Own the traditional recipe

• 12 August 2026
• Recipes
• By Esma Demirhan

Ask ten people from the eastern Mediterranean how a syrup dessert should be made and you will get ten answers, all of them delivered with complete certainty. The sponge should be drier. The syrup should be hotter. There should be more coconut, or none at all. None of them are wrong, which is the difficult part when you are trying to write one recipe down and repeat it every week.

What we settled on came from a simple test. We made the same sponge five times and changed only the temperature of the syrup as it went on: boiling, hot, warm, room temperature and chilled. Hot syrup on a warm sponge floods it and the whole thing collapses into something closer to pudding. Cold syrup on a cold sponge sits on the surface and never travels. Warm syrup on a fully cooled sponge is the one that soaks evenly all the way through and still holds a clean edge when you cut it.

The second thing we fixed was the weight. Most home recipes tell you to pour syrup over until it stops absorbing, which works if you are making one tray for your own table and have made it fifty times before. In a kitchen that sends the same dessert out every day, it is useless. We weigh the sponge, we weigh the syrup, and the ratio stays the same whether it is one tray or twelve. It is not romantic, but it is the reason the dessert you buy in March tastes like the one you bought in September.

The nuts go on last, and they go on by hand. Walnut and peanut, chopped rather than blitzed, so there is still some texture against the soft sponge. That part we have never seen a reason to change.

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