I came up with this recipe because I was craving semolina cake. This cake was initially inspired by the Middle Eastern semolina cake called basbousa – a dense semolina flour-based cake that is usually baked with ghee and tahini, which gives it this nutty, toasty flavor profile and a dense, rich texture, and the baked cake is then soaked with a rose water or orange blossom-infused syrup. It has this melt in the mouth texture that I just adore. Making craving for it got to that point that I thought about making basbousa myself, but I wanted to lean more into the sesame aspect, and use ground sesame seeds in the cake, as well as tahini. Instead of ghee, I went with brown butter, since it is basically ghee with the toasted milk solids, which gives the cake an even nuttier flavor! Instead of doing the orange blossom or rose water syrup, however, I wanted to use a different soak that was much less sweet. While I love South Asian and Middle Eastern desserts, them being soaked in simple syrup and all, at that specific point of me writing this recipe, I didn’t want something that sugary, just something with that characteristic denseness and grit from the semolina. So for the soak in this cake, I went with milk tea. Mostly because I had an entire box of assam tea bags I needed to use up anyways, and the milk tea would pair gorgeously with the sesame and the brown butter anyways. The end result was still a semolina cake that was mirrors basbousa in terms of the denseness and the crumb of it cake itself, but using brown butter, a lot more sesame, and a milk tea soak instead, resulting in a very similar texture to the original cake, but a lot less sweet, and a lot more nutty in flavor!

Because of how much brown butter, brown sugar, and sesame I used, the batter itself ended up tasting similar to Chinese nian gao, which is a sweet glutinous rice cake that has strong molasses undertones and is usually garnished with sesame seeds itself. In other words, for me, it tasted like pure nostalgia, while still hitting on those semolina cake cravings. Other things to note with this recipe, but if you don’t have any tahini on hand, you can totally omit it. I get that it can be expensive to purchase tahini paste AND sesame seeds, but the tahini is only really there to impart the edges of the cake with a nuttier sesame flavor. You can also technically make your own tahini, or at least a sesame paste, by pureeing 3 parts white sesame seeds with 1 part oil! You don’t have to use Assam tea for the soak. Most black or dark teas work gorgeously, coffee is also a viable alternative, and if you aren’t a tea or coffee kind of person, you can stick with just the milk, salt, and dark brown sugar! I used Assam tea because I had a lot of it on hand, and I love that earthy, malty flavor it has, but English breakfast tea or Earl Grey work beautifully in this recipe(if you got the Earl Grey route, I would even recommend using a splash of orange blossom water too)! And when it comes to the sesame, you can totally make this recipe using black sesame as well. I went with the toasted white sesame seeds simply because I had a giant bag of them I wanted to use up. With the tahini, you can make your own if you have sesame seeds on hand. Simply toast them(if they are untoasted) and then blend them with a little oil, and you have tahini paste that you can use! You can omit the tahini completely if you don’t have it on hand/don’t want to make your own, I just enjoy baking the cake with it because it adds a nutty crust to the exterior of the cake itself. But I will be honest and say that if you had to omit anything in this recipe, it would be the tahini.

For the soak:
3 Assam tea bags
1 cup milk
a pinch of salt
1 tbsp dark brown sugar

In a pot, heat everything up for about 5 minutes, or until the sugar is dissolved into the milk. Pour the contents of the pot into a heat proof container and transfer to the refrigerator, allowing the tea bags to steep into the milk for at least 3 hours. Remove the tea bags, and pour the soak over the baked cake.

For the batter:
2 sticks unsalted butter, browned
1 tsp tahini paste
1 cup semolina flour
1/2 cup finely ground toasted white sesame seeds
1 tsp baking powder
3/4 cups dark brown sugar
3 eggs
a pinch of salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
toasted sesame seeds for garnish*

Brush a shallow 13 x 9 inch baking pan with a thin layer of your brown butter(no more than 1 tbsp) and all of your tahni paste. Combine the rest of the brown butter with your other ingredients(minus the sesame seeds) to for your batter. Pour the batter into your baking tray, and spread into an even layer. Sprinkle sesame seeds on top. Bake at 350 degrees F for 25 minutes. Allow the cake to cool before slicing into squares.