Baking for Beginners: Mouthwatering Mexican Desserts

1. Introduction: I love that food is so nostalgic. You could take one bite and it'll transport you to a very special memory. I love how food just brings people together. Hi, I'm Yvette Marquez, and I am a food blogger over at muybuenocookbook.com I also have two cookbooks, Muy Bueno and Latin Twist. Today, I'm welcoming you into the world of Mexican baking with two of my favorite desserts. I'm so excited to share these recipes with you because I love to share my food, I love to share my culture, and I love to see other people enjoying it. Today, we are going to be making two of my favorite Mexican desserts. We're going to start with pineapple empanadas and we're also going to be making a tres leches cake. You don't need experience to take this class. I'm going to give you all kinds of tips and tricks, and also all the ingredients that we're going to use are all readily available in your pantry or at your local grocery store and you don't need any fancy tools either. By the end of this class, I hope that you take away some confidence and some excitement to continue making these recipes. There is nothing better than the smell of homemade baked goods in your home. Vamos a cocinar. 2. Getting Started: [inaudible] I'm so excited that you decided to take this class. I didn't grow up cooking. So if I could do it, you can do this too. I was inspired to continue cooking Mexican recipes after my grandmother passed away. She lived to be 98-years-old. When she passed away, I just realized I didn't want those special recipes to die with her, and so I had my aha moment and said, "I want to continue cooking these recipes for my children." Food is special, and by making these special traditional recipes, I know that you'll find them as special as I do. When I started my blog, that was in 2010, I started it as a journey of wanting to write a cookbook and didn't realize, at the time, over 10 years ago, that blogging would turn into a business, and I couldn't be happier sharing the recipes that I grew up with and just sharing my culture. Today we are going to be making two of my favorite Mexican desserts, Pineapple Empanadas and a Tres Leches cake. What I love about both of these recipes is that they're rustic. They're forgiving, they're not perfect, and they're just super approachable, but most of all, so delicious. I'm hoping, as we go through these recipes, you will get some confidence in the kitchen and be inspired to bake. I'm going to share some basic techniques that you can take and use these for anything when it comes to pie-making or cake making. We're going to have fun in the kitchen, I promise you, we're going to get through this together, and I'm going to teach you a lot of great tips along the way. I'll be using a stand mixer. You don't need a stand mixer. You can definitely make this recipe by hand, but I would also encourage you to get a hand mixer because we're going to be doing some whipping. It might get a little tiring without a hand mixer. You'll need a stove and an oven. You can follow along by cooking alongside me as well as downloading the recipes from the Class Resources. I can't wait to see what you make. Please take a photo and share it in the Project Gallery. It's time to get started. Let's get in the kitchen and start making the dough for the empanadas. 3. Intro to Pastry Dough : We're going to get started and make some empanadas. But first, we need to make the dough. I'm going to show you a simple recipe to make a simple pastry dough. You can use this dough to make pies, galettes, but we're going to be making some pineapple empanadas. I'm going to walk you through every step so that you can make this at home. This dough is kind of an evolution of dough that my grandma used to make and what my mom's made. Once you have a dough, you can use it to make savory empanadas and sweet empanadas. We're going to make sweet empanadas, but if you want to make a savory dough, you can just omit the sugar and the cinnamon and you can fill it like ground beef or chicken tinga or cheese and chili. There's so many variations, but we're going to make a sweet dough which has some cinnamon and sugar in it. This dough is super simple, made with pantry staples. We have all-purpose flour, we have granulated sugar, some eggs, baking powder, ground cinnamon, vegetable shortening, salt, and some milk. Super simple ingredients to get started making our pastry dough. I'm going to be using a stand mixer. But if you don't have a stand mixer, you can easily make this in a bowl. Literally, just with your hands, combine all your dry ingredients and then you're going to add in your liquid ingredients, your milk and your eggs, and then you can combine that with a bowl. But I don't want to get my hands dirty, so I'm going to cheat and use a stand mixer. Also, I'm using baking powder versus baking soda. I know they're interchangeable, but with baking powder, it really has that power to help that dough get nice and tender and rise not only before you bake it, but during baking. Now go download your recipe from the class resources and then I'll walk you through the measurements in the next lesson. 