Recipe: paçoca brigadeiro for Children’s Day – 10/09/2023 – Marcão’s Recipes

In my other column (Cozinha Bruta, 6/10), I criticized people who insist on maintaining Brazilian food when they move to distant countries. Well: the current recipe, directly from England, is brigadeiro de paçoquinha.

I didn’t go through the Brazilian markets in London looking for paçoca. It turns out that my grandson’s grandmother (my daughter’s husband’s mother) hid the sweets in her luggage. Grandma thing.

I, as a grandfather, feel obliged to please the brat’s taste buds. So give him peace, then. I made brigadeiro de paçoquinha, a crossover between brigadeiro and cajuzinho.

It’s a good recipe for Children’s Day, something the English already celebrate in May. And the kids, depending on their age, can actively participate in the preparation.

For some reason I don’t know, the grandson prefers paçoca brigadeiro —something I had never heard of— over the traditional chocolate brigadeiro.

One of the fundamental ingredients of the sweet, paçoca, was guaranteed. The other was missing: condensed milk. It was easy to find as London’s large Jamaican community loves it.

I bought condensed milk made in the UK, with Caribbean themed packaging. Absolutely identical to the Brazilian one.

And then grandpa’s touch comes in: as both paçoca and condensed milk are sweet on the edge of the glycemic apocalypse, I decided to tone down the sugar bomb.

To do so, I used peanut butter, like the marombeiro kind, that my daughter bought. Just crushed peanuts, no other ingredients.

The preparation method is the same as that of the common brigadeiro. You cook all the ingredients together in the same pan until it comes away from the bottom. Then wait for it to cool completely until it rolls (I prefer to do this with the cold dough).

To roll the brigadeiros, I separated and crumbled some more paçocas. You can do the same, use broken peanuts, chocolate sprinkles or whatever you want. Children can provide free labor at this stage of preparation.

The recipe has no yield because it depends on how much candy the person eats, in addition to the size of the brigadeiro you are going to roll.

One thing that doesn’t exist here is the pleated mold for brigadeiro and beijinho. I improvised a scene with my grandson’s toys.

To anyone who says it looks like something a child would do in a sandpit, I’ll answer: that’s the spirit, you fools. Ugly. Boring.

BRIGADEIRO DE PAÇOCA

Difficulty: easy
Ingredients:

• 1 can of condensed milk
• 60 g (4 15 g packets, crumbled), plus enough to roll the sweets
• 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
• 1 tablespoon salt-free and sugar-free peanut butter

Way of doing:

1. Add the ingredients to a pan and cook over medium-low heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, until it starts to come away from the bottom (the bottom becomes visible when you use the spoon).
2. Transfer to a covered ovenproof dish and leave in the fridge for at least 3 hours.
3. On a plate, crumble some more paçoquinhas. Grease your hands with oil or butter. Scoop out the cold brigadeiro by spoonfuls, make balls with your hands and spread them on the paçoca.

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