Corazanes Dulces

Corazanes Dulces, translates to "Sweet Croissants". However these little yummy morsels, are not a lot like croissants, except for their shape. These "croissants" are a lot more bready in texture. In Uruguay these are a part of a group of sweets we call "Bizcochos" and we usually eat them for afternoon tea with a nice "mate".

This is what bizcochos look like.
http://cocinerama.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/bizcochos.jpg

I have never tried to make these before, but for some reason, a couple of weeks ago, I went in search of a recipe. They are normally made using lard, from beef or pork, but being vegetarian, I had to vary the recipe to use a non animal fat.

Follow this link for the recipe that I used. The recipe is in Spanish, but the ingredients for the original are as follows:

Dough
500 grams plain flour
30 grams fresh yeast
30 grams sugar
30 grams salt
150 grams lard (pork or beef, at room temperature)
200 mls warm water

Paste
70gms lard
100gms plain flour

I thought that 30grams of salt was far too much, and reduced the amount to 10gms. Also when I went to start, I realised that I didn't have enough plain flour, so I used a combination of spelt and plain flour. Also, I found that the "PASTE" which is meant to be made with the 70gms of lard and 100gms of plain flour, turned out like a dough, I guess it must be because the fat that I used had a high content of water, and therefore didn't perform like the lard. Still, I got some good results :)

I also varied the recipe by using a bread maker instead of doing it all by hand. It works well this way when you have a 3 month old baby at home ;)

These are the ingredients for the ones that I made.
Dough


250gms plain organic flour
250gms organic spelt flour (white)
150gms butterfully light (it's a butter/oil spread from Aldi, I didn't realise it was low fat till later)
2tsp dry yeast
30gms sugar
10gms salt
200mls warm water

Paste
70gms melted butterfully
100gms spelt flour
In addition to this I also used 2 tbs of butterfully and 2tbs of spelt flour.

Method

1. Place all the dough ingredients in the bowl of your bread maker and turn on to the dough setting.
   
2. Once the dough is complete, let it rest in the breadmaker bowl until it increases in size enough to pretty much fill the bowl, same way as your loaf of bread would. I only did this because having a baby, I didn't get back to it for quite a long time after the dough was complete ;)
3. Take out the dough and place on a floured bench. Roll out in a rectangle shape, your dough should be about a 1/2 cm in thickness.
4. Roll out the paste, in fact the paste should be able to be spread onto your dough, but because of what I explained earlier, mine didn't work out ;), so you roll it out really really thinly and spread it out over your dough, trying to cover as much of your dough as possible. Because my "paste" didn't cover the whole of my dough, I used the 2tbs of butter and make up for it. Melt the 2tbs of butter and brush it over the dough and paste, and sprinkle with the flour.
5. Roll up the dough the same way you would roll up a swiss roll. Then put it aside in a warm place to rise for half an hour.
6. First roll out the pastry roll in the direction of the blue arrows. Cut the pastry in half , and roll out in the direction of the pink arrow. Cut pieces as indicated by the dotted line, and roll up your "croissants" starting from the widest part of the triangle, towards the point.
7. Place them on a cookie sheet covered with baking paper and allow to rise in a warm place for about 15 minutes. Brush with a simple syrup and sprinkle with sugar. Bake for about 15 minutes until they're nice and golden.
8. Enjoy with a cuppa :)

NOTE: These turned out great and they're delicious, however they are nothing like the "Corazanes" you can buy in Uruguay in a bakery. I will try making these again, and if they're better I will post the recipe.