A piece of cake

Britons are often disappointed by Spanish cakes. You pass a cake shop and there are all sorts of incredibly appealing cakes and buns with reds and greens and cream and pastry and they look really tasty. But they aren't. The cream isn't real, it tastes of nothing much. The pastry is too flaky or there's too much of it and the coloured bits are just sugary.

Now it would be an untruth to say there aren't any nice cakes, pastries or buns in Spain. I really like lots of the traditional stuff. Bizcocho, for instance, is a sponge cake and there are lots of variations on bizcocho just as there are lots of variations on sweetened bread like toñas or the almondy flavours of things like Tarta de Santiago. Not far from us, in Petrer, we have the shop of one of the most famous cake makers in the whole of Spain; Paco Torreblanca. But, in general, fancy cakes in Spain are often disappointing.

Just bear with me whilst I add something else into the mix. Because I'm old I continue to watch broadcast telly. In the same way that the, Ted Rogers hosted, 3-2-1 show of the late 70s and 80s was based on a Spanish TV show, lots of current Spanish TV programmes are based on international templates: First Dates, Big Brother, The Voice, Come Dine With Me, Strictly Come Dancing, Got Talent, Kitchen Nightmares, Boom and lots more have Spanish versions. Last night the Spanish interpretation of the Great British Bake Off, cleverly titled Bake Off España, aired for the first time. Jesús Vázquez was the host and Dani Álvarez, Betina Montagne and Miquel Guarro were the judges.

I've never seen a full episode of the Great British Bake Off on either the BBC or Channel 4 but I have seen bits of it as Maggie is an avid viewer. Some of those cakes look truly incredible. I did watch the whole of the first of the Bake Off España programmes last night. I didn't think the standard was very high. In fact it looked to me as though lots of the bakers didn't have a firm grasp on the basics. The crema in the milhojas was a runny liquid, a couple of the participants had real problems making their ovens work and there were two kitchen fires. The judges even spat one of the cakes out!

"Well, what would you expect?," asked Maggie, "Spaniards aren't good with cakes."

And all things nice

I think, in my youth, I was misled about treacle and cocoa. Treacle, in a Heinz treacle pudding, isn't the same treacle as the bonfire night Parkin. Cocoa, rather than drinking chocolate, is the pipe and slippers staple that goes with the "You've been a long way away, thank you for coming back to me," of Brief Encounter, rather than the stuff I drank from the machine at Halifax Baths. This came to mind as Maggie and I sipped on a hot chocolate at the Christmas light turning on ceremony in Pinoso the other day.

Hot chocolate, the sort that is made either with proper cocoa powder or, more usually here in Spain, by dissolving low grade chocolate in hot milk or a hot water and milk mix, is thick enough to stand a spoon in and usually sweet enough to dissolve teeth on contact. In these here parts the chocolate is usually served with a sweet bread, called toña. Toña tastes like the doughy part of the French buns sold in the Yorkshire of my youth but Maggie seems to think it's more like the iced buns of Liverpool. Iced buns and French buns sound substantially similar to me. Chocolate y toña is served at lots of events. There is sometimes a pretence that it's for the children but the people at the front of the queue, with the sharpest elbows, are the grandpas and grandmas rather than their generationally removed descendants.

I wondered if there was a blog here. About the local food. Not the impressive stuff, not the main courses, like gazpacho, the rabbit stew loaded with a naan bread like pancake, or the local paella made with rice, rabbit and snails or even the made from nothing gachasmigas. I set about Google and came up with an insurmountable problem. Put something like coca amb oli into the search and Google finds, at least for the first 50 pages, things which are almost exclusively Catalan in origin. That's because Valenciano and Catalan are, linguistically, related.

My cooking skills are limited but they far exceed my skill in telling what I am eating. If I had to do that MasterChef tasting thing and to say what was in the food I'd just tasted I would be hard pressed to tell the difference between beef and pork never mind the flummoxing subtleties of herbs and spices. So, just because I've eaten various cocas, doesn't mean I tell you much about them. Maggie describes coca amb oli as fat pie (I think it's a flat bread made with lots of olive oil) but I always think of cocas as being the local equivalent of pizzas, something bready with a topping usually including tomatoes, peppers or aubergines and, often, something fishy. I could well be wrong though.

I thought about it more. There are rollitos, doughnut shaped hard biscuits often flavoured with orange or wine or anis  a sort of pernod or ouzo type drink. I think rollitos have a lot of lard, a lot of olive oil and a lot of flour in them. I like them. Maggie says they are boring but she thinks digestive biscuits are boring too so she's not the best judge. I'm pretty sure they are typically Pinoso though.

Then I remembered perusas. Perusas are what you get at the end of the meal in Pinoso when you have just eaten something traditional like rice. They usually come along with some of the local sweet wine called mistela. Just like the rollitos I like perusas and Maggie doesn't but we both describe them as dust cakes to visitors. They literally melt away once you've bitten into them. Google had no trouble with perusas. The first few search pages had the word Pinoso in the heading. The ingredients are similar, flour, sugar, oil, lots of eggs, anis and icing sugar to dust them off.

So, in the end, I decided there wasn't enough hard information for me to do a blog on the bits and pieces of the local cuisine.