7 recipes that use granulated sugar, with photos, step-by-step instructions and cook times. The quickest, Bolo de arroz, takes 40 minutes. It is most often cooked with egg, plain flour and cinnamon.
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Ma'amoul are delicate shortbread-like pastries made for Eid and Easter across the Middle East. A soft, rose-scented butter dough is wrapped around a filling of dates, walnuts, almonds and pistachios cooked with cinnamon, marked with a fork, baked pale and dusted with icing sugar. Makes 35; they keep well in a tin.
Pudim de leite condensado is the dessert of Brazilian Sunday lunch, served in every home and por-quilo restaurant from north to south. It's richer and denser than a French crème caramel: condensed milk, milk and eggs baked in a water bath in a ring tin, then turned out under a glossy layer of dark caramel. Chef's tip: bake it gently in a water bath and keep the water just below a simmer. Too much heat makes the bubbles that leave the pudim full of little holes; Brazilians prize a smooth, silky pudim lisinho.
Bolos de arroz are the tall, sugar-crusted cakes standing in their paper wrappers in every Portuguese café cabinet, from Porto's breakfast counters to the pastelarias of Lisbon's neighbourhoods. Despite the name they are mostly wheat flour, with a share of rice flour that gives a fine, slightly sandy, springy crumb, perfumed with lemon zest. People have one with a galão mid-morning or for lanche, the afternoon snack, peeling the paper down as they go. Chef's tip: wrap a strip of baking paper around the inside of each muffin hole so it stands 3 cm above the rim; the batter climbs up it and you get the tall, straight-sided shape.
On Portuguese beaches in summer, from Praia da Rocha in the Algarve to Nazaré and Figueira da Foz, vendors walk the sand with a glass box on their shoulder calling 'Olha a bola!': soft fried doughnuts rolled in sugar, split along one side and stuffed with thick yellow creme pasteleiro. Though named after the Berliner, the Portuguese version is cut open rather than injected, so the custard shows like a smile. They are eaten in swimsuits, sticky-fingered, mid-afternoon, and in cafés the rest of the year. Chef's tip: let the shaped balls rise until they look puffy and a gentle finger press springs back slowly; under-proved dough fries dense and over-proved dough collapses and soaks up oil.
Kürtőskalács, or chimney cake, comes from the Székely Hungarian villages of Transylvania and is now sold at every Budapest Christmas market and summer festival, turning on spits over glowing coals. A strip of sweet yeast dough is wound around a wooden roller, rolled in sugar and baked until the sugar caramelises into a thin, crackling shell; you unwind the soft, steaming spiral as you eat it. At home you can bake it in the oven on foil-wrapped rolling pins or tins. Chef's tip: press the dough spiral firmly into the sugar before baking; loose sugar falls off, but pressed sugar melts into the glassy crust. A common mistake is leaving gaps between the strips, which makes the cake tear apart when you slide it off.
Rugelach came from the Jewish bakeries of Eastern Europe, and today they are piled high on trays in Jerusalem's Machane Yehuda market and in every New York deli bakery, eaten with coffee on Friday or packed for a Hanukkah visit. The American-style dough made with cream cheese and butter bakes up tender and flaky, and each wedge is rolled up around a filling of brown sugar, cinnamon, chopped walnuts and raisins into a small crescent. Chef's tip: chop the walnuts and raisins finely; big pieces tear the thin dough as you roll it.
Cuberdons are the purple, cone-shaped sweets sold from handcarts on the Groentenmarkt in Ghent, where locals call them neuzekes, 'little noses'. A thin, firm sugar crust encloses a syrupy raspberry centre, and they only stay that way for about three weeks before the inside crystallises, which is why they have never become an export. They are made with gum arabic, not gelatine, so they suit vegetarians and vegans. Making them at home is a fun weekend project: the syrup is poured into cone-shaped hollows pressed into a tray of dry cornflour, which slowly draws moisture out and forms the crust. Chef's tip: use a sugar thermometer and be exact; just a few degrees too low and the cones never form a crust, a few too high and they set solid all the way through.
