Light Milk Mahalebi with Strawberries

Mahalebi is a cream we make in Cyprus like pudding. The traditional way of flavouring this cream is with rose water, rose syrup and orange blossom water. Back at home my mom served it with spoon sweets and a little syrup on top and my favourite would be with bitter orange spoon sweet.

For a sweeter mahalebi, instead of adding sugar in the cream, you can add a little bit more corn starch and add some of the spoon sweet syrup to sweeten and flavour it.

Now that I am cutting on the calories, whenever I make this cream I make it with low fat milk and fructose and serve it with fresh fruit which I cook a few minutes with some fructose.

I made this pudding at the beginning of May but there are still fresh strawberries in the market and the sauce is very easy to make. I just added a little fructose on the strawberries and mixed it for five minutes in a frying pan. Instead of serving the sauce on top as I did, if you like you can mix it in the cream and make the cream pink and flavoured with strawberries.

I put aside two for my husband and I and as the children like the cream to be sweeter, in the remaining cream I added a few pieces of white chocolate, which I mixed in while the cream was still hot so that it would melt and then crumbled some chocolate chip cookies in the cream. Finally, I added some chocolate shavings on top.

You will find the recipe in my cookbook "Mint, Cinnamon & Blossom Water, Flavours of Cyprus, Kopiaste!"

This recipe goes to Tobias, of Tobias cooks, for his 8th Mediterranean Cooking Event, featuring Cyprus.

Kopiaste and Kali Orexi!

See a few more ideas how you can serve this cream:

Fruit Spreads

Apricot Compote

Cherry Compote

Kiwi Sauce