If you look up South Sudan’s national dish, you’re led to believe that it’s ful medames, and whilst this may be true, we’d prefer to save that dish for Egypt (which is where it really originates), so we went searching for other options, which is when we found a blog called Taste of South Sudan. It was early December at the time so when we found a recipe for kahk, or sugar-coated cookies, that said it was ideal for Christmas, an easy decision was made. Plus, this was something that Baby Mash might actually eat (and even help with!).
Kahk are similar to shortbread, except they’re made with ghee and yoghurt, and use sesame seeds to give them a distinctive, almost savoury flavour. The recipe suggested adding other flavours like anise, cardamom, fennel and cloves, but we decided to keep them pure (partly so we could see what they were like plain, and partly so that Baby Mash would actually eat them). We halved the recipe below.
Kahk
Ingredients
8 cups plain flour
3 cups ghee, melted
1 cup plain yoghurt
1 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
2 tbsp sesame seeds
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp vanilla extract
Icing sugar to dust (optional)
Method
1. Roast the sesame seeds in the oven for 10 minutes (or toast them in a frying pan) and set aside.
2. Warm the ghee and place in a large mixing bowl.
3. Add the yoghurt and mix with an electric mixer.
4. Add the vanilla (and other flavours if using).
5. In a separate bowl, mix the sugar, flour, sesame seeds, baking powder and salt.
6. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix well.
7. Cover the dough and let it rest for 30 minutes.
8. Roll the dough out to about 5mm and cut into desired shapes.
9. Bake at 180C for 15 minutes, until the bottom starts to brown.
10. Cool on wire racks.
11. When cool, dust with icing sugar if desired.
Makes around 40 (depending on the size of your cutters)
Things the above recipe doesn’t include with regards to making these with a two-year-old:
1. Right at the start of the baking process, the two-year-old will declare that he doesn’t like ghee and therefore isn’t interested in helping to make the dough.
2. He will, however, get involved with the dough cutting with gusto.
3. At the same time, he won’t be particularly interested in either a) rolling out the dough evenly, b) pushing the cutter the whole way through it or c) positioning the cutter so that an intact shape is created.
4. He will find a selection of Christmas cake ornaments and press those into the dough to make holes and other creative decorative features.
All of the above considered, we think we did pretty well making the selection of biscuits we ended up with, somewhat rustic though they may look! Jokes aside, it’s always fun (and carnage) baking with a toddler and getting him involved in the process. He was also VERY keen to get involved in the eating process and we had to prise him away from the biscuit tin on more than one occasion.
We’ve never actually cooked with ghee before (we usually ignore it when it appears in recipes and use butter instead) and that was a bit of an eye opener: it’s much sweeter than butter and it therefore makes perfect sense to use it in sweet biscuits. Not that these biscuits are all that sweet – as mentioned earlier, the sesame seeds gave them more of a savoury quality. It was mostly for that reason (and also because we could see that Baby Mash was going to eat a lot of them) that we decided not to dust them with icing sugar, although that does seem to be the traditional way to make them and we’re sure they’d be just as nice.
We think these biscuits could be added to the repertoire. Whilst all the ghee clearly doesn’t make them a health food, if Baby Mash is going to get obsessed with a snack food we could do worse than one that only has 1 tbsp of sugar in the whole batch, and gets a little bit of nutrition from the sesame seeds. And they’re yummy for grown-ups too!
Good Food on Bad Plates 