Ma'amool My Way - Week 5 GBBO - Spice Week

Whilst Ma'mool are supposed to be little bite-sized date pastries, mine have ended up somewhat larger! I will explain why I ended up having to make my ma'mool my way! 

I love using spices in my baking. Must be to do with my middle-eastern roots. I don't like particularly 'spicy' food but I love the fragrant 'spices' which aren't the hot type.

My lovely aunt had sent me these rather interesting teabags from Iran. They are saffron, rose and cardamom tea bags. Three of my MOST favourite spices. But as a tea the saffron just tasted all wrong and I didn't get on well with them at all. But I knew that one day they would come in handy for baking so I put them in my baking drawer and waited...until GBBO SPICE WEEK!!! YAY!!!

Having never made Ma'mool (or even heard of it) before, I wasn't quite sure where to start until an email pinged into my inbox from Bloomsbury Cooks with a recipe from Yasmin Khan's Zaitoun recipe book for...you guessed it...Ma'mool. I can't find the recipe anywhere online to link to but as I adapted it a fair bit, I'm going to write up my version here. Basically I halved the recipe and switched up some of the ingredients like using ghee in place of butter and coconut sugar in place of caster sugar and so on. I have Yasmin Khan's The Saffron Tales recipe book but don't yet have Zaitoun so I was glad to have received the email from bloomsbury with the fab Ma'amool recipe. 

Ingredients for the dough:

250g semolina

40g plain flour

90g ghee

35g coconut sugar

pinch salt

2-3 tbsp hazelnut milk

1 tbsp rosewater

Ingredients for the filling:

150g dates

1 saffron, rose, cardamom teabag (contents removed from teabag and crushed to a powder)

A little water or rose water

Obviously those teabags are not so easy to get hold of but saffron, rose petals and cardamom are quite widely available these days so you can just use a little of each of those spices instead of needing the teabags. 

Method: 

In a food processor blitz together all of the dry dough ingredients together with the ghee to form 'breadcrumb' like texture.

Next add in the milk and rose water until it forms a dough. 

I found the dough to be really crumbly. It needs chilling for an hour before using but as you can see from the picture below, it was STILL really crumbly even after chilling.

To make the filling, I blitzed together the dates, spices and the water/rosewater in a food processor until it made a smoothish paste. This also needs chilling for about 30 minutes. 

As the dough was so crumbly, I couldn't manage to make the filled balls of ma'amool so instead I made bigger ones by pressing the dough into moulds, filled with the filling and then pressed more dough on top. I managed to prick some patterns into some of them too.

I baked them at 180C for 20 minutes. They could probably have done with more filling inside as I had some filling left over and as it is a dry tasting dough, a deeper filling would help bring added moisture to the party. 

Whilst I'd never eaten Ma'amool before, I have had similar tasting treats like Iranian naan berenji (rice flour biscuits) and noon nochodchi (chickpea flour biscuits) - both with a dry tasting dough and aromatically flavoured. So I can see how these Ma'amool would work really well with iranian style tea. Iranians tend to drink loose leaf tea with no added milk. Sometimes it is delicately flavoured with cardamom pods or rose-petals too. I made a pot of herbal tea with loose leaf camomile, lavender and rose petals to have with my Ma'amool. I found that my Viners eminence gold teaspoons from Maha home worked perfectly with my little Iranian tea cups too.

Linking up with Mummy Mishaps and Casa Costello for #GBBObloggers2018 and #GBBOBakeoftheweek: