Recettes

Sonhos de Banana

Sonhos de banana means banana dreams in Portuguese, and they are small fried fritters from São Tomé and Príncipe, the island nation off the coast of Central Africa. Mashed banana is worked into a batter with flour, egg, milk and sugar, dropped into hot oil and dusted with cinnamon sugar while still warm. The Portuguese connection runs through everything about them. São Tomé and Príncipe was a Portuguese colony from the late fifteenth century until 1975, and sonhos are a Portuguese sweet in their own right, a fried dough eaten particularly at Christmas. What the islands did was put banana into them, which is what the archipelago grows, and the result is closer to a beignet than to a doughnut. The same sweet, under the same name, is eaten in Brazil, which shares the Portuguese colonial inheritance from the other side of the Atlantic. That triangle of Portugal, São Tomé and Brazil is visible in a great deal of the islands' food, and sonhos de banana is one of the clearest examples. They are eaten as a dessert or simply as something sweet in the afternoon, and they are at their best within minutes of leaving the pan.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

30 minEasySão Tomé and Príncipe

Recette de Nympha · Africook

Peppermint Crisp Tart

Peppermint crisp tart is a South African fridge tart, which is a category of dessert the country has more or less to itself: no baking, assembled in layers, and set in the refrigerator rather than an oven. This one takes about fifteen minutes to build and then several hours of waiting, which is the hardest part. It is built from four things, three of which are specific products. Whipped cream is folded together with caramelised condensed milk, grated Peppermint Crisp chocolate is stirred through, and the mixture is layered between Tennis biscuits, a coconut biscuit that softens into an almost cake-like layer as it sits. The biscuits are what make it a tart rather than a mousse. That dependence on particular brands makes it awkward to reproduce outside southern Africa, and South Africans abroad tend to have it carried out to them. The usual substitutions are a peppermint Aero bar for the Peppermint Crisp and a plain coconut biscuit for the Tennis. It appears at braais, birthdays and family gatherings, and it belongs firmly to the same national repertoire as malva pudding and koeksisters.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

15 minEasySouth Africa

Recette de Amara · Africook

Waffle Cookies

Sugar cookie dough cooked in a waffle iron instead of an oven. No country is claimed; it is a modern shortcut rather than a traditional sweet. The appeal is genuinely mechanical. A waffle iron applies heat from both sides simultaneously and under pressure, which cooks a cookie in two to three minutes rather than ten to twelve, and produces something with a crisp honeycombed exterior and a soft, cakey inside, a texture no oven-baked cookie has. It also means no preheating an oven for a handful of cookies. The dough has to be a stiff one for it to work. A soft, spreading cookie dough runs out of the sides of the iron; this recipe's ratio of flour to butter gives something firm enough to hold its shape between the plates. Chilling the dough helps if yours seems slack. Greasing the plates matters more than for waffles, because cookie dough is much higher in sugar and sugar sticks and burns readily. Two to three minutes is short and the window is narrow. Sugar caramelises fast under direct contact, and there is no visual warning through a closed iron, so the first one is a test. Africa has no equivalent tradition, though Belgian-style waffles and stroopwafels are the nearest relatives.

30 minEasy

Recette de Debby · Africook

Kahk

Kahk are round Egyptian shortbread-style cookies, buttery and crumbly, buried under a heavy layer of icing sugar, and made for Eid. Their history is unusually well documented for a biscuit. Kahk is believed to date to Ancient Egypt: carvings showing people making it have been found in temple ruins at Memphis and Thebes, and a recipe was recorded in the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza. Few foods anyone still eats have that kind of paper trail. They are made in enormous quantity in the weeks before Eid al-Fitr, and the making is social, families and neighbours gathering to shape trays of them together, which is as much the tradition as the eating. Fillings vary. Plain kahk is common, but so are versions stuffed with agameya, a paste of honey, ghee, flour and nuts; with dates; with pistachio or walnut; or with lokum. The texture is what people judge them on: a proper kahk should collapse in the mouth rather than snap. That comes from ghee and from not overworking the dough. The icing sugar is not a garnish, it is applied generously and is part of the thing.

22 minMediumEgypt

Recette de Blessing · Africook