Turkish Sweets & Desserts

If you love sweets/desserts, you'll love dining in Turkey.

Restaurants offer a limited variety of desserts, but specialty shops offer more:

*Pastane**(si)*

This is a pastry-shop (pahss-tah-NEH or pahss-TAH-neh-see) with Turkish and European-style cakes, cookies, and biscuits, sometimes divided into the categories of yas pasta (moist pastries such as rich cakes) and kuru pasta (dry pastries such as cookies and biscuits)

There are often puddings as well. My favorite is fırın sütlaç (FUH-ruhn sewt-lahtch), a baked milk-and-rice pudding. It's the one of a mild yellowish color with a top mottled with brown spots where the baking has slightly burned it. (If you prefer your milk-and-rice pudding unbaked, simply ask for just sütlaç.

*Baklavacı**(sı)*

Besides baklava (BAHK-lah-vah), the many-layered flaky pastry stuffed with crushed nuts and soaked in honey and syrup, these shops often have other sweets such as tulumba (too-loom-BAH), small fluted cylinders of soft pastry baked, then soaked in syrup.

This soft-pastry-soaked-in-syrup is a common idiom among Turkish pastrycooks, so you'll find it in all sorts of shapes, such as the artistic ones in the photo to the right. Sometimes these syrupy treats are sprinkled with crushed nuts.