Skip to main content

Sweet things

Image
By Helen Lee Gray

What is it about nuns that they feel compelled to mix eggs and sugar and pastry together and invent sweet treats?  Convent sweets (Doçes Conventuais) are a big thing in Portugal, each region has its own specialties, but it is all versions of a theme.


 Mix egg yolks and sugar until a yellow paste forms and then shape, then that yellow paste is either encased in pastry or dough.


Convents and Monasteries  started to churn out sweet treats in the middle ages, when sugar was made available in Portugal through the Portuguese world-wide trade routes.  Eggs play a major part in the cake making process, as egg whites were used to starch clothes, nuns habits and alike.  Egg whites were also used to clarify home made wine and beer.

 What was left over was the egg yolk.  So what do you do with all that egg?  You simply add sugar. 


Nuns used their initiative and in the spirit of making money for the church started to sell sweets.  It has now become part of the Portuguese culture.  Coffee shops have a bewildering array of cakes on offer, there are the staples such as a Bolo de Berlim (a doughnut with the yellow stuff in the middle) the Pastel de Nata (a pastry case with a thicker bit of yellow stuff in the middle).  There are regional treats such as ovos moles (translates as soft eggs) available in Aveiro (it's yellow stuff in rice paper)....there are Tentugal pastries (it's the yellow stuff in filo pastry).......But there are lots without the yellow stuff, such as beer cakes or bean paste cakes. Whatever they are they are intensely sweet and give a great sugar rush.   Here is a lovely summary of sweet treats on offer in Portugal.

Each year a town close to us has a Doçes Conventuais exhibition, where local suppliers show off their sweet treats.   We took a visit this year and sampled some of the pastry and yellow stuff delight and experienced the sugar high.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Building our Barrel Vault Wood Fired Oven

By
This is a short description of my barrel vault build that I have done here in Central Portugal. The final internal size is a 1m squared floor with a arch height of 50cm. I hope you enjoy and get some ideas from it. I wish to thank ukwoodfiredovenforum  for their advice and support. • 1: First I dug out a hole in the flower bed, on top of the stone wall, where the oven was to be built • 2: Set up a form to pour in the concrete base • 3: Pour the concrete base, which was about 5-6 inches deep • 4: On top of the base I cast 4-5 inches of LECA (light weight expanded clay balls) mixed with cement to hold it's form • 5: Then I cast a 2-3 inch heat retaining base, to add to the thermal mass, using calcium aluminate cement with large grain sand, as a flat base for the hearth bricks to sit on • 6-8: I then dry laid the hearth bricks on a dry bed of fine sand and clay mixture, with th...
1 comment
Read more

Read the signs

By Helen Lee Gray
In 2009/10 there was a brief outcry in the UK about the amount of unnecessary road signs on British roads.   The consumer group called Civic Choice submitted information that there were tens of thousands of excess road signs and that too many signs were confusing and distracting.    The AA results of a survey can be found here and the Campaign for Plain English also supported some of the findings. I think this problem has ‘gone global’, well at least ‘gone European’ OK maybe just ‘gone Portuguese’.   There is certainly a road sign disease spreading on the IC8, one of the major highways in Central Portugal.   This disease seems to have reached its peak in the area between the turn off for the IC3 and Castanheira de Pera.   The disease is spreading, the spores of signs scattering along the roadside and new signs growing all the time.   In this short distance, it takes just 10 mins to drive, it has been reported to me that there are a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

oh what a lovely bougainvillea

By Helen Lee Gray
It was something I wanted to grow, a plant which would cover the wall, give shade, give colour and really stamp the fact we lived abroad.   Bougainvillea. We have the other Mediterranean type of plants growing; we have olives in abundance, we have the grapes thriving, we have the figs establishing, but alas no bougainvillea.    I looked up how to grow it and it says:   Bougainvillea thrives in full sun.   “At least 5 hours a day of direct sunlight is the minimal light required for good bloom. More hours of direct sun are better. Less than 5 hours and the plant may not bloom very well.”   5 hours of sun ‘check’, good light ‘check’, south facing ‘check’….but alas the Med we are not!   This little peak of Central Portugal has cold air in winter (snow even), a vigorous breeze at dusk and is prone to a late frost.   Our courtyard is just too exposed to the elements, there is no little ‘nook’ for a bougainvillea, there is no wall for it to climb...
2 comments
Read more