My Mother-in-law’s Mahlep Biscuits

Do you keep a cookie jar? I try not to, but in winter it is hard to resist the temptation and to overlook the practical side. On a cold day the need of a comforting snack is more pressing and the cost obtaining one is higher (putting on the coat alone is an undertaking). That’s why I feel right to go back to the long-standing tradition of baking ahead and keeping the bake treats handy in a cookie jar or even a sack if we speak of a large household like the joint family house where my mother-in-law was born.

The whole last year anne was making these .. let’s call them biscuits. They are bite-size diamonds with umber-colored shining tops generously brushed with egg yolks before baking. Each diamond is packed with the taste of brioche, or challah, or Greek Eastern bread called paskalya in Turkey. No wonder: this biscuit dough is rich with all the milk, butter, eggs, sugar added. Plus they are flavored with mahlep. What more to wish? My visiting mom was so intrigued by them that she asked anne in great detail about the making, and anne presented her with a bag of mahlep as my parents were leaving for Russia. But like with all of us anne’s baking passions come and go, and now she is obsessed with mastering Westen-style cakes. That makes me very nostalgic about her biscuits.

She calls them “Anamur çöreği“: çörek is a pastry, anything you made of dough that is not a cake, or a cookie, or a bread. A Turk would say about this one “ne tatlı, ne tuzlu” meaning that it does not clearly belong to the category of the sweet pastries but can’t be called savory either. My husband claims he does not remember any pastries like that, and to be honest I could not find anything under the name “Anamur çöregi” online besides my own blog post where I mention it (bugger!). But what I found is a lot of nostalgic references of women from the Turkish South-East who remember their grandmothers making pastries similar to this one and flavored with mahlep. So for the lack of other references for me this çörek will always be “my mother-in-law’s biscuits”.

In many countries you’d find such a pastry type that’s meant to be stored forever, or at least for a long time. Often such pastry is prepared for festive occasions and shared aplenty with the family and neighbors. It stays fresh long time after the festivities are over, and can be pulled out anytime to offer to the (unexpected) guests. Not sure how festive Italian biscotti are even though there are certain pointers to their use during the religious celebration, but Russian pryaniki or Lebanese mahmul cookies are terrific examples. Russian pryaniki is a variety of gingerbread, rich on honey and exotic spices, traditionally made in huge wooden molds. Molds also come handy to prepare mahmul, cookies made of dense dough stuffed with nuts or dates and used for celebrations by many religious communities in the Middle East.

Many Turkish regional cuisines have such festive pastries that - very conveniently - keep very well. Some of them would be your typical rusks and made just like biscotti when you first bake your pastry, then slice it and dry it in the oven at a lower temperature: dried cake slices of Selaniki gevreği (Thessaloniki rusks) or diamond-shaped yeasted Beypazarı kurusu are just your double-baked biscotti.

But I find the other variety of these keeping-so-well pastries more fascinating. They are not dried most of the time, just baked longer you’d need to. Especially Turkish South and South-East seems to be abundant with examples. In Urfa you find külünçe biscuits with nigella seeds and fennel seeds. Not very far apart is the Mardin hayat çöregi prepared for both weddings and funerals and flavored with allspice, cinnamon, clove and mahlep. Gaziantep kahke, savory cookies with dry crumb and often sprinkled with sesame seeds resembling what’s known as kandil simiti throughout Turkey. And finally, molded olive oil cookies kerebiç in Antakiya. My mother-in-law’s biscuits surely belong to this range.

I remember her making these biscuits and telling me that she remembers a similar Russian pastry from her sport camps in the Soviet Unions. I thought she suggested the similarity in taste, and I could not come up with any ideas. The biscuits are a miniature version of the brioche-like bread sold at the state-run shops during my Soviet childhood indeed, but she said, no, it was not the bread. Eventually it occurred to me that she means the mentioned above pryaniki, neither sweet nor savory and keeping so well. I thought I fell in love with anne’s biscuits for their exoticism, but now I see that I fell for the comfort of a well-known, if not somewhat modified, food.

My Mother-in-Law’s Mahlep Biscuits / Anamur Çöreği

It’s pretty hard to classify these pastries: while they are made of a rich bread dough, they are shaped into small biscuits and baked until they almost turn into rusks. They are great to dunk in your coffee or tea, and if you find them too hard you may place them in a air-tight plastic container to softening them a bit.

Makes 20-24 small biscuits

Ingredients

2.5 tbsp/ 35 g unsalted butter, softened
3 tbsp / 45 gram sugar
1/3 cup + 1 tbsp / 100 gram milk, at room temperature
1/2 medium egg
3 gram fresh yeast (or replace with 1 gram dry yeast)
1 1/2 cup / 210 gram all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp / 1 gram fine sea salt
1/2 tsp / 1.5 gram mahlep

remaining egg, for brushing
sesame seeds, for sprinkling

Directions

Pre-heat the oven to 180C/ 350F.

Beat the butter and sugar in a medium bowl until combined. Whisk in the egg. In a small bowl dissolve the yeast in the the milk. Pour the milk in the rest of the batter and whisk until smooth. Set the whisk aside and add the flour, salt and mahlep. With slow swirling movement mix all the ingredients until well-combined: the dough should feel very soft but not sticking to your hands; you should be able to scrape down the bowl clean with the dough. Leave the dough in the bowl covered with a clean kitchen towel to rest for 10 minutes.

Transfer the dough to the working surface, knead a few times, divide into 2 equal parts and shape each part into a neat smooth ball. Roll on ball of dough into a 30 cm / 12 inch long log and cut the log into the 3 cm / 1 inch diamonds. Repeat with the remaining dough. Arrange the biscuits on a baking tray lined with the parchment paper. Brush with the remaining egg and sprinkle with the sesame seeds. Bake for about 40 minutes, or until the biscuit tops turn deep reddish umber color. Cool down completely and then store in a air-tight container.