Quiche is one of those things that was very popular to cook at one time…
Ana’s Cheese Empanadas – Random Recipes Meets AlphaBakes
One challenge I love taking part in is Random Recipes, where literally you get to choose a recipe at random and bake it. This is hosted by Dom at Belleau Kitchen each month. This month he has teamed up with Caroline over at Caroline Makes and Ros at The More Than Occasional Baker and joined Random Recipes with AlphaBakes. The idea of AlphaBakes is to create a recipe using a different letter of the alphabet each month which sounds fun as well. The challenge ended up being to cook a random recipe beginning with the letter A. First I went and pulled a random book off my bookshelf and I ended up with Leon, Baking and Puddings, Book 3.
This is a hefty book with a large selection of recipes and the one I chose at random was Ana’s Cheese Empanadas. These were created by the Ecuadorian cleaner at Leon who is called Ana. Cheese Empandas are small cheese filled pastries, the pastry was make using sparkling water and orange juice which was a bit unusual. The cheese is meant to stay inside the pastries when cooked, mine burst open. I probably should have used water to seal them more firmly. They did taste really nice however, I couldn’t stop eating them.
The original recipe uses Mozzarella cheese but I used cheddar as I had that in the fridge. It seemed to work well. These would actually make lovely nibbles for parties or summer barbecues with some cherry tomatoes on the plate alongside them.
Ana’s Cheese Empanadas
Ingredients
- 400 g plain flour
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 115 g butter
- 50 ml orange juice
- 80 ml sparkling water
- 250 g cheddar cheese
- 1 medium onion
- 1½-2 tablespoons caster sugar
- 1 egg
Instructions
- Mix the flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl.
- Add the water, orange juice and butter and knead into a dough.
- Place the dough in the fridge, wrapped in cling film, to rest for thirty minutes.
- Grate the cheese into a bowl.
- Finely chop or grate the onion and add it to the cheese along with the sugar. Mix well.
- Preheat the oven to 200C, 400F Gas Mark 6 and line a baking sheet with baking parchment.
- Roll out the dough until it is a couple of millimetres thick.
- Use a round cutter to cut out circles in the dough, add some cheese mixture to the centre and fold the circle in half and press together.
- Brush each of the finished empanadas with beaten egg
- Cook in the oven for 10-15 minutes until golden
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