Sekerpare

It was six years ago when this yummy dessert jumped to the top of my favorites list. I started to work and live in Eskisehir then. It was a new city to discover for me and the first thing taking my attention was, after its freezing weather, its pastry shops located all around the city. There were so many pastry shops selling various savory and sweet pastries and it was impossible for me to ignore their tasty products displayed in shop windows. As I always have a sweet tooth, I was more interested in desserts. Luckily, I wasn’t the only person who was trapped by these screaming pastry shops. I met a colleague who was new like me and we discovered the city together. We became homemates soon after we realized that we had so many common points. For one thing, both of us were blinded with the desserts posing in the pastry shops on our way home. Isn’t that enough? We tried almost all kinds by tasting one each day and this one in the picture became our favorite. Especially after dinner, one of us would go buy it while the other would brew black tea. It was the best time of the day for us if we had a movie accompanying our sekerpare and tea pleasure.

It is called sekerpare (sugar bit) in Turkish. As its name implies, it will be the best solution for you if you have difficulty to satisfy your sweet tooth. I decided to try to make it at home after marrying a man who loves sweet foods as mush as I do. Guess what? It is as tasty as the ones we used to buy.

Ingredients
All ingredients must be at room temperature. These ingredients make 50 pieces of sekerpare.

For its dough:
-    2 cups flour
-    ½ cup semolina
-    ½ cups sugar
-    1 egg
-    125g butter
-    1 dessert spoon baking powder
-    Hazelnut
For its syrup
-    2 cups sugar
-    2 ½  cups water
-    1 tbsp lemon juice

As we must let the syrup get cold before pouring it on sekerpare cookies, start with making the syrup first.
Pour water and sugar in a pot. Heat them until it boils. Let it boil about 15 minutes until it reaches the right consistency. Add lemon juice and take it from the heat. Put it aside and start preparing the cookies.

Combine butter, flour, semolina, sugar, an egg and baking powder and knead them well.
Preheat the oven at 180C.

Pick walnut sized pieces and roll them. Put them in an oiled tray leaving enough space between each as they will rise when cooked.

Place hazelnuts on their top pressing gently. Cook them in oven for 25 minutes until golden.

Pour the syrup when the cookies are still hot. You can pour it with a ladle on each piece. Wait until the cookies absorb the water. You can serve it with black tea.

Note: I make 50 piece from these ingredients, but pour the syrup on 25 of them as I put the other half in refrigerator to make it another time. When I have any unexpected guests, I just prepare the syrup and pour it hot on the cold cookies to serve them tasty sekerpare. Don’t forget the rule for pouring syrup on cookies for skerpare. If the cookies are hot, the syrup must be cold and vice versa.

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Kemalpasha Dessert

Kemalpaşa Tatlısı

I love every kind of dessert, and I can eat anything sweet at any time. Fortunately our cuisine has such a great variety of desserts that I make a different one each time we crave for sweet. We can classify Turkish desserts in two categories according to their main ingredients. One of them is dairy desserts, the other is sorbet desserts. Today I made one from the second category. I learnt its recipe from one of my friend who is from Bursa, a beautiful green city of Turkey. It is very important to learn it from a person from Bursa as this dessert is a special dessert of the city, so I must admit that I’m a lucky person to have that friend.

Kemal Pasha dessert is peculiar to a town of Bursa called Mustafakemalpasha. As you can understand from this name, the dessert takes its name originally from the name of this town. And the town takes its name from our leader and the founder of Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. As he was a great general, he is called Mustafa Kemal Pasha. The people of this town gave its name as Mustafakemalpasa in 1922. For more information about this town, you can visit here.

This dessert is a kind of cheese dessert and as this cheese is originally produced in that town, kemalpasha dessert first came out there. It has been produced in the town since 1960 and it is a great source of income for the people of the town. There are more than 10 companies in the town producing and selling this dessert. This dessert has two steps; cooking in oven and boiling in sherbet. These companies cook the cookies of the dessert in oven two times,  package them and then send them to markets. These packaged ones are ready to be boiled in sherbet and you can find several brands of kemalpasa in markets. This dessert has such a significant role in the life of the town that there is even a kemalpasha dessert festival on September 14.

