Foodbuzz Tea Party Takeover for a Cause

The Foodbuzz Top 9 is a great opportunity that encourages all the food bloggers to get better with the experiences and knowledge shared everyday. The Top 9 on March 25th will be for a noble cause. Foodbuzz and Electrolux are partnering to host Top 9 Tea Party Takeover with 9 tea party recipe posts. For every tea party recipe created by a Featured Publisher, Foodbuzz will donate $50 to the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund.

 

The Ovarian Cancer Research is to fund research to find a method of early detection and ultimately cure for Ovarian Cancer. Cancer of the ovaries is an insidious disease that can often strike without warning. Ovarian cancer is difficult to detect, as the symptoms of ovarian cancer are often vague and subtle, similar to those in other non cancer conditions affecting women. There is no effective screening test for ovarian cancer but tests exist that can identify women who are at higher risk for the disease. Visiting the Kelly Confidential site you will be able to donate to Ovarian Cancer Research Fund. 

 

Unfortunately, I already had the experience of losing some women in my family to cancer, and it’s very painful. So when I saw this takeover I didn't hesitate to support this great cause sharing traditional family recipes. In Minas Gerais we have the habit of join people around the table to take tea and coffee accompanied by a lot of divine treats like cream biscuit, cheese bread, corn cake, Minas Cheese, broa de fubá (cornmeal puff) and sequilho (tapioca biscuit). 

My grandma has a lot of passion for making these treats and then get together friends and family at her home. It was a great pleasure for her baking and rejoices people, and we also could see that. The treat that most represents this passion are the sequilhos. Besides its wonderful flavor, it is gluten free and perfect for all kind of Tea Parties. These little sweet circles are made with sour tapioca flour, sugar, butter and eggs. The biggest surprise about this story is that my grandma, helped by my mother and aunts, also used to prepare the tapioca flour itself in the farm. Nothing was purchased in the market, making all the process extremely laborious. 

Tapioca flour is made with cassava roots, which are widely used in Brazilian cuisine. Nowadays, it is very common to find sour tapioca flour in Asian and Brazilian markets, but in the past, each family had to prepare  its own tapioca flour. My mother explained me how they used to make it. To obtain tapioca starch, they peeled and grinded the roots. The dough obtained was rinsed several times for the total extraction of the starch. With the process of decanting, the tapioca starch was separated from the water mixture. To get the sour type, the starch was maintained for a fermentation period and then dried in the sun. The sour type is considered a starch modified by oxidation, whose main characteristic is its expansion property without the use of leavening agents (baking powder or yeast).

 

Sequilhos are not difficult to make (if you have the sour tapioca starch in hands). You just have to mix all the ingredients together. This was the first time that I made sequilhos and I tried to make them with the same passion as my grandma.  She used to flavor them with lemon zest but I made it different. For the first I used coconut. The results were light and soft biscuits. To accompany these adorable sequilhos, I prepare a tea with fresh lemon balm, followed by corn cake, cream biscuits, and cornmeal puffs with fennel seeds.

Coconut Sequilhos

2 cups sour tapioca flour
1 ½ cup sugar
2 tablespoons butter
3 eggs
1cup coconut

Preheat the oven to 360°F
Sift the sugar with the tapioca flour. Add remaining ingredients and work the dough with your hands until it forms a ball. Make the biscuits, as desired, and bake in moderate oven in a greased sheet pan about 10 minutes or until golden.

Cornmeal Puffs With Fennel Seeds

1,1 lb yellow cornmeal
1,1 lb all purpose flour
3 eggs
½ cup butter

3 cups milk
Fennel seeds

Preheat the oven to 350 °F.
In a pan, place milk, sugar and butter to boil. Sift the cornmeal and flour on the pan, stirring until to form a polenta. Place the eggs, one at a time, stirring constantly, and  then the fennel seeds.  With an ice cream scoop make the buns and then dust with cornmeal. Place them in a greased pan and baking until golden brown.

Salty Fresh Corn Cake

10 ears of corn, kernels removed
2 cups milk
1 cup cheese (Mozzarella or Minas Cheese)
1 tablespoon salt

Pulse the corn kernels with the milk in a food processor. Pour pulsed corn into a large mixing bowl.
Add the cheese and salt. Mix well with a spoon. Pour into a cake pan and bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes.

Cream Biscuit

http://lulussweetsecrets.blogspot.com/2011/01/cream-biscuit-bolachinha-de-nata.html

Cream Biscuit - Bolachinha de Nata

I come from a Brazilian State named Minas Gerais. It is one of the major producer of coffee in Brazil and most of my relatives plant coffee. If you go to England, you will enjoy the tradition of having a cup of tea. But if you go to Minas Gerais, you will appreciate a delicious cup of coffee, made only with freshly harvested grains. This is an especial tradition that unites people around the table not only to drink coffee (which we prefer with milk, not cream), but also to have a “Quitanda”. “Quitanda” is a collection of divine treats like tapioca biscuit, polenta cake, Brazilian cheese bread and cream biscuit, which is my favorite and I will have the pleasure to share the recipe with you.

This recipe is in family for generations. I have great memories of my beloved grandma baking many biscuits in the firewood oven in the farm. But first, she boiled the fresh milk, which she got in the farm too, and then collected the fresh clotted cream formed on the surface after cooling it. That’s right, fresh clotted cream is the secret ingredient. My mother also usually made them as snacks for the break at school. My sister and I loved to help her. As we were not able to make a braid, we rolled like little shells. Our “shells” were a success in the school!

Many years later my husband, then boyfriend, ate for the first time the biscuit in my aunt’s house and he loved it! He ate so much that every time he comes back there, he is greeted with a lot of biscuits.

I made the cream biscuits for the first time by myself. I rolled them like my mother used to make, but also like the shells that I used to make when I was a child. This is a very easy recipe to prepare. If you don’t want to use clotted cream, you can substitute for butter or vegetable shortening. There is another ingredient in this recipe that is kind of different: ammonium carbonate. It is a classic leavener that makes extra-crisp texture. It has a very strong smell when baking, but it totally dissipates by the time the biscuits are done.

Here comes a tip for you: try to moist the biscuit on the coffee with milk before eating. I love to do this and it’s simply delicious. Enjoy it…

Cream Biscuit

500g cream

4 eggs

13 teaspoons of sugar

2 tablespoons ammonium carbonate sifted

about 1Kg of all purpose flour

In a bowl of an electric mixer with a paddle attachment, combine the cream, sugar and eggs. Beat until light and fluffy. Add the ammonium carbonate and stir. Then add all purpose flour until the point of rolling. Bake until golden on 360°F.