Mousse au miel with rose water and a blackberry sauce

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When I am searching for ideas for my blog, salty dishes are most often coming to my mind. This is a pity, as I particularly love sweets and I love baking! Consequently I have been thinking about a fancy dessert for a while until I got inspired: Some weeks ago, just when small social gatherings were possible again, I was invited to a birthday party. We went to a Libanese restaurant and tasted all of the appetizers like Falafel and Baba Ganoush. I left the table for some minutes and when I returned, somebody had ordered dessert for everybody. At first glance the dessert looked like some scoops of ice cream with a fruity decoration. But it really was not ice cream, and we immediately started a discussion about what ingredients could be in there: Some milk crème thickened with eggyolk? Something like panna cotta maybe? There was rose water in it for sure! We asked the waiter, and he told us that the dessert was called Ashtar and is made from milk and cheese.

The moment I returned home, I knew that I had to find a recipe! Ashta is neither made with eggyolk as I had first thought nor with creme cheese – and it was not creme cheese, as the waiter told us. Instead one cooks milk with vinegar to separate whey and cheese. I knew that technique mostly from making the Indian Paneer cheese.So why not trying it out for creating a deliciouslate summer Bronze Age dessert, sweetened with honey, a blackberry sauce and of course with rose water!

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Ingredients:

• 1l milk
• 1tbsp honey
• 125g blackberrys
• 4 tsp rose water
• 4 tbsp flour
• 40ml cider vinegar
• sesame
• pistachios

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Preparation:

Cook 750ml milk in a pot and add the vinegar while stirring until the whey separates from the cheese. Pour the cooked milk into a sieve and let the cheese drain. Cook the remaining 250ml milk and stir in the flour until the milk thinckens like a pudding. To get rid of clumps, press the pudding through a sieve. Now mix the cheese and the pudding with honey and rose water and let the mousse cool down.

Cook the blackberrys and squash them a little so that a sauce-like consistency develops. Finally serve the mousse with the blackberry sauce, some sesame and minced pistachios.

I was surprised, how much the mousse tasted like honey – I thought it would taste a lot more of roses than honey. In the end, it came out quite different than I had thought in the beginning – but I found out a really nice dessert for summertimes!

Bon appétit!

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