Baking Spain's typical Easter cakes: Recipes for regional favourites

EASTER'S now over for another year, but the sweet treats filling supermarket shelves and bakery display units will still be around for a few days yet, and probably at reduced prices for clearance.

Depending upon where you live, this might include the usual chocolate eggs and bunnies – much less prolific in Spain than in the Anglo-Saxon nations, but there are always a small handful on sale – or monas, which are doughy loops coated in hundreds-and-thousands, or sugar sprinkles, with a painted hard-boiled egg in the middle.

More popular still are the ones with a foil-covered hollow chocolate egg in the centre and, if you have a degree in engineering, you might even be able to assemble the plastic toy inside (no doubt, if you're a parent or grandparent, you'll have had to acquire this skill by default, and discovered failure is not an option), and the ones which disappear the fastest not only have the chocolate egg, but the whole cake is coated in chocolate. 

There's no truth in the claim that they're quite filling and one is enough to satisfy you. 

Monas are more typically associated with the Comunidad Valenciana and Catalunya, on the east coast, but can be found elsewhere.

Torrijas, or sweet, eggy, sugary French toast, are an Easter staple in Madrid, and other regions have their own, individual confectionery for the spring holidays.

When shops run out of their overstocks, many of these are fairly easy to whip up yourself – so if you were in the wrong region to indulge in your favourites this year, it's time to get baking.

Unusually, for Easter 2022, typical seasonal sweet stuff in the shops along with monas and chocolate eggs have included fresh and candied dates, kalb el-louz 'almond hearts', and other semolina-and-honey cakes and pastries – for the first time in many years, the Islamic holy month of Ramadan has fallen right across Easter.

Ramadan is the ninth lunar month, rather than calendar month, so it goes back around 10 days a year – having been in high summer over most of the 2010s, the daytime fasting and prayer followed by post-sunset family meals is not due to take place over the shortest days of winter until the beginning of the next decade.

But while Easter confectionery will only be in the shops for a few more days, until existing stocks reach their use-by dates, Ramadan goodies will be in abundant supply in Muslim-run grocery stores until around May 2 or 3, when the final day's celebration, Eid ul-Fitr, is expected to take place.

Madrid's torrijas: Capital Easter confectionery 

Until relatively recently, torrijas were not an Easter thing. They are thought to have been found in Latin recipe collections drawn up in the fourth or fifth centuries and spread to Spain, France and the UK during the Middle Ages, not becoming a dessert-type dish until at least the 16th century.

They originally became popular as a recovery snack for women just after giving birth – along with a glass of wine – due to their high energy content, and it is also for this reason that they became an Easter staple.

Over Lent and Holy Week, which ends on Easter Sunday, eating meat was traditionally forbidden as it represented feasting and indulgence, whilst Lent is a period in which Jesus Christ's 42-day fast in the desert is honoured. Fish, especially white fish like cod, is typical of Good Friday and Easter Saturday, to provide the protein that, once, would mostly come from meat; high-calorie foodstuffs to replace energy that would have come from meat were eaten instead, and as it was a time of abstinence, scraps and leftovers were eked out.

Additionally, it is thought that the pagan tradition of celebrating the spring equinox could have some link to Easter being at the time of year it is – a season of rebirth and new life, which would tie in with Christ's resurrection, and of the now-abundant harvest following a long winter with few crops.

Torrijas therefore started out as a way of making something edible from dry, stale bread, eggs, milk, and sugar – introduced to Europe from the colonies in the Americas – and have now evolved into numerous variations, including those suitable for the lactose-intolerant.

Here, the usual ingredients of dry bread, sugar, eggs, orange peel, cinnamon, and vanilla are used, plus oil for frying them in, but instead of the bread being soaked in milk, a mixture of water, fresh orange juice and honey is added to the sugar, peel and spices, boiled and reduced into a syrup.

The bread is drenched in the syrup, soaked, baked, dipped in egg and then baked again or fried, before coating in sugar or icing sugar.

The simplest and quickest recipe for torrijas involves a baguette loaf – ideally not fresh, and can even be stale – cut into slices of around two centimetres or an inch, and soaked in 600ml of milk (skimmed, semi or full-fat, whichever you prefer) previously boiled with 100g of sugar and two cinnamon sticks.

How long the bread stays in the milk depends upon how hard it is – less time for softer crumb and longer for tough or stale – since you want to avoid it disintegrating.

Beat three eggs, dip the milky bread in them, flash-fry in a pan of sizzling oil, one by one, flipping them over to brown them on both sides, then scoop them out and drop them on a plate covered in kitchen paper to soak up the excess oil.

Squeeze each slice by pressing them with the back of a spoon to drain away any oil still left, and coat them with sugar, ground cinnamon, icing sugar, or all three.

Madrid's oldest inn, the Taberna Antonio Sánchez – founded in 1787 – has been serving torrijas year-round for over a century, and recommends adding lemon rind, and soaking the bread well in the milk; over Easter week, they serve up a deliciously-buttery version using brioche instead of bread, and both versions sometimes come in a dish with a scoop of ice-cream as garnish.

In the Valencia region, a 'local' version has been devised using a mixture of milk and horchata – sweet, milky tiger-nut juice – instead of just the milk.

