Cream puff pastry or «pasteis de nata» is a very famous Portuguese sweet. These pastries can be found everywhere, but the most famous are pastel from pasteis de Belém, which is renowned for their pastries.
Carmen Arrabal Trueba, 4º Secundaria
Ingredients
- 1 sheet of puff pastry
- 4 egg yolks
- 200ml of liquid cream. Ideally, it should contain at least 35% fat
- 50ml of milk
- 75g of white sugar
- 30g of cornstarch
- ½ stick of cinnamon
Method
- In a saucepan over high heat, put the milk together with the cream, the cinnamon stick and the lemon peel. When it starts to boil, remove it from the heat.
- Meanwhile, in a bowl, put the egg yolks together with the sugar and cornstarch, and beat everything with a whisk. You’ll notice that the mixture is very dry at first, but if you keep beating vigorously, little by little it will become creamy, and eventually it will look quite smooth.
- Pour the infused milk and cream little by little into the bowl, stirring at the same time.
- Again, pour the mixture into the sauce pan that you had used, and put it on low heat while stirring constantly so that it does not stick to you, while it thickens.
- Be patient because it takes a few minutes, finally you will see that it thickens quite a bit, remove it from the heat, it’s ready!
- Put it in a bowl and let it temper. When it is at room temperature, remove the skin from the lemon and the cinnamon stick.
- Preheat the oven to 250ºC.
- Take the puff pastry out of the fridge, stretch it a little with a rolling pin and cut it with a cookie cutter or a glass, approximately 10cm in diameter. You should get 12 circles.
- Grease the mold you are going to use with a little butter.
- Now place the 12 puff pastry circles in the holes, pressing the sides so that they are not wavy and cover the holes well.
- Fill in the interior with the cream that we have prepared, approximately up to 2/3 of the capacity of each hole, trying not to reach the edge on the sides.
- Put the mold in the oven and bake them for about 15-20 minutes, until you see that the surface is golden.
- Take out the mold, let it cool for a few minutes and then remove the cakes from the mold and let them cool completely on a wire rack.