If you are married and want to remember the sweetness and the breath-taking moment of your first kiss or if you are single and haven’t kissed before, I suggest simply taste one bite of the Middle East’s favourite dessert Basbousa. In fact I learnt later that thisword gets translated into Arabica for “Just a kiss”. I experienced a weird sort of coincidence or as I love to call it synchronicity knowing about it, because it tasted as pleasant as my first kiss. It was as if the universe was kissing me for the first time. I can assure you your taste buds will fall in love with its magical taste. I can never forget that precious moment when I munched on this sugary delight for the first time and the way its delectable flavours made an instant camaraderie with my senses. Not just that but just one look at this tantalizing dessert and you are sure to choose it without any logic or reason. The semolina cake with its syrupy top and crusty edges makes me die to taste its every single piece. You won’t find one tinny tiny bit of this cake on my plate after I’ve had it- that’s how much I love this dessert.
I couldn’t resist my temptation to share this with my family and friends. But I wanted to try it at home and feel the joy of seeing my loved ones relishing it’s mouth-watering flavours. As Christmas was just few days away I thought of inviting all my loved ones into my humble abode and treat them with my magical recipe of Basbousa. This was my way of honouring the age old and nostalgic Middle Eastern recipe.
So if you too want to kiss yourself or your loved ones don’t wait and grab the ingredients before the moment fades!
Ingredients to prepare the Syrup
- 1 ½ cup Sugar
- 1 tsp Lemon juice
- 1 ¼ cup water
- 1 tsp saffron/cardamom/ vanilla/ Rosewater only for flavouring
Ingredients to make the Basbousa
- 2 ½ cup semolina
- ½ cup all-purpose flour or self-raising flour
- Almost 1 cup powdered coconut
- 1 cup caster sugar
- 200g butter without salt which has been melted (one of the main ingredient)
- 200g yogurt
- Around 10-20 blanched almonds
- 1 tsp Vanilla Essence
Process:
- We’ll have to make dough like thing in a bowl by mixing the semolina, caster sugar, yogurt, coconut, butter and the vanilla essence. It should end up not sticking the bowl.
- Once this is done, we’ll take a baking tray and grease it with oil or butter.
- Next we’ll simply spread out our dough like thing on the baking tray preferably with our hands and make sharp diamond or square cuts on the top. This will ensure that our Basbousa gets a distinct structure.
- We’ll decorate this with our blanched almonds over each Basbousa.
- On the other hand we’ll pre heat our oven at 180 degree Celsius and without any hesitation put our yummylicious Basbousa into the oven, to get itself baked.
- We’ll have to gather our patience for some 20 to 25 minutes.
- So in the mean while we’ll quickly make our syrup. For this, we’ll take our sugar, water and lemon juice and place it on the stove with medium flame. We have to keep stirring so that our sugar doesn’t crystallize.
- We can add whichever flavour we want at this point into our syrup.
- And now we’ll cool it down and wait for the oven to do its thing.
- Once you hear the bell ringing from your oven, take out your gorgeous Basbousa and spread out the cold syrup over the steaming hot Basbousa and right there you’ve made all by yourself the insanely easy but incredibly appetizing Basbousa.
I am more than sure that your friends and family would find excuses to eat this from your hand again and again can’t resisting the insanely appetizing dessert. This dessert is sure to earn you a plethora of appreciation and love. I say it’s not just a kiss it the most satisfying kiss! Happy cooking and eating. Enjoy!
image source : onionin.com