heat and allow it all to simmer for 10-15 minutes, stirring regularly - it should be smooth and custardy.

To make cool puddings, pour the mixture into serving cups and refrigerate them for at least 2 hours. To make icecream, refrigerate the mixture until very cold, at least 4 hours and ideally overnight. Pour it into an icecream maker and churn, then freeze the icecream in an airtight container for at least 4 hours.

To make the syrup, place all of the ingredients in a small saucepan over medium-high heat. Bring them to the boil, and continue boiling for 10 minutes. Allow the syrup to cool down to room temperature.

To serve, drizzle the syrup over single serves of the pudding or icecream and scatter over the chopped pistachios.

Makloubeh

December 28, 2015

I received the Moroccan Soup Bar cookbook for my birthday! The thick volume collates many recipes from the eponymous restaurant, which we've visited many times during our near-decade in Melbourne. (In 2016 we're likely to become even more frequent visitors to the newly opened sister cafe Moroccan Deli-cacy.)

A visit to the Moroccan Soup Bar has always been much more than a plate of food, with the wild-haired and lion-hearted restaurant founder Hana Assafiri roaming the room, minimal table reservations, no alcohol, and a spoken menu of vegetarian dishes rich in herbs and spices. Likewise, the book is much more than a catalogue of recipes; Assafiri devotes many pages to her philosophy of generosity, actively supporting women within her business and creating a convivial, diverse environment that doesn't shy away from debate. (I was excited to see her featured in Ai Weiwei's Letgo Room of Aussie activists at NGV.)

I devoured Assafiri's words on Boxing Day, and planned a feast of her foods to welcome Michael and his brother Matt back to Melbourne a couple of days later. We started with marinated olives, hummus swirled with olive oil and sprinkled with parsley and paprika, and flatbread. Of course, the famous chickpea bake was mandatory (I made mine using a corn chip cheat I figured out a couple of years ago). Michael helped julienne zucchini and apple for a tangy salad (though we forgot to add the pomegranate seeds I'd patiently collected earlier that afternoon!). I teamed these dishes with makloubeh, a vegan-friendly eggplant and rice dish that I'll share the recipe for below. Finally, after a big break, I served muhallabiya in ramekins - these are dairy-based puddings flavoured with orange and lemon, drizzled with an orange blossom syrup and scattered with pistachios.

But back to the makloubeh (pictured up top). This dish consistently pops up in the Moroccan Soup Bar banquet as a platter of red rice, topped with an eggplant slice and slivered almonds. Herbs, spices, tomato paste and pomegranate syrup go straight in with the rice as it cooks and the eggplant slices are browned separately in a frypan and stored in a low oven, rendering them smoky and close to collapse. There's enough substance and variety to enjoy makloubeh as a meal on its own, and I reckon we'll be doing that on weeknights to come. As it was, we packed leftovers into lunchboxes and wolfed them down at the Boxing Day Test the next day.

Makloubeh
(a recipe from Hana Assafiri's Moroccan Soup Bar)

1 eggplant
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
handful of fresh parsley
handful of fresh coriander
1/4 cup olive oil
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon chilli powder
1 tablespoon tomato paste
2 1/2 cups water
1 cup rice
1 tablespoon pomegranate syrup
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons pepper
100g slivered almonds
oil, for frying

Slice the eggplant into 1cm-thick 'steaks'. Sprinkle salt on both sides of the slices and allow them to drain in a colander.

Peel and finely dice the onion and garlic. Coarsely chop the parsley and coriander.

Place the olive oil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the onion, garlic, parsley (reserving a little bit for garnish), coriander, cumin and chilli powder; saute until the onion is soft. Stir in the tomato paste. Add the water and bring it to the boil. Rinse the rice and, when the water in the saucepan is boiling, add that rice to the pot. Bring it all back to the boil, then lower the heat to medium and allow the rice to cook for 20 minutes.

While the rice is cooking, set oil in a frypan over high heat and brown the eggplant slices on each side, sprinkling over a little pepper as they fry. Place the eggplant slices in a baking tray and, when they're all done, place them in an oven on low heat. Place the almonds in a small bake-proof tray and toast them in the oven, too.

Once the rice has hit 20 minutes, stir through the pomegranate syrup. Cover the saucepan and simmer the rice for a further 15 minutes.

Make sure you get those almonds out of the oven before they burn! When everything is ready, spoon the rice onto a platter. Layer the eggplant slices over the rice, then sprinkle them with the almonds and reserved parsley. Serve as a main meal or a component of a feast!