Middle Eastern Easter Cakes- Ma'amoul

Our family has Middle Eastern roots and we all love the food- gatherings usually involve massive feasts of houmous, baba ganoush, dolmades and much much more. Every Easter with our Easter breakfast we have ma'moul and date rings. I have never made them by myself and this year seeing as we were going to my boyfriend's parents for Easter dinner I decided to give them a go to bring them along as a gift. I borrowed special ma'amoul molds from my Auntie but I imagine you could do a similar thing just using your hands although the pattern obviously wouldn't be there. I found this recipe on about.com and adapted it to make it vegan and also increased the quantities of the filling because I prefer them fuller.

INGREDIENTS:

• 2 cups plain flour
• 1 cup semolina
• 225g vegan margarine
• 1/2 tsp allspice
• 2 tbs orange blossom water
• around 1/2 cup of pistachios
• 5 tbs sugar
• 2 tbs soya/alternative milk
• icing sugar to dust

METHOD:

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celcius and line or grease a baking tray.

Combine the flour and semolina and beat together with the margarine. Add the milk, 1 tablespoon of orange blossom water and the all spice and mix well.

Whiz up the pistachios and sugar in the food processor to chop the nuts (or chop by hand/buy chopped and just mix together). Then stir in the remaining orange blossom water.

Take small chunks of the dough and flatten with your hands. Either press into the mold with extra dough around the outside and a hollow in the middle or do this with your hand. Put a spoonful of the pistachio mixture in and cover over the top with the extra dough, pressing to make sure it is sealed. If using a mold then have a wooden chopping board or similar so you can bang down the mold to release the cake.

Once these are all done and on the baking tray, bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes. Once out and cooling dust them with icing sugar.

They can keep for quite a while so you can keep them in a sealed container for a few weeks.