Sweet Catalonia // Panellets

Sweet Catalonia is a new addition to this website: a series of columns on cooking in the area of Spain I'm living in, with an emphasis on desserts and sweets. Today: panellets.

When I was a little boy my parents had a painting on one of the dining room walls. It showed a barren landscape in winter. The sky was a light-devouring shade of grey and the landscape below was completely covered in a shroud of snow, the suave hills and the shepherd’s hut on the left. There was no life in that picture and it appeared to radiate cold. 

Of course this was just an impression. Most of the time, it was the people in that dining room who radiated cold. Families are tricky constellations, made up of people who for the most part haven’t chosen each other. So when the temperature inside is fluctuating dangerously and winter is approaching outside, people reach for warm food. 

On All Saints’ Day, the Catalans eat panellets, a fine example of “warm” food, even though it spends just 5 minutes in the oven. Panellets, meanings “small breads”, are not bread at all, but little balls of marzipan, covered in pinyones, pine nuts. Those pine nuts, sticky with egg yolk, should be close together, so the panellet looks a bit like a beetle, with a blonde protective shield. 

Panellets are “typically Catalan”, but how that works is impossible to explain, I’m afraid. To me, it’s first and foremost a family dish. It’s easy to make — making your own marzipan is a matter of minutes, plastering them with pine nuts may take a bit of patience — and the kind of dessert that even the most stressed-out parent can put together without having a nervous breakdown. 

A nice thing about marzipan is you can make it as healthy as you like. Many times the marzipan you buy is 70% sugar and only 30% almond flour, because the more sugar the longer it lasts on the shelve. Since you’re just making a small amount, you can easily switch that ratio. More almonds will make the marzipan less white, brown-ish. Add an egg or a tiny bit of water to have it all stick together. 

To make the panellets even more “meat and potatoes”, literally replace the marzipan with boiled potato: small clumps of potato, covered in a layer of sugar and a second layer of almond powder — so in the end you do keep the taste of nuts. 

For a cross connection between Halloween and Catalonia: make the panellets out of pumpkin puree, mixed with some dark sugar, then cover them in coconut. In all cases, end with a couple of minutes in the oven. Not too long: the point is not for them to go dry, but to gain a bit bit of colour. 

As people may have gathered from the first paragraph, I’m not one for sugarcoating family life. What I like about the traditional panellet, is that the “shield” of pine nuts makes it ever so slightly crunchy. Your teeth don't just sink into the marzipan without encountering any resistance whatsoever, there’s something to be chewed on. And while I’m turning a dessert into a metaphor for family life, why not add a citric note? Instead of a ball, we start with a layer of marzipan, about one centimetre high, then cut little wheels out of this. In the middle, make an indentation (with the back of a spoon perhaps) and fill it with a lemon or yuzu jam. This minimalist sour touch will remind you that family life is seldom in perfect harmony. 

And neither should it be. Someone remind me to ask my parents where that painting disappeared to?