Name: Suspiros de Pajares
Prep time: 60 min
Yield: 40
Ingredients: 500 grams flour; 400 grams lard; 125 grams icing sugar; 1 egg yolk; 1 egg

Preparation

Low

To start, if we don’t have cooked lard, we will heat the lard we have in a saucepan until it starts to boil. As soon as it starts boiling, we remove it from the heat, take off the layer of foam that has formed on the surface, and let it cool. Now we have the cooled lard. We beat it and start adding the powdered sugar and the egg yolk. We beat everything well and then gradually add the flour (previously sifted). We knead well. The dough is ready. We cover the table or countertop with a little flour where we will roll out the dough and work it a bit with our hands before rolling it. We roll it out with the help of a rolling pin or a bottle (traditional method) and leave it with a thickness of about 1 cm. It’s a dough that breaks easily, so if we make it thinner, it will be difficult to handle. We preheat the oven to 180ºC. We cut the dough with cookie cutters. Here I must advise you not to complicate things by using cookie cutters with very thin parts because, as I mentioned earlier, the dough breaks easily. I tried using cookie cutters in the shape of a figure, bear, hand, and so on, but I had to abandon them because I could barely get a couple of whole figures. In the end, I used the classic round cutter. Once we have the cut pieces of dough, we place them on the baking tray, brush them with egg, and put them in the oven. If we use an oven without a fan, we will place the tray in the middle, using top and bottom heat at 180ºC for 15 - 20 minutes. If we use a fan oven, we do the same but set the temperature to 150ºC. When they start to brown, the suspiros will be ready. After 15 minutes in the oven, we can take one (careful, they are very hot), break it to check how they are, and estimate whether they need more time. In my fan oven, they are perfect in 20 minutes. The suspiros are now baked. We just need to let them cool and then sprinkle with powdered sugar. You will get around 40 suspiros. If we want to keep them for a while, we will put them in a tin (the typical one for tea cookies or Danish pastries, the kind that used to be given to you when you were sick and an old friend of your grandmother visited you) and they will last a few days until they are gone.