When one has an ingredient so delicious, time consuming to have prepared, and so unique and rare with it's appearance in your refrigerator, it would be an horrific and unforgivable outcome to not give it the few moments of your mental process needed to put it to use in an interesting and exciting, yet comforting fashion. So when I found myself with an overwhelming excess of Rose Water and Vanilla Flavoured Labna after making it for a dessert one day(such a reckless, yet secretly fiendish slip up in my usually thoughtful and carefully planned preparation process), I couldn't resist searching for just the right way to convert it into something that would in no way remind my guests that they had in fact consumed this particular element 2 days in a row.
A year or so before I came across a recipe for a delicious yogurt cake that had a wonderfully light and fluffy texture while still being creamily silken and slightly chewy with the finest of crusts, I put things into perspective and thought to myself, 'if yogurt makes it come up with this kind of texture, surely labna MUST give a more intensified experience, not to mention the amplified flavour of the concentrated yogurt being glorified even further with the rich creaminess from the vanilla bean with the ethereal flavour sensation of roses dancing ever so delicately across your tongue and floating it's way into the sensory regions of your nostrils'. So I set to it.
At first I made a small trial batch with minimal haste, to work out cooking times, temperatures, and more importantly, how to serve it. When the first batch was abducted from the oven the aromas were too much for me to bare. I delved into them with a reckless abandon and complete disregard for the future of my fingerprints as I urged(read - tore) them from their dinky baking mat and greedily stuffed them into my mouth, showing a similar disregard for my mouth as I showed for the rapidly fading crop circles that were once my fingerprints. Outcome? OM NOM NOM NOM! (read - 'success!)
The texture was like a caky, creamy and ever so slightly caramelised marshmallow, with a delicate perfume of rose dancing off the back of my palate upwards as though being sprung up there off the gentle tang of the yogurt cheese as it rested momentarily on my tongue before being pushed out of the way by the creaminess of the vanilla. All I needed now was some finishing, some final flourishes to take it from being just a plain little cake('plain' being used very loosely mind you..) into something that could hold the attention of a table full of people long enough to get their minds as lubricated as their palate so the beauty encapsulated in these little bites could be properly taken into consideration and hopefully appreciated to a level that might come close to my own feelings of affection towards them. Back to the fridge…
Raspberry jus sat there right at eye level, staring me down the moment the little man in the fridge turned on the light, signalling the little light in my mind to flicker on like a fluorescent, tick, tick, tick tick tick PING! Raspberry seemed the perfect element to introduce into this family of flavours, it just needed to find it's place in the texture party. Fondant icing was the most obvious start due to the appearance of the cakes, so the jus became fondant, but not all of it…the rest of it was reserved while I gently quartered fresh raspberries and right at the last minute the quarters were dressed in their own jus. Complexity into Deceptively Simple... goodness from leftovers, sometimes it's better than the original usages.
