Kalon Prama means Nice Thing or Good Stuff and is the Cypriot name of this cake. The Greek name is Samali. I was meaning to make this for a long time now and there are a lot of Cypriot recipes I have still to record but kept postponing it as I kept making new recipes. A few days ago we went shopping with my husband and saw a nice clay vessel with sheep’s yoghurt. I immediately remembered the yoghurt my father used to bring at home and without second thought I put it in the cart. I hadn’t eaten sheep’s yoghurt since I left Cyprus and I had forgotten what a wonderful taste it has.

This yoghurt was in a 1 kilo vessel and it was too much for us to consume in a short time so the first thing that came to my mind was to make Kalon Prama. Although I have been in Greece for so many years I never had this cake in a friends’ or relatives’ house before. I had bought it however from bakeries, supermarkets and confectioneries, but whenever I tried it was nothing extraordinary. This recipe I’ve had it since I was single and it was given to me by my aunt Loukia. At the time I used to work close to her house and she would call me and invite me over for lunch. As my cousin was about my age I would always accept her invitation because apart from being very pleasant and easy to converse with and I loved her very much, she was a great cook but at that time although I liked cooking I did not ask her for any recipes except for this one and whenever I bake this cake I remember her.

Kalon Prama or Samali

Preparation time: 30 minutes

Baking time: about 1 hour

Ingredients:

• 2 glasses of full fat yoghurt (not necessarily sheeps’ yoghurt)
• 1 ¹/₂ glasses of sugar
• 4 glasses of semolina
• 1 teaspoon of mastic raisin
• 1 teaspoon of baking soda
• Blanched almonds
• Tahini or butter to grease baking tin

For the syrup

• 2 ½ glasses of sugar
• 2 glasses of water
• Lemon rind
• 1 teaspoon or lemon juice

Directions:

The first thing to do is to prepare the syrup so that it cools by the time the cake is baked. We put all the ingredients in a sauce pan and boil for 5 minutes.

Then we blanch the almonds (you may see how here)

Preheat oven at 180 degrees centigrade.

Beat the yoghurt and sugar in the mixer at full speed for 15 minutes. Pound the mastic raisins with 1 teaspoon of sugar either with a pestle and mortar or in the spice grinder. Mix the semolina with the baking powder, the soda and mastic, reduce speed of mixer to low speed and add the ingredients gradually. The mixture must be more dense than a cake.

Butter the baking tin either with butter or tahini sauce, which will give it a nice flavour. Empty mixture into the baking tin and spread evenly with a spatula or a spoon. Decorate with the blanched almonds and place the tin in the preheated oven and bake the usual way we bake all cakes (for about 1 hour) and when a knife or a toothpick comes out clean the cake is ready.

The syrup must be cold when we pour it over the hot cake and we wet it spoon by spoon so that it may be absorbed by the cake. When baking in a rectangular or square tin cut the cake into diamond shapes or when in a round tin cut a circle in the middle and then into slices.

The proportions I have given for this cake does not make it too sweet. If you like yours to be sweet increase the sugar in the cake by ½ a glass and the sugar and water in the syrup by one glass. Cover with a clean napkin and leave it for a while to absorb the syrup. This cake is much tastier the following day.

Tags: Desserts, Sweets in Syrup