Ballokume Recipe

In this article, you will learn about our Ballokume Recipe. It is a dessert of the Elbasan region and one of the favorite traditional desserts of Summer Day. It has gone viral being cooked and liked throughout Central Albania. Today, we will show you how to cook them.

This recipe is handmade using our hands. You can also use the equipment we usually use to prepare cakes, but it is not the same. The Albanian grandmothers used copper utensils and wooden spoons to cook this dessert. In this way, the Ballokume dough maintains the same temperature during the batter process, and our last result will be delicious.

The secret to preparing this dessert is in the quality of the ingredients we use. The cornflour should be much fine. We sift it first and use the top fine flour for our recipe.

The butter should be organic, unmixed with other fats. Eggs should also be organic (village eggs).

Below, we are sharing the ingredients for cooking 500 g of cornflour or 12 Ballokumes. You can double or triple it, depending on how many pieces of Ballokumes you want to cook for your family and friends.

You can also try our Bullseye Cookies

Ingredients

• 500 g of cornflour
• 400 g of icing sugar
• 250 g melted butter
• 1 lugë ash water (Finja)
• 4 big organic fresh eggs

Directions

1. We will start the work by melting the butter. Butter should be organic and seasoned. Melt it and drain it from the remnants of buttermilk or milk. We will let it cool to room temperature.
2. The second step is to beat the butter with the sugar. I chose icing sugar to melt it more easily.
   The secret to having a good start in this recipe is to rich a good mixture of butter with sugar. We need to use a metal container and a wooden spoon. Traditionally it has copper vessels. I replaced it with this high-quality and clean stainless steel vessel. Its shape helps a lot in mixing.
   We will add the sugar and the warm melted butter. Beat the mixture with a wooden spoon to increase in volume.The mass bleaches, and if we check with a spoon or with two fingers, we will see that sugar dissolves and is yarny.
   The butter and sugar mixture will take 20 minutes or more to rich this texture. It depends on your arm strength, as the whole process will be manual.

   

We continue adding fresh eggs at room temperature. We will add the eggs one by one. The second after the first has been well absorbed, and so on.

How To make Ash Water

1. When we finish with the eggs, we add the ash water, which we prepare by adding to a container one tablespoon of sifted ash and 100 ml of water.
   Bring the ash solution to a boil and let it cool and drain. Once we see that the ash drained to the bottom of the container, we drain the ash water with a kitchen gauze.
   We will repeat the process by letting it rest and drain it again. The ash water will come out clean. We add one tablespoon of it to our dough mixture.

Baking Process

1. We will add sifted cornflour, piece by piece. The Ballokume dough will be ready.
2. We will grease our hands with oil and shape the Ballokume dough. We separate each piece in the size of a fist in a baking pan lined with baking paper.
3. Bake in a preheated oven at 150 degrees and bake for 40-45 minutes.
4. We remove them and let them cool completely.
5. We wrap them in cellophane bags so that they do not dry out and crumble. With this amount, 12 Ballokumes will come out.
6. We can consume them directly, or we can very well preserve them wrapped as they are for a few days. But the fresher it will eat, the better it is.

Bon Appetit!

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