The secret of this dessert is the unsalted cheese it contains. This cheese is produced from the milk of cows which are raised in the town of Mustafakemalpasha. However, as I don’t have the chance of buying this special cheese, I use regular unsalted cheese.

Ingredients

For its sherbet:
-    2 cups water
-    1 ½ cup sugar
-    1 tbsp lemon juice

For its dough:
-    1 1/2 cups flour
-    1 tsp baking soda
-    2 eggs
-    5 tbsp butter
-    150g unsalted cheese or sweet curd
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First, you should prepare its sherbet. Boil water and sugar in a pot about 10 minutes. Once it boils, add lemon juice.  Boil it one more minute and take it from fire.

Preheat the oven to 180C (400F).

Sieve the flour in a tray. Break eggs in the middle of the flour. Mix it with your hands. Then add baking soda, butter and crumbled unsalted cheese. Knead all of them well. It should be soft enough, but shouldn’t be sticky. Lay greased cooking paper on a tray. Roll about 20 pieces from the dough as big as a walnut. Put them in the tray and cook then for about 20 minutes until golden.

After they are cooked, take them out from the oven. Let them cool for about 20 minutes. Then, heat the sherbet again and when it boils, put these dessert cookies into the boiling sherbet and boil them until they get soft. This takes about 10 or 15 minutes. Then take them with the help of a collander.

Serve it cold. If you like, you can serve it with ice cream or cream. I love it plain. For the decoration, after taking it with a collander, I added 1 tbsp more lemon juice to its sherbet and it became crystallized. I took one spoon from this sherbet and dropped it on the desserts. It doesn’t have such a decoration in its original form, it’s just something I made up.

If you want, you can keep this dessert cookies for a long time after you cook it in oven. And you can boil them in sherbet whenever you want.

Cologne in Turkish Culture

Cologne has a big role in our culture. It has various kinds, but the most popular one is lemon cologne. People use it for many reasons and at many places. One of the places where cologne is used is inter city buses. The bus staff drop lemon cologne in the hands of their passengers one by one. You open your hand, he drops some cologne into your hand, you rub your hands together and take to your nose to feel that refreshing scent. This great product not only cleans the atmosphere of the bus but it also helps you feel relieved during your travel. The staff repeat this a few times until the bus arrives its destination. (image source is here.)

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Summer Dream

Yaz Rüyası (Meyveli Kup)

I have a very special reason for making this fresh dessert. Guess what? One of my close friends got engaged! Their engagement celebration was last weekend, but as it was held in a different city far away from here, I couldn’t join it. I thought that I could  invite her and congratulate her with this “Summer Dream”. I would also invite her fiance, but he doesn’t live here, so my only guest was my friend.

I know she adores dairy desserts, especially Turkish pudding with rice. But this time I made something different because I wanted to use some summer fruits in my dessert. I bought the freshest fruits from this week’s open market: peach and kiwi. I used them raw so that we could feel their real taste and not to kill their freshness.

The original name of this dessert is coupe with fruit, but my friend wanted to call it “summer dream”. I loved this name more, so I used it as the title of this post. I’m sure she was influenced by the fruits I used, but I believe that she was more inspired by her dreams about next two months. Their wedding is going to be in August, so she is very busy with planning the ceremony and thinking about her future life.

As I said I couldn’t join her engagement celebration, but she shared her happiness with me by bringing a few chocolate. During an engagement celebration in Turkish culture, chocolate or Turkish delight is served to guests. Future bride and groom keep some of them for their friends who can not join the celebration. They give these to their friends when they first meet them. They can even carry these in their bags to share with friends as soon as possible. There is another thing the future brides carry in their bags: a piece of red ribbon, again to share with friends. You may wonder what this red ribbon is. In engagement celebrations, the rings are tied to each other with a red ribbon. Generally a respected person put these rings on the bride’s and groom’s fingers and then cut the ribbon from the middle so that equal pieces of ribbon fall to their share. The bride to be keeps her part for a very good purpose. She cuts this part of red ribbon into small pieces and share them with her friends, the girl ones who are single. It is believed that they will find their soulmate with the help of this small piece of red ribbon. It is also believed that if the piece is short, they will meet him in a short time, if it’s long, it will take a long time for her to meet him. My friend was also carying pieces of red ribbon to give her friends, of course not for me as I’m already married.

