Ramadan feast consisting of Egyptian Kunafa with ricotta cheese

Ramadan feast of Egyptian kunafa with ricotta cheese. Egypt is renowned for their colourful and sweet recipes, of course for their great history too. Egyptian kunafa with ricotta cheese is one of my favourite sweet dishes and is one of the most eaten desserts during Ramadan.

Kunafa can be filled with all sorted of fruits, nuts, creams but my favourite is with ricotta cheese. I like to put a little dampen on all things sweet.

I love ricotta cheese as it has a lower fat content to most other cheeses and is made with goats  and sheep’s milk whey. It is  great for making creamy pasta sauces too.

Now for this recipe, I didn’t use any sugar and substituted the white sugar with agave syrup and some rose-water syrup. Who needs refined sugar? I deviated from the usual recipe by adding the chocolate sauce on top f the ricotta cheese.

Kunafa with ricotta cheese (Makes a small dish, double the quantities for a larger dish)

• 1/4 kilo of kunafa
• 80-100g of butter
• 100g of ricotta cheese
• half a cup of milk/cream
• 4tbsp of sugar-free chocolate
• Some crushed almonds

For the syrup:

• 1tsp of ground cinnamon
• 1tsp of rose syrup
• 1/4 cup of water
• 1/4 cup of agave syrup
• A slice of lemon

Method

1- Put the oven on at 180 degrees Celsius

2- Melt the butter in a pan and separate the kunafa with your hands whilst the butter is melting

3-Mix the butter with the kunafa well and separate into two sections

4-Take one section and press into a tin

5-Mix the ricotta cheese with cream/milk so its creamy and layer on top of kunafa

6-Melt the sugar-free chocolate. I used a sugar-free Sweet Freedom chocolate spread I received from an event which you can buy from Waitrose, Tesco, Morrison’s, Sainsbury’s, Ocado, Asda and Holland and Barrett.

6-Sprinkle through your crushed almond nuts

7-With the remaining section, cover the chocolate and cheese section and put in the oven and bake for about 30 minutes until golden brown from the top

8-In the meantime while that is cooking, make your syrup by mixing the ingredients in a saucepan on low heat for about 15-20 minutes and allow to cool down before pouring on the kunafa

9- When the Kunafa is ready, take out of the oven and pour your syrup over and add some  almonds on top. I added some goji berries before putting in the oven which actually got burned so I wouldn’t advise this.

Make yourself a cup of hot chocolate or latte and indulge in a slice or two of this. If you want you can put some cream on top or simply eat it with sliced fruits. Slice peaches and apricot is my favourite combination.

Go on give this a try, it has to be one of my best Egyptian desserts along with            Om ali  which you can check out too. Plus this is a sugar-free guilt free recipe.

Give me your thoughts below.