"Hurmašice" - A Dessert From Centuries Ago.

My mother is here on holidays and she is a good cook.

She knows a lot of the traditional cakes from a region of Croatia called Posavina which is now divided up between two countries, Croatia and BiH.

One of these cakes is found in Posavina and all of Bosnia and most of Herzegovina in BiH, it is originally a Turkish dessert and dates back to the Ottoman Empire. This is probably when it was introduced to the peoples of Croatia, as most of the country was occupied by the Ottoman Empire.

The dessert that she made for us today is called Hurmašice pronounced "hermarsheetsay".

Recipe from the Posavina region in Croatia:

Ingredients:
3 coffee mugs of cooking oil (coffee mug of 300ml)
2 coffee mugs of sugar + 500 grams of sugar
2 tablespoons of sour cream
2 egg yolks
1 baking powder
120 grams of margarine
700 grams of flour
1 handfull of wallnuts
200ml (1 glass) of water
1 lemon

Step 1

Mix the 3 cups of oil, sugar, sour cream, egg yolks, baking powder and margarine with a mixer.

Step 2
Add the flour bit by bit until you get a soft dough which does not stick to your fingers.
Note: this should be about 700 grams of flour.

Step 3

Break up your wallnuts into 4 pieces. So from 1 whole wallnut you will have 4 pieces.
Then take pieces of the dough, and press onto the top of a cheese grater, take one piece of wallnut and place on top and gently cover with the dough.

Step 4
Place into an oiled baking tray.
Once the tray is full, bake in a preheated oven at 200 degrees celsius for about 20 minutes until they turn gold in colour.

As this is baking:
Take the water + 500 grams of sugar, cook it, and add slices of a lemon into it as it cooks.
Cook it until you get a nice syrup.

Last step is to pour the syrup on the cakes once the 20 minutes of baking are done and this is what it should look like.

This is a very old recipe, maybe different to the way it is made in other parts of the world, my mother made it the way her mother showed her.

It is again a very different style of dessert, not the usual European tasting type.

I like them.

Hope you try this recipe.

Thank you for reading.