#Chocollaboration Ep14: Dubai-style Chocolate with Layla's Kitchen
When we decided to jump on the delicious bandwagon of making Dubai-style chocolate bars, I knew that as much as I could learn from online videos, I wouldn't be bringing very much authentic experience to the table. Thankfully, over the past couple of years, I have got to know Yasmin Sayed Ahmed, owner of Layla's Kitchen. Originally from Alexandria, Egypt, Yasmin has been bringing her Middle Eastern-inspired cookery to Newcastle in recent years. It has been a real privilege to welcome her into The Chocolate Factory for our latest #chocollaboration workshop.
Memories and recipes...
The evening started off with our guest interview, hearing a little about Yasmin's early food memories of Rice Pudding with raisins and rose water, and her favourite Egyptian dish Koshari (which I would really like to try!). We also heard about her exciting plans to open a cafe at Jesmond United Reformed Church in October, and her warm welcome and wonderful cuisine will be well worth the visit.
Illustrations by Hannah Graham, produced during the evening.
But then the cookery began; Yasmin demonstrated the process of baking the fine strands of kunafa pastry, then gently crushing it up into smaller strands, and toasting it in melted butter until it was golden. She then showed us two different Dubai-style filling recipes. The first was a coconut filling, which involved blending the desiccated coconut to release some of the oils, before adding the kunafa along with some unrefined icing sugar, sugar syrup, and vanilla bean paste. The second was the pistachio version - blitzing salted, roasted pistachios to release the oils and form a paste, and again adding the kunafa and syrup. We all got to taste the mixes at this stage, and they tasted so wonderfully fresh and buttery. With these at the ready, we then moved on to the chocolate work.
The Magic Chocolate Wheel!
Jane Williams in illustrative form.
I demonstrated how to flick the melted green cocoa butter into the moulds to decorate them. When everybody had done this, they all queued up at the 'Magic Chocolate Wheel' to coat the moulds with a choice of milk or dark chocolate, and then added Yasmin's fillings to them. We then piped more chocolate over the top to seal them.
Whilst the chocolate bars were in the fridges (we were battling the heat, and sweltering in a mini heat wave!), we made stuffed Medjool dates. Following Yasmin's example, we de-stoned the dates, filled them with our kunafa fillings, and then coated them in chocolate.
Illustrations by Hannah Graham, produced during the evening.
The evening felt like a real celebration of Yasmin's culinary heritage, and gave us all an authentic window into making her take on Dubai-style Chocolate. As an added highlight to the evening, one of our guests was the immensely talented illustrator Hannah Graham. As well as a love of chocolate, she experiences the world in a beautifully engaging way, and has the gift of being able to capture special moments with her pen and water colours in real time. The illustrations she made for our chocolate workshop beautifully told the story of the evening, and it was an honour to have her there.
We look forward to welcoming you to our next chocolate workshop. We will be having a break for the summer, but will be back up and running in September with a #chocollaboration with The Brownie Bar. Hope to see you there!
Future events and ticket availability can be seen here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/
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