Personally it is unbelievable that we've gone this long with our dessert tours; 8 full years, and look at our online presence now! How does your CEO manage to do a full time job, starting her business, AND keep up with the eating ...
I guess eating is the easy part. Creating a dessert on the other hand has been getting tricky - our crazy Heston'esque themes are fun and challenging but we are running out of ideas.... so from haughty Throne to the down-to-earth Middle East with lots of inspiration - pastries, fragrant flavours, nuts, syrups and spices, in different permutation and combinations.
Let's start with a Turkish delight mastic ice cream by
Booza served with Kurukahveci Mehmet Efendi coffee - the oldest Turkish coffee company - wait, does that make a Turkish affogato?! Rose water and coffee probably didn't go as well, but it certainly works with coffee & cardamom booza. This also complemented the chocolate orange spiced alfajor sandwich - the cookies yielded happily to our bites and so the ice cream doesn't splat out on the other side .... Gorgeous biscuits with a subtle but unmistakable hint of spice. Superb (and thanks for the leftovers!)
I'd never heard of ktefa before. For some reason I felt like making something Moroccan - technically African, but with a heavy Arab influence it is still essentially Middle Eastern. Ktefa is made up of layers of warqa pastry, sweet toasted coarse ground almond, and orange blossom water custard, and I'd taken the liberty of using halwa as well to give it more more of a nutty flavour. These flavours certainly married well with each other - and proudly I will add this exotic sweet to my repertoire of desserts.
Small and intimate, all we needed was a dimly lit room with rugs and cushions, a belly dancer... and maybe hookah just to get into the festive mood...
CS