4. Making Pastry Dough : We're going to start with the dry ingredients. We're going to start with the flour. We need three cups of flour. Let me scoop that out. With flour, you want to be sure to not pack your flour. That's a big no when it comes to baking. I never trust my husband to bake because he always packs the flour and it's not a pretty thing. Just level it off, get your flour, and we want three cups. If you pack your flour, you are going to get more flour than you need. When it comes to brown sugar, it'll usually say to pack that because you want a full serving. With flour, it's nice and light that it'll fill exactly with what you need versus packing it. You're just going to get more than what you really need. We have three cups of flour, and then half a teaspoon of salt. With salt, even though this is a sweet empanada, salt really adds and just emphasizes all of those flavors, so don't be afraid that we're putting salt in a sweet pastry dough. Then some baking powder. We're going to do two teaspoons of baking powder. What's nice is I love that this has your automatic little level on here. Smart little invention that canister. We're adding some ground cinnamon, and then we're going to add two tablespoons of sugar. If you want to use the same dough for savory empanadas, just omit the sugar and the ground cinnamon. Now we're going to add this to the mixture and we're going to combine these just till everything is combined, and then we'll add in the rest of the ingredients. You want make sure that you combine all your dry gradients before you add in all your wet ingredients. You don't want to have just one speck of ground cinnamon in one bite and sugar all in one section. You really want to incorporate all those ingredients before you start adding in your wet ingredients. If you don't have a stand mixer at home, you can easily do this with a spoon or a whisk. Just what to make sure those are nice and everything is incorporated. You don't see any cinnamon anywhere in there. Now we're going to add in the shortnin. The shortnin also, if you don't have a stand mixer, you can use a pastry cutting tool to combine that with the dry ingredients, or you can even use a potato masher and just mash that all up with the dry ingredients. You want to make sure that this is well incorporated until we add in your milk and eggs. It's similar to any pie dough that you're adding butter. You just want those small crumbles and make sure your shortnin is just really well incorporated into those dry ingredients. Now you can see this shortnin is incorporated. You can see some little balls of shortnin in there and that's perfect. That's exactly what you want before you start adding in your milk and your eggs. We're using half a cup of milk, and if you don't want to use milk, I've actually made this recipe with beer too, which really gives it an amazing flavor when you're making like a savory empanada. You can actually use water as well. I love just the flavor of the combination of the milk with this dough, and then we're going to add two eggs. I'll just go ahead and use the same measuring cup and just add them in here, and I'm going to whisk the eggs in the measuring cup before I incorporate it into the stand mixer. It's always safe to break your eggs in a separate little dish before you add it all in. You never want to accidentally drop a shell in there. That's never any fun. You want to whisk your milk and eggs together. You just want to make sure that the egg yolks are broken. You'll still have that mixing process in the mixer, or if you're doing it by hand. But just as long as you have those egg yolks broken, you should be safe to go. This dough is super forgiving. Now we're going to add it into our dry ingredients, and we're going to blend this. You can see the dough is already combining by itself and you want to continue to mix it and combine it till it all comes together. Look at this dough, so soft, so pretty. You could see the little flecks of cinnamon in there, going to be a nice and soft and tender dough perfect for your empanadas. What I like to do once your dough comes together, I'd like to separate in two, it just makes it easier to role once you're ready to get to that process. When my mom makes empanada, she usually does it like if she's making flour tortillas and makes little dough balls and rolls each ball of dough into like a flat little surface. I'm not that fancy. I like to make it a workable dough and use it like if I'm making a pie dough and roll the whole thing. I'll show you a little shortcut. But what I'm going to do is just wrap this up with Saran wrap and refrigerate them, and you can even do this day before, two days before, and then have your filling ready, and just assemble when you're ready to make your empanadas. The dough is ready. I'm going to refrigerate it and then we can get started on our filling. 