Moroccan Fried Honey Cakes

It is a known fact that people of Balkans love Middle Eastern food. It came here with the Ottomans, merged with the local cuisines and influenced their further development. And it most influenced Bosnian cuisine. For those of you who are interested here are two Bosnian food blogs with amazing recipes that I read: Sehara s receptima and Cool Sofra.

Similar thing happened with Moroccan cuisine, but apart from the Middle Eastern, it was also infused with Berber, Spanish, Corsican, Portuguese, Moorish, Mediterranean, and African cuisines. I never knew how much I liked it until I got this cookbook from my dear friend Medena from Café Chocolada. Medena, thank you so much!

Fried honey cakes
recipe adapted from Cooking Moroccan by Tess Mallos

Soaking syrup:

3 Tbsp fresh orange juice
1 1/4 cup sugar
1/3 cup honey
4 tsp grated orange zest
1 1/4 cups cold water

Put water, orange juice and sugar in a pan and bring to boil. Add orange zest and bring to boil again. Reduce the heat and simmer for 5 minutes. Remove from heat and strain the syrup to remove the zest. Add honey and simmer for another 5 minutes. Keep warm.

Cakes:

3 eggs
1/4 cup fresh orange juice
1/4 cup oil
4 tsp grated orange zest
1/4 cup powdered sugar
2 1/3 (+ 1/3 extra) cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
oil for deep-frying

*For the whole recipe you will need juice of about 2 oranges and zest of about 3 oranges.

Mix together eggs, orange juice and oil in a large bowl. Add orange zest and sugar and whisk some more. Sift in the flour and baking powder and mix everything with a wooden spoon. Cover and let rest for an hour.

Sprinkle the extra flour onto the dough and transfer to a lightly floured surface. Knead until dough stops sticking to your hands. Add more flour if necessary. Flatten the dough into thickness of 1 cm and cut out round cakes with a 5 cm diameter.

Heat oil in a large deep-sided frying pan until a cube of bread dropped into oil browns in 20 seconds. Fry 3 or 4 cakes at a time on both sides until they’re brownish. (Original recipe says 1 minute on each side, but mine were done after 10 seconds on each side.) Remove with tongs and let dry on a paper towel.

Soak each cake in a warm syrup and pour the rest of the syrup on top of all of them. If you manage to keep yourself away from them for a whole day, they will be fabulous tomorrow, just like Tulumbe, after they absorb the syrup.

Note: This is my entry for the ajme, koliko nas je!, a food bloggers game created by Monsoon and hosted this month by Vali from Vali voli torte.

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