Baseema - A treat from South Sudan

Do you like trying recipes where there is no photo and you have no idea how the dish will turn out?  With the Internet, you can always browse for a photo of what you are about to make, but it doesn't always yield results.

Baseema is a South Sudanese dessert that I had never heard of before, but I was curious about it after reading the  recipe on p41 of Share: The Cookbook That Celebrates Our Common Humanity. According to the recipe, "baseema" means "delicious" - how could I resist?  I did browse for a photo of Baseema so that I had some idea of what I was making, and the golden, fluffy looking cake that I found encouraged me.

I was very pleased with the Baseema.  There is no photo of it in Share, but with ingredients like yoghurt and coconut, I couldn't go wrong.  The end result was as light and fluffy as these photos suggest, and Baseema tastes wonderful and moist without any frosting or other additions.

To make Baseema, you will need:

5 eggs
140g icing sugar
200ml vegetable oil
500g plain yoghurt
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
300g plain flour
2 tspns baking powder
110g dessicated coconut

350g sugar
1 tbspn lemon juice
225ml cold water

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius, and grease and line a 23cm x 33cm cake tin.

Beat together the eggs and icing sugar until light and frothy, then stir in the oil, yoghurt and vanilla.

In another bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder and coconut.  Fold these dry ingredients into the egg mixture, and pour the resulting batter into the prepared cake tin. 

Bake the baseema for 30-35 minutes or until cooked through.

While the baseema is baking, put the sugar, lemon juice and water into a small saucepan, bring the mixture to the boil, then simmer for 5 minutes to thicken up the syrup.

Pour the syrup over the baseema while it is still warm from the oven, and leave the syrup to soak in for a while before cutting the baseema  into squares to serve.