5. Making Pineapple Filling: Our dough is in the refrigerator, now it's time to make a pineapple filling. What makes this super simple is that we're using canned pineapple. We're going to have a combination of a crushed pineapple and pineapple tidbits. With the tidbits, you get a little bit more of that added texture of chopped pineapple. But what's nice is that you don't have to core a pineapple and do all that. It makes it super simple and you can make it year-round. I love empanadas because you can use any filling you want. In the fall, you can use apples, or pumpkin, or peaches in the summer, so there's so many varieties. With pineapple, it could be done year-round with your canned pineapple. Then we're going to season it with some ground cinnamon, some ginger and nutmeg. Those fall flavors with little tropical twist, super yummy, we're going to sweeten it with some sugar, and then we're going to thicken it with some cornstarch. I'll show you how to do that once everything is combined into the pot. If you don't want to use canned pineapple, you can certainly use fresh pineapple. I'm guessing about one whole pineapple should take the place of these two pineapple cans. Also, to make it even simpler, you can use pie preserves. One one my favorites is cherry pie filling, which there's no cooking involved. You just open up that can and use your dough and has some delicious cherry empanadas. An empanadas is basically a little handheld pie. their portion controlled, they could be made sweet or savory. I grew up with my grandma making empanadas and it was so special, when my mom visits and then she makes empanadas for the kids, they're totally spoiled. When grandma visits, they get their pick and flavor of whatever empanadas she wants to make for them. Download the recipe, gather all your ingredients, and let's get started. We're going to make the pineapple filling and we're going to do that at the stove top, because we're going to thicken it up with some cornstarch and we're going to actually have to have it cool before we start making the pineapple empanadas. We're going to start with your cans of pineapple, and we're going to reserve some of that juice. We're going to save about three-quarter cups of that, that we're going to actually use to add into our filling, so we don't want it too watery. My grandma, every time she made anything with canned pineapple, she would always say, do not throw that pineapple juice away, that's the deliciousness of it all. We want to reserve that. Then now it's super simple because all we need to do is just add everything into the pot. We're going to turn on our flame, add in our crushed pineapple. What's nice is the texture of this preserves. We're going to get the crushed pineapple and then the tidbits. Then we're going to add in our sugar. It's one cup of granulated sugar. We're going to add one-quarter teaspoon of ground cinnamon, and ground ginger. We have an eighth of a teaspoon. We're also going to use an eighth of a teaspoon of ground nutmeg. Then we're going to add three-quarter cups. This is about a cup of all that juice that's left over, so just leave a quarter cup behind, just in case we need a little bit more. We're going to just bring this to a boil, and then once all of this starts to come together, we're going to actually extract a little bit of that juice because we're going to reserve it so that we can thicken it with some cornstarch. You don't want to add the cornstarch in your pot directly because it could start to clump. What you want to do is get some of this juice out of this mixture, let it cool. Then we're going to add the cornstarch to that. Then we'll add the cornstarch mixture into the pot. That's what's really going to thicken this up. Now that all of this is combined, it's just barely getting to the boil point. We want to get some of that mixture out because we're going to combine that with our cornstarch to thicken up. Yeah. This is about one-third cup of the mixture that you want to reserve. You want to let this cool before you add your cornstarch because it'll start clumping. We'll set this aside. Now it's coming to a boil. We want to make sure that you continue to stir because you don't want that sticking to the bottom of the pot. We're going to lower this, and we're going to let it just simmer low and slow for a good 45 minutes. Its 45 minutes later, and as you can see, this mixture is looking and delicious. It has that caramelized color because of all those juices, and some of those bigger chunks of pineapples have disintegrated. Now, we can make our slurry, which is our cornstarch and pineapple mixture that we have here. Just to do that, we're going to do three tablespoons of your cornstarch, and you have that cool liquid that we put aside. You want to combine that. As you can see, it's already thickening here, but we're going to add this to the mixture. We're going to cook it low again for 10 more minutes, and that's really going to thicken our mixture. Adding the cornstarch does not change the flavor. Being that it's so sweet, it really balances it out, but just really helps the thickening process. As you can see, it's already really