Basbousa Cake with Chocolate Ganache & Pineapple

-
0 Comments

Basbousa is a cake all the way from Egypt. It has a slightly granular mouthfeel as compared to normal cakes since it is made from fine semolina flour. Once cooled, a simple syrup is poured over it. The cake imbibes the simple syrup to become a moist, soft and spongy cake. So what gave me the opportunity to do this? Gulab jamun! I had a lot of the gulab jamun syrup lying around in the kitchen and I wanted to repurpose it in some way. If you're an Indian, you can probably relate. Initially this was going to be a solo cake but it ended up expanding to a plated dessert. To enunciate on the richness of the cake from the syrup, I went with dark chocolate ganache; specifically dark chocolate since its 70 percent or more cocoa prevents you from gagging from all the sweetness by lingering with some bitter back notes (and I’ll also take some of its heart benefits, please). For some relief to the palette, I decided to plate some sliced pineapple for some toned sweetness and acidity and garnished with some slivered almonds for some crunch.


Egyptian semolina cake

Basbousa cake:

  • 1/2 cup semolina flour
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1/2 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 cup yoghurt, whisked
  • 1/4 cup whole milk
  • 1/4 cup butter, melted
  • 1 egg
Preheat your oven to 180C. Grease a 6 inch round baking pan with butter and dust with all purpose flour. In a large bowl, combine all the dry ingredients and whisk thoroughly. Whisk in the yoghurt and milk, followed by the melted butter until a homogenous cake batter is formed. Add an egg and combine. Pour into the prepared baking pan and bake for about 25 minutes, or unutil a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Cool to room temperature.

Simple syrup:

  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 1/4 cup water
  • A few strands of saffron

Combine the sugar, water and saffron in a pot. Bring to a gentle boil for about 5 minutes. Allow to cook completely. Soak the syrup into the cooled cake using a pastry brush.

Chocolate ganache:

  • 1/4 cup heavy cream
  • 65g dark chocolate

In a saucepan, bring the cream to a slight simmer on a medium heat. Add and melt the chocolate, reducing the heat to a low. Remove from heat once combined.

Plating:

  • Slivered almonds
  • Pineapple slices

Place cubes of the basbousa cake on a plate. Pipe the chocolate ganache and garnish with pineapple slices and slivered almonds.


No comments:

Post a Comment

Tea Traditions
Around the World


POST | KAHWA: KASHMIRI TEA

Let’s talk about tea

Whether it’s a whole ceremony at your home or a reason to argue over who is going to make it on weekend mornings, tea rules: it’s a universal beverage. The big drink.

Whenever I think of afternoon tea, or just tea in general, one of the first things that comes to my mind is a cup of milk tea surrounded by a table loaded with finger sandwiches, biscuits, scones, jam, cream and Victoria sponge cake; British tea. That’s what I think of tea as. But this visual could be different for you. You might think of masala chai from India, matcha tea ceremonies if you’re from Japan, the first time you drank çai on your visit to Turkey, some tea bags or just some soggy tea-drenched toast.

Whatever it is, tea is a huge tradition all over the world, and just like truth, it has different versions: British afternoon tea, Indian milk tea, Burmese laphet and Moroccan mint tea, to name a few.

What are some of your tea traditions?



Food for thought,

by food, for food.


A lot of my friends ask me where I get my ideas from. Many just assume that I’m a culinary genius and I pick ideas from my brain just as someone would go apple-picking. But that’s far from the truth. You do NOT know what other salt has fallen into my failed dishes.

I get all of my ideas from other food: cookbooks, recipes on Instagram and food blogs of chefs and MasterChef contestants (especially Beccy from Canada Season 5, Fred and Nick from US Season 10 and Suu from US Season 11) whom I admired in their seasons. Many of my findings act as a catalyst for new ideas or help me steer existing dishes in the right direction. Sometimes I’d just want to be a normal foodie and try other’s dishes because, well, I’m hungry. In short, food for my new ideas, by other chef’s food for MY food on this blog. Quite the analogy.


Instagram