Rose Water

This shortcut to cocktail orgeat is easy to pull off when you start with store-bought almond milk. 

This rose-scented kuih lapis is popular in the Malay community, served either as an evening snack or for breakfast and making an appearance at special events.

Chef Reem Assil's version of Ma'amoul Med Bil Ashta—a holiday cookie enjoyed for Eid, Christmas, and Easter—that's famous in Lebanon.

Mahalabiya is an easy, creamy milk custard that’s the ideal canvas for showcasing seasonal fruit.

These soft and chewy pancakes—inspired by atayef and Korean hotteok—are filled with nuts, sesame seeds, tahini, and grape molasses.

Kunafa is one of the most ubiquitous pastries across the Middle East and is such a simple dessert to make that it can be on the table in an hour.

This easy Egyptian bread pudding (called Om Ali or Umm Ali) is made with puff pastry, perfumed with rose water, and topped with an assortment of toasted nuts.

These date-filled cookies—qrass bil-tamr—are a typical Ramadan sweet, offered to guests and snacked on during the night before the fast begins again at dawn.

Maamoul are delicate pastries—filled with pistachios, walnuts, or dates—that are served on special occasions like Eid Al-Fitr and Easter.

Warbat is a popular snack during the month of Ramadan. The flaky pastry is drizzled with rose water syrup and sprinkled with vivid green crushed pistachios.

These delicate jam-filled bar cookies are made with dough that you freeze and then grate into the pan. They have a delightful light and crumbly texture.

These milky little doughnuts are a burnished bronze on the outside, white and cakey inside, and soaked to the core with delicately flavored rose syrup.

Using dates as the primary sweetener here means a lot less sugar in the ice cream, making it ideal for those who need to cut down on sugar but still want something sweet.

Delicate rose water (a common ingredient in Middle Eastern sweets) and tart lemonade are a refreshing combination in this pretty pink drink.

This brittle recipe is a riff on an Iranian candy known as sohan. Its snappy texture and fragrant flavor pair well with bitter tea.

Pork loin is a lean, mild cut of meat. I like to add flavor and keep it moist by stuffing it with a mixture of chopped herbs and garlic. Simply make a small channel in the center of the loin with a knife, then poke the stuffing in. The meat will be flavored and basted from within while it roasts.

Rose water infuses this tender cake with an intoxicating aroma perfectly matched by sweet-tart spring rhubarb.

Light, pretty, festive, and special, this can pull off the trick of being either the Christmas Yule log (without the chocolate or the sponge) or the perfect pudding for a midsummer lunch.

Worth It If you're anything like us, the first thing you think of when you hear "Turkish delight" is Edmund, the jerky younger brother from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe who's plied with Turkish delight by the evil White Queen. We never really had this candy growing up, and so it has a bit of a magical association. How could something be so good that it would cause you to betray your family? Well, to be fair, the queen's Turkish delight was actually magical—we can't promise the same for this. But we can promise a delightfully soft and chewy sweet that's better than any store-bought version you've encountered. Rosewater is the traditional flavoring, and is available at many specialty and gourmet stores, but feel free to replace it with the same amount of whatever pure extract you like, such as orange or vanilla. Do note that this recipe requires expert timing (don't worry: that doesn't mean you have to be fast as lightning)—read it through a couple of times before you start! It's not a difficult recipe, but if you don't have a good idea of how everything gets put together before you begin, it's easy to bamboozle yourself in the middle. Be a good Scout and be prepared!

These cream puffs are a completely French invention. They look so perfectly beautiful! My children love filling them with whipped cream—and eating them, of course. These are certainly hard to resist.

It seems every country that grows rice makes rice pudding, and almost every experienced cook has his or her own technique. After years of playing with it, this is the one I like best, and it works well with the variations of most cuisines. In many cases rice pudding is simply milk bound by rice; often the amount of rice is well under 10 percent of the total. I prefer this recipe with just 1/4 cup, no more. The result is a thick milk custard with a recognizable but understated rice presence. If you want a dense and slightly chewier mixture, use the larger amount of rice. Other possible additions to rice pudding: a strip of lemon zest, a pinch of saffron threads, or a teaspoon of ground cardamom added at the beginning; a couple of tablespoons of raisins and/or slivered pistachios stirred in at the end. See the variations, and the following recipes, too—this group of recipes is unending.

This wonderful, heartwarming winter drink is hot milk thickened with the starchy ground bulb of an orchid called Orchis mascula. This was sold by street vendors from the large copper urn in which it was made. The stone-colored powder called sahlab (salep in Turkish and Greek) is expensive and not easy to find. I have often bought it in Middle Eastern markets only to discover that it was a fake or adulterated mix. Cornstarch is an alternative which gives a creamy texture but not the same special flavor.

In Egypt, vendors sold crates of rose petals, in their season, for making rose water and rose jam. Certain varieties of rose, such as the wild eglantine of Turkey and Syria, are the best for jam-making. I have not been able to make a good one with the roses from my garden. The petals remained tough under the tooth.