Turkish Delight Strawberries

I made these with turkish delight from a local Turkish cuisine restaurant, Anatolia’s. Anatolia’s make beautiful tasting turkish delight in the flavours of – rose, mint, lemon, and orange.

This idea came about after a short conversation at work about the classic combination of rose turkish delight and strawberry. At the time the concept seemed rather simple. Just cut a strawberry and poke in the turkish delight. Simple. Hmmmm. Not really.

I wanted to halve the strawberry almost through, then place a thin square of turkish delight into the cut. That was the theory. In practise these turned out very different to what I had in mind. They look pretty enough, and tasted nice. But, the turkish delight was soft – it got stuck to the knife, it got stuck to the chopping board, it got stuck to my fingers, and I ended up moulding it into the slices in the strawberries. We had even placed the turkish delight in the fridge beforehand so it was firmer (and even tried some in the freezer), plus, it was a hot day, do this didn’t help matters, as it quickly turned almost liquid-soft. I will attempt these again, but with a firmer consistency of turkish delight. The White Witch in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, who is famous for handing out turkish delight to Edmund, would turn me to stone if she saw these creations. I will endeavour in the future to make some that look worthy of something the Queen of Narnia would serve.

These were a headache (literally) to photograph, the light in the photo didn’t do these justice, as they did look lovely against a bright light with the light coming through the colours of the turkish delight transforming them into little stained glass windows.

They would be a nice treat for Christmas because the traditonal red and green colours of Christmas are represented – the red of the strawberry, and green of the mint turkish delight. They would look very appropriate for the Christmas season.

These are best assembled just before serving, as the turkish delight begins to melt and the strawberry juice hastens this process.

After all this messing about with finding strawberries in the shops, making a special trip to find the turkish delight, messing around and getting frustrated with the constuction of these delicacies when they didn’t go according to plan, then the photography session, I jokingly suggested to Mum that we should make some macarons. She was not impressed.