My Spanish Taste: Panellets: traditional Catalan sweets

Panellets are traditional Catalan sweets associated with All Saints day or the night before this day. In these days families and friends meet together and celebrate very popular festival called Castanyada, which consist of a meal of hot toasted chestnuts, sweet potatoes, panellets and sweet moscatel to drink. Panellets are made out of marzipan dough prepared by mixing together almond flour, potato or sweet potato and sugar. They come in many different shapes and flavors, although the traditional ones are small balls covered with pine nuts. You can also find them with coconut, chocolate or dried fruits. Traditional recipes for these sweets contain almost the same amount of sugar as almond flour, but for me these are simply to sweet, so this time I decided to add only 100 g of sugar per 250 g of almond flour. In addition to classic ones, rolled in pine nuts, I also prepared the coconut and chocolate ones.

Ingredients:

for the basic dough:

250 g almond flour

100 g sugar

100 g cooked or baked sweet potato (mashed)

pine nuts

desiccated coconut

cocoa powder

Nutella

almonds

1 egg

Method:

Put the mashed sweet potato into a bowl, add almond flour and sugar. Mix well using your hands, until you get a consistent dough. Divide the dough into 3 parts. Cover with cling film and place in the fridge for 1 hour.

After one hour or so, mix one part with a tablespoon of cocoa powder, and the other with a tablespoon of desiccated coconut.

Divide the chocolate dough into small portions and flat them forming circles. Put a little bit of Nutella in the middle of each circle and then form balls. Insert 1 almond on top of each of them. Set aside in the refrigerator.

From the third portion of dough, form small balls. Toss them in lightly beaten egg white and then roll them in pine nuts. Finish brushing the top with egg yolk.