thickening up. We have a little leftover pineapple juice just in case it gets too thick, we can always water it down, or if we need to make it thicker, we can also use that juice just to combine it with cornstarch. It's really just up to the thickness that you want. Once this cools in the refrigerator, that's going to thicken it even more. Don't try and over-thicken it while it's cooking. It's getting nice and thick. This is the perfect consistency that you want. We're going to let this cool, and once it cools, then we can refrigerate it. 6. Assembling and Baking Empanadas: Here's our filling already chilled, our pineapple filling, and then we also have our dough that's also been chilled. Now we're ready to make some empanadas. What you want to do is just unwrap it. Then I have flour here. We're going to sprinkle a little bit of flour on our counter surface. This is half of the dough. This recipe makes about 12 empanadas. With half of your dough, you're going to make six empanadas. What I like to do, a nice little cheat, is just roll this all out, and then I have these circle molds, this is about a four-inch mold. If you feel comfortable, you can definitely just roll out each portion. But I just love that you can cheat and just have one big surface, like if you're making a pie dough, and have perfect little circles. We're going to roll this out. It doesn't have to be perfect. This dough is super forgiving. You want the dough to be about an eighth of an inch thick, just similar to if you're making flour tortillas. Then once you cut them in molds, you can also just roll them out if it's still a little too thick. Now we have our mold. Then I'm going to transfer these to the cookie sheet. If your dough's a little too thick, you can roll it out individually. I'm going to move this over to our baking sheet. I'll just go ahead and add a couple more in there. This is a pretty standard size, just a four-inch is pretty much the size that you want to aim for. Like I said, they don't have to be perfect. Once we fill them in, fold them over, I'll show you a fun little trick of how to fix your circles that might not look so perfect right now. The important thing is just making sure that you don't have too thick of dough. You can also just stretch it with your hands. Now we have our pineapple, and you want to just add a dollop of some of that pineapple mixture to 1/2 of the empanadas. Then what we want to do is, you can use your finger and just add a little rim of milk to the dough, and that's going to help seal it, because you don't want your dough to open as it's baking, so you want to seal that little pocket. Then you're going to just fold this over. If you want to get fancy and you don't like the shape, you can also use something like a little pasta tool like this, and then just cut off the excess there. This also helps seal the dough. Then from here, you just get a fork and just crimp your edges, and that's really going to seal those empanadas. Then you want to make some little air pockets so that the steam can come out while it bakes. Continue to make, continue to fill. This is a fun dessert that you can make with kids. I know my kids love helping me make empanadas. My son is the expert crimper or brushing the glaze, which I'll show you how to make after this. Your egg wash basically is just egg and a little bit of water, and you're just going to whisk that. What this does is it gives your empanadas a really pretty sheen once they bake. Then we're going to just brush the empanadas. That's going to give it that really pretty glossy finish and give it a nice golden brown color as they bake. If you don't like egg wash, you can also just use milk. While this egg wash is wet, what you can also add is a little sprinkling of raw sugar that gives it that really yummy, crusty, sugary topping. They look so pretty. That's how simple it is. The oven is preheated for 350 degrees, so now it's time to bake these for about 15-20 minutes. It's been 20 minutes, and what I like to do is place them on the broiler, just on that top rack for one minute just to give them that nice golden color. That broiler works fast, so make sure not to leave your kitchen, one minute is all you need. Now, all that's left is placing them on your cooling rack and letting them cool. They taste so good once they're nice and cool, perfect when they're warm, especially with some coffee for breakfast. They can stay at room temperature for a couple of days. After a couple days, I recommend refrigerating them. If you want to reheat them, you can always just pop them back in the oven. Well, you've mastered pineapple empanadas, now you can enjoy one while we get ready for Tres Leches cake. 7. Intro to Tres Leches Cake: Now it's time to make tres leches cake. Tres leches is my absolute favorite cake. It's so moist, so spongy. You can top it with any toppings that you like. Make sure to download your recipe so that you can get all your list of ingredients. A tres leches cake is basically a spongy pound cake, super airy, super light. The tres leches is literally translates to three milks. We're going to be adding three milks on the cake once it's baked, and then we're going to refrigerate it. That's what makes it super moist. The three milks that we're going to be using is condensed milk, evaporated milk, and then some of that coconut milk. If you want to get fancy, you can add a splash of rum. We're going to need flour, sugar, eggs, and we're going to separate that, and that's the big key when it comes to a tres leches cake, is that it's super spongy. So you want to make sure to separate your eggs. We're also adding coconut milk, which is also going to be in the tres leches topping itself, and vanilla extract, and baking powder. Let's get started. We are going to start by combining our dry ingredients. 