Turkish Recipes: S?zme Yo?urt Tatl?s? (Yoghurt Cake) | Turkey's For ...

When it comes to Turkish cuisine, what do the people of Turkey not do with yoghurt? The answer is...not a lot. It's enjoyed on its own; it's made into the wonderfully summery Turkish drink, ayran; it's used as an ingredient in kebab dishes such as ?skender Kebab; yoghurt is the main ingredient in the soup, yayla ?orbas??and it's the base for many Turkish meze dishes such as cac?k and geren.

And Turkish yoghurt is also used as an ingredient in desserts. For our Turkish Food & Recipes Feature Week, we made a first course of Sebzeli Uskumru ?orbas? (Vegetable & Mackerel Soup). That was followed by a main course of the Ottoman classic, H?nkar Be?endi, and now it's time for a dessert. How apt that we should finish off our meal using a Turkish staple ingredient: s?zme yoghurt?(thick, natural yoghurt).

(As with our previous two recipes, this recipe is taken from the Turkish cookery book, The Sultan's Kitchen. The recipe is from page 144 and is republished with the permission of publishers, Tuttle Publishing. All photos are our own and the recipe is written in our own words.)

A Turkish Recipe For S?zme Yo?urt Tatl?s? (Yoghurt Cake)
Well, we have done many Turkish recipes on this blog since we started it - but this is the first time you have seen a dessert. Make the most of it as there won't be too many more - at least not for a while. We purposefully chose a dessert that didn't look too difficult, wouldn't require too much careful measuring (we don't have the equipment) and that we might be able to eat at the end of it. The cake worked and we've eaten it. A result!
Neither of us are dessert experts, so we stuck to this recipe as closely as we could. Here's how we went on.

• First of all, preheat your oven to 180 degrees celsius (350 farenheit).
• Take 8 eggs at room temperature and separate the yolks from the egg whites. Let the yolks fall into a large mixing bowl and keep the whites to one side for now.
• Into the egg yolks, finely grate the zest from a lemon (around 2 teaspoons) and add half a cup of sugar (your cup should be roughly the size of a British teacup).
• Beat the egg yolks, lemon zest and sugar together until you get a foam on top (we used a hand whisk and this took a minute or two).

Now it's time to add the rest of the cake ingredients:

• Into your egg mixture, sift in three quarters of a cup of all-purpose flour, 3 teaspoons of baking powder and 1 cup of fine-grain semolina.
• Gently fold these into the mixture. (Memories of baking with my nana when I was a child. Folding was a slow figure of 8 until all the flour was mixed in.) See top left image in the photo above.
• Now add 2 cups of room temperature s?zme yoghurt (top right image) and again, fold this in gently until it's completely mixed in (bottom left image).
• Take your egg whites and beat them until they form white peaks and fold these into the mixture also.
• Use butter to lightly grease a baking tray. The recipe suggests a 10x15x2 inch baking pan. We used a square pyrex lasagne tray roughly 12x12 inch (about 30x30 cms).?
• Sift a light sprinkling of flour over the butter and now add your mixture to your baking pan.
• Place in the centre of your preheated oven and bake for 45 minutes or until it's a light, golden brown on top.
• Meanwhile, make a syrup. 2 and a half cups of water, 3 cups of sugar and 3 tablespoons of lemon juice. Stir and bring to the boil for 3 minutes and then simmer for 15 minutes. Remove from the heat.

The proof is in the pudding, as they say...

• As soon as your cake is golden on top, remove from the oven.
• Slice it into 12 squares and hopefully your cake will not be stuck to your baking pan. We were expecting disaster at this point but as you can see, all was well.
• Now pour your syrup over the cake slices and allow them to cool gradually at room temperature. The syrup will soak through your cake.

A serving of s?zme yo?urt tatl?s?

And when it's ready to eat, the recipe suggests sprinkling crushed pistachios on top of your cake. We forgot to buy some, so we served ours with pistachio-flavoured ice cream instead - and very good it was, too.

Making S?zme Yo?urt Tatl?s? - Afternotes:

• S?zme yo?urt tatl?s? is a quick and easy cake to make if you have lots of people to feed.
• We were using a hand whisk and couldn't get our egg whites to form peaks. However, our cake is still light and airy. An electric whisk and a drop of lemon or vinegar in the egg whites should work.
• Our oven is very small so the cake was golden on top, and cooked through, within 35 minutes.?
• We're not big fans of sweet foods so we halved the amount of syrup in the recipe above.?
• If you're unable to get s?zme yo?urt where you live, natural Greek yoghurt will make a decent substitute.

Afiyet Olsun!

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Source: http://www.turkeysforlife.com/2012/09/turkish-recipes-suzme-yogurt-tatls.html

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