roll call + turkish pistachio cake

i’ve gotten responses back so far from:

1. anna
2. jaime
3. mariam
4. chad
5. sarah
6. kate
7. bill
8. dan
9. richard

i sent everyone an invitation to register on wordpress and become a contributor to this blog, but mariam alerted me to the fact that she didn’t receive her invite.  if that’s the case with anyone else, please let me know and i’ll fix it.  and if it’s not the case, we should probably get going talking about all things delicious.

re: delicious.  my boyfriend, varun, and i made a cake for torie (our roommate and a fellow detican) last week to celebrate her birthday.  it was a turkish pistachio cake that i found in the cookbook arabesque, which has sections for moroccan, turkish, and lebanese food.  essentially, it was sugar and egg yolks mixed with an enormous amount of ground pistachios and then combined with egg whites beaten until they held stiff peaks.  we sprinkled an additional enormous amount of coarsely ground pistachios on top and baked it for a while.  after letting it cool, i poked holes in the cake and saturated it with orange blossom syrup.  (the recipe called for rosewater, but i prefer orange blossom water.)  i covered it with a thin layer of qishta, a type of cream commonly used in much of the middle east.  the cake came out really, really well — somewhere between baklava (syrup and nuts) and tres leches (total saturation) — although i wouldn’t have been able to make it happen were it not for my sudanese grocery store (18th and wyoming in adams morgan) selling cheap, pre-shelled pistachios down the street.  i think this would be a good cake to make if you’re looking for a dessert without flour or dairy.  i’ll post a picture once i can get one off torie’s camera.