8. Making Tres Leches Cake : We're going to add one cup of flour 1/8 teaspoon of salt and 1.5 teaspoons of baking powder. Then we can just simply mix that up with a spoon. You just want to combine these dry ingredients and now we want to separate our eggs. I've already separated three eggs, that's important step. You want to make sure that you separate your eggs. We have four eggs in this recipe, so we got one more here. Then I have this handy dandy little egg separator. If you don't have an egg separator, you can simply cup your hand, crack your egg in your hand, and just let it drip out. Make sure you hold your egg yolk into the palm of your hand and then just simply place it into your egg yolk bowl. It's messier so I'm using an egg separator today. We're going to whip this up and it's going to make a meringue. It's going to be super fluffy and that's what makes basically any pound cake, any sponge cake. It's that really fluffy batter that's lightly added and you're going to incorporate that so that it doesn't deflate. That's what's going to make your cake nice and spongy. Now, we are going to combine all the ingredients with our yolks. What we want to add is three quarter cups of sugar, and one teaspoon of vanilla extract, and 1/3 cup of coconut milk. Then we're going to mix this up and then we will get to the egg whites. Now, we are going to add this into our dry ingredients. Now, it's time to do the egg whites. Really what these do, we get those peaks and then we're going to add in a quarter cup of sugar to this mixture. See how we're getting those peaks? We can still fluff a little bit more or mix a little bit more, but I'm going to go ahead and add in the sugar and then we can continue mixing. It's always better to just go ahead and over whip. You're not going to go wrong, it's better to have them nice and whippy than lose your patience and put them in there before they have that fluffy consistency. That's looking pretty good. I think that will work. Now, the tricky part is I'm going to go ahead and swap these and I'm going to give this a mix with my mixer and then I'm going to fold in those egg whites. Now, what you have here is a nice consistency similar to pancake batter. Now, all that's left to do is adding in those egg whites. You want to just drop those in ever so gently and you're going to, by hand, just combine those ingredients. You don't want to overmix this process. This is what's going to give you that fluffy, light and airy batter like a soft little marshmallow cloud. All you have to do now is add your batter to your prepared baking dish and bake. I've lightly greased it with just some cooking spray. You can also use a little bit of shortening to prepare your baking dish. Now, you just want to lightly pour your batter. It doesn't seem like it's a lot of batter, but this really rises beautifully. This is about a nine by 11 pan. Even though you're not going to slip this cake out, you don't want it sticking to the bottom. What's nice about tres leches cake is it's going to be very moist once we add those milks on top but you still want to be able to slice out your individual serving and not have it stick to the bottom of your pan so make sure that you add some cooking spray or prepare it with a little bit of shortening. Then you just want to smooth out so that you have an even layer of batter just with the rubber spatula works really well. That's it. It's time to pop this in the oven at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes. Now, it's time to make that the tres leches basically, your three milks. We have evaporated milk, condensed milk, and coconut milk and we're also going to add a splash of rum. I'm going to add it here in a mason jar. If you've never tried condensed milk, oh my gosh, this is like candy. This is literally Mexico's candy. They also use this to make dulce de leche, which is a caramel form of this. It's basically cooked condensed milk. It is so yummy, so sweet. Then we're going to add evaporated milk and then coconut milk. What's nice about having it in the mason jar is you can just refrigerate it, and always save it when you're ready to really assemble your cake. Now, we're going to add in some rum to this little party. Just a little splash. Then we can just close this up and shake it. This makes it about three cups. What I like to do