So we celebrated her happiness together with this dessert followed by Turkish coffee. She told a lot of things about the celebration; how they danced, how people enjoyed themselves, and how she felt happy being together with  both her beloved and her parent. I wish her a happy life with her future husband.

Ingredients (servings: 5)
-    1lt milk
-    1 cup sugar
-    1 cup of water
-    6tbsp wheat starch
-    6tbsp rice flour
-    1tbsp vanilla
-    1 kiwi
-    1 peach

Chop the fruits as you wish.

Pour the milk inot a pot and mix it with sugar. Put the pot on medium heat. Meanwhile, in a small bowl, dissolve starch and rice flour in a cup of water. Add this little by little into the heating milk. While pouring it with one hand, stir it the milk continually with the other hand. Keep stirring it until it reaches the consistency of pudding. Add vanilla just before taking the pot from the heat.

Pour it evenly into small cups until half. Do not fill the cups completely. Put little chopped kiwi or peach on it. Then pour the rest. You will have fruits between two layers in this way. And you can decorate your dessert with the rest of the chopped fruits. Let them cool in the fridge at leat 3 hours.

Some time ago, Vanessa at http://mommygourmet.blogspot.com/ declared that she would hold a contest. The rule of the contest is to have a meal with a friend and write about this alongside the recipe. I’d like to send this post to her as we really enjoyed the evening with my friend.

Smart Peach

The beautiful peach decided to take a shower before someone ate her. The uncle farmer applied insecticide to her since it was a bloom. She washed and cleaned her body very well to get rid of all pesticides on her body. She knew that people would make compotes, jams of it or use it in various desserts or cocktails, and she didn’t want to be used without being perfectly cleaned. (drawing by mom)

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Sobiyet

We had our dinner with two friends this evening. It was a long time since we had met last, so we decided to invite them for dinner. As we love eating together, they accepted it immediately. We had grilled gilthead seabream in oven with season salad in our menu.

Our dessert was from our guests. It’s a common tradition in Turkey, if you are invited for  dinner, you should take a kind of dessert as a contribution for dinner. And our kind friends brought this scrumptious sobiyet for our dinner.

Sobiyet (rolled baklava with pistachio and cream) is one of the most popular traditional Turkish desserts. The most popular one is baklava. Sobiyet is very similar to baklava, the only difference is that it has cream inside it. The best baklava and its versions are made by Güllüoğlu and as far as I know, they also have an agency in the U.S. However, they don’t have one in Eskisehir, that’s why our friends bought it from the best of Eskisehir, Hacıoğlu.

Dessert before engagement

Desserts with sherbet have a different role in Turkish culture. Couples have a small ceremony with just their closest family members before their engagement. And a kind of sherbet dessert such as sobiyet, baklava, kadayif is served to the guests at the ceremony. This is a kind of wish for that couple to go on a sweet relationship and to end up with marriage.

If you want to try it at home, here is the recipe.

Ingredients (servings:20)
•    1kg flour
•    500g wheat starch
•    4 eggs
•    5tsp salt
•    1 ½ cup water
•    1 cup pistachio
•    800g butter

For its sherbet:
•    8 cups sugar
•    12 cups water

For its cream:
•    ½ lt milk
•    4tbsp semolina

Put flour, salt, eggs, and 1 ½ cup water in a large bowl, knead them well. Divide the dough into pieces in size of walnuts. Then roll out these pieces with a rolling pin in size of a small plate. Wait them 15 minutes. Then put 8 of them on one another by sprinkling starch between each, they should overlap. And roll all of these out at the same time. Thay should be thin phyllo sheets.

Cut each phyllo sheet into small suares of 10cm.

Preheat the oven to 180C.

Cook the semolina and milk together in a pot by mixin it continually until it gets thicker than pudding.

Put pounded pistachio and a spoonful semolina mixture on each squares. Fold the edges of the square in shape of an envelope. Do the same for all of the squares and place them in a tray.

Melt the butter and pour it in the tray. And cook the in oven for half an hour.

Meanwhile, you can prepare its sherbet. Boil 12 cups water and 8 cups sugar in a pot. When the sugar melts totally, take it from heat and let it cool. When you take the sobiyet from oven, pour this sherbet on them. Don’t forget, sherbet should be cold, sobiyets should be hot. Then let it cool and serve it cold.

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