This is for my little brother. He has been a vegetarian for many years, but he used to love both Turkish delight and jelly, so bro, this is for you!

This is a seriously delicious jelly flavour and I recommend that you give it a go if you like jelly and Turkish delight. You could use this in a trifle that would really wow your dinner guests as they get bursts of rosewater.

You could colour the Turkish delight jelly with normal food colouring, but beetroot was an all natural alternative that worked perfectly. There was no beetroot flavour with this amount of beetroot, more than one tablespoon of grated beetroot is likely to give a faint flavour as will leaving it to infuse for more than about 30 seconds.

Vegan Turkish Delight
Serves 2, 10 minutes preparation plus 5 cooking

80 grams of sugar
1 and ½ tsp of agar agar powder, available from Asian supermarkets
450 mls of water
1 ½ tsp rosewater
A few drops of food colouring
or
1 tbs of grated fresh beetroot

Place the sugar in the bottom of a microwave safe container that holds at least 500mls. Add the water and then sprinkle the agar agar on the water. Let this mixture rest for 5 minutes to let the agar agar start absorbing water.

After resting, stir the mixture well to make sure there are no clumps of agar agar. The mixture needs to be heated to just boil to ensure that the agar agar is fully dissolved. Microwave the mix in 1 minute intervals on high, stirring in between each minute in the microwave. Watch this process closely as the mixture will bubble quickly once heated and boil over easily, be ready to press stop at any moment! It will take about 3 minutes.

Once the mixture boils the agar agar and sugar should be dissolved and the mixture will have gone from cloudy to clear.

To colour, either add drops of food colouring, or put the beetroot into the liquid for about 30 seconds.

The rosewater should be added last. Don’t add the rosewater before heating as the flavour and scent will evaporate. Strain the mixture into your jelly mold.