is save about half a cup for your individual portions. It's nice to be able to serve your cake with a little dollop of the mixture on your plate and then your slice of cake. Then if you want to drizzle just a little bit more, but then we'll also make a whip cream. With the tres leches cake, the typical milk is regular milk, condensed milk, and evaporated milk but you can totally play with it like I am using coconut milk instead of regular milk. You can also make it pretty much vegan, using coconut milk, almond milk, soy milk. So use your tres leches of your choice. There you go. We better check on that cake, see how that's doing. The cake looks beautiful but we want to make sure that it is cooked all the way. The way to check is with a toothpick, just place it in the center. If it comes out clean, oh see, nice and ready. Now, we want to get that out of the oven and let that cool. It smells beautiful. As soon as this cake comes out of the oven, you could see that it already starts going down. That's why it's really important to let it cool versus picking all the holes in it right now to add in the milk. You want to make sure to let this rest at room temperature for a good 20 minutes. Once you add in your milks, then you definitely want to refrigerate it, but let it cool first before you refrigerate it. Our cake is cooled. Now, we're ready to pierce it with a fork. That is just going to help all the milk seep into the cake. We don't want to use all the milk. We want to be sure to reserve some when we are serving. We're going to pour this in and it might look crazy. It's so foreign. I'm sure adding milk on top of a cake, but I'm telling you it's like a sponge and this will all soak in there. That's what makes this so unique. It's okay if it spills over your side, that's what you want. It's a sponge cake and that will seep through, will save about half a cup to a cup. See how it's already soaking in? You can just bring it to the sides, make sure it goes all over that cake. You don't want no dry pieces of cake. You want all of it to have that nice sweet milk and it's important to refrigerate the cake. Even though this looks ready to go, it's good to have this in the refrigerator, maybe 20-30 minutes. What's nice is you can even make this overnight the day before an event and it makes it that much easier. We're going to cover it up with some Saran wrap. Now, it's time to refrigerate it and once it chills, we can get to decorating. 9. Decorating Your Cake: The cake is in the refrigerator, it's chilling. You want to be sure to let it chill for about 30 minutes up to overnight. But now we are going to make homemade whipped cream. All it is is some heavy whipping cream and some sugar. If you want to add to vanilla, you can make a little Chantilly cream, but that's all it is, so let me show you how to do that. It's two cups of your heavy whipping cream. You want to make sure that it's nice and cold, and one-quarter cup of granulated sugar. Then we're just going to whip this up. You can start seeing how pretty that looks. It's going to take a good 3-5 minutes of whipping. You want a really nice fluffy whipped cream. You can see it starts making those pretty ribbons. There you got some whipped cream, super simple to make it at home. You can always cheat and just buy your favorite brand, but it's just nice and something simple that you can have and make easily at home. If you don't have a stand mixer, you can do it with a whisk. Doing it by hand, you're going to get a serious arm workout, but it's totally doable. Our whipped cream is done now it's time to get the cake out of the fridge. We did it. We have a Tres Leches cake. Look at how beautiful this looks, so spongy, you can see that milk trying to ooze and escape out of there. What I like to do is serve individual portions versus decorating the entire cake. You can just cut your slice of cake, and then you can garnish it with whatever you want. You can add fresh fruits, toasted coconut. But what I like to do first, is I like to drizzle a little bit of that left over Tres Leches onto your cake because that's just some yummy goodness that you want on your plate. Then we're going to cut a slice of this cake that's looking so good. Now we have our whipped cream, and we can add a dollop to our slice. Look how yummy, this looks so good. This is so pretty for spring, for Easter, for Cinco de Mayo, you can really customize it, make it super tropical. There's all kinds of fun variations. Then you can sprinkle some coconut flakes, can garnish it with berries or fruits, whatever you want. We did it. We have our homemade Tres Leches cake. It's time to dig in. 10. Final Thoughts: Congratulations, we did it. Look at how beautiful. I knew you could do it. It's not that difficult. These are super traditional Mexican deserts that I hope you have the confidence now to make again and again. I can't wait to see what you make. Please share your photos in the Project Gallery. I'd love to see your creations. Feel free to have fun and make them your own. Thank you for joining me, and happy baking.