Michelin-starred Madrid-based chef Dabiz Muñoz, founder of the restaurant DiverXO, has launched his own 'ready-meal' brioche version for supermarkets – TorrijasXO – with separate pots of lemon cream and chocolate sauce.

Costing €11 for a pack of two, made using Bourbon vanilla, they retail at El Corte Inglés food hall, although in the run-up to Easter weekend, every last one had sold out.

Crespells: The star of the Easter holidays in Mallorca

Mallorca's star-and-heart-shaped biscuits are described as an easy recipe to make with the kids – a fun and educational project for the Easter school holidays – although you need an electric whisk or beaters. 

They would have originally been hand-beaten, but this would prove exhausting and potentially unsuccessful, so it's best not to run the risk.

Three eggs, a cup of extra-virgin olive oil, a cup of freshly-squeezed orange juice, 100g of sugar, the zest of one lemon and, although the traditional method involves 100g of pig fat or lard, known as manteca de cerdo, the mixture would work just as well with butter, are all whipped up together to a creamy consistency with the beaters, and half a kilo of flour added very gradually whilst the whisks are still going.

Roll out the dough, get the kids to mould or cut them into shapes, pop in the oven (pre-heated to 180ºC) for 25 to 30 minutes and, once golden-brown, remove and coat liberally with icing sugar.

Another Mallorca Easter staple – lesser-known but becoming trendy again – are rubiols, which are effectively pastry pockets or empanadillas; the difference is that the pastry also includes beaten egg and oil, and that the fillings can be sweet or savoury.

Whilst empanadillas are usually filled with tuna, peas and onions, tomato and pepper, or spinach and hard-boiled egg, rubiols might be either plain spinach, or spinach with raisins and pine-nuts, or sweet ones with jam.

They were originally thought to contain soft cheese or unsalted cottage cheese – half a kilo, beaten with one egg and 100g of sugar or icing sugar and the zest of half a lemon, with the pastry made using another egg and 100g of sugar or icing sugar, flour, fat, olive oil, the rest of the lemon zest and 100ml of freshly-squeezed orange juice.

A variation on these, known as the borrachuelo, is typical of the province of Málaga at Easter – and also at Christmas – but adds white wine and aniseed liqueur to the pastry mix along with the juice and grated rind of a lemon or orange and are stuffed with what is known as cabello de ángel (literally, 'angel hair'), a type of grated and heavily-glazed sweet potato bought in tins from supermarkets.

The rolled-out pastry is folded over the filling and pressed down, deep-fried and coated with icing sugar.

Asturias' and Cantabria's 'fried milk'

As you're probably figuring out by now, the majority of Spanish Easter cakes involve milk, flour, eggs, sugar, cinnamon, and orange and lemon rind, juice or both.

At least that means you can bulk-buy the ingredients and make separate batches of each – fling some cornflour into your basket to add Asturias' and Cantabria's leche frita or 'fried milk' traditional Lent 'cakes' to your baking repertoire.

'Fried milk' could also be thought of as 'fried custard' – the basic formula is the same as for making white sauce (as a base for bechamel, macaroni cheese or for stirring into pasta and vegetables or pouring over fish and meat) which, as we know, only has to have sugar or icing sugar and yellow food-colouring added to turn into custard – as in, boiling up milk and gradually stirring cornflour into it to thicken it.

For this northern-coastal Easter and Lent snack, boil half a litre of milk with 60g of sugar, the zest of an orange, a lemon or both, and a cinnamon stick, then turn down the heat and leave to simmer for five or 10 minutes.

Drain the mixture, discard the hard bits and return the liquid to the pan with a spoonful of vanilla, gradually adding 30g of cornflour (sold as Maicena in Spain), stirring well to avoid lumps and on a low heat.

Once it reaches the consistency of thick cream, scoop it out onto a tray, cover with cling film and leave to cool enough to be able to put it in the fridge overnight. 

The next day, cut it into small portions, coat these in wheat flour and deep-fry in oil until golden-brown, then spoon them out onto kitchen roll and cover with sugar or icing sugar.

Another deep-fried snack made with milk and flour, sold at all times of year but more so at Easter, are buñuelos, or miniature buns, and are found in greater or lesser quantities almost anywhere in the country.

Pour 150ml of milk, 15g of sugar, 30g of butter, 15ml of sweet wine, the zest of one lemon, a teaspoon of aniseed seeds and a pinch of salt into a pan, bring to the boil and then remove instantly from the heat.

Mix in 75g of wheat flour, then add a beaten egg; roll the resulting dough into golf-ball-sized portions, deep-fry them one by one and cover with sugar and cinnamon.

During the Comunidad Valenciana's huge March Fallas festivals, it is common to see these being sold in paper cones in the streets, typically made with pumpkins.

Fried doughnut rings dipped in sugar, known as roscas or rosquillas, are another typical Easter treat in the southern region of Andalucía in particular, and were originally an Arab recipe.

With the Moors, or northern African Arabs, being the dominant population as well as the ruling class and aristocracy for around 700 years until the late-15th-century Inquisition, the race left an indelible legacy on most of Spain – language, architecture, medical science, mechanics, farm engineering and crops – including culinary traditions; as Andalucía was exposed to Arab food culture for the longest period of time, much of it has stayed in the region. After all, the Moors' presence in Spain lasted for far longer than the post-Moorish era (so far, about 530 years) has, meaning their vestiges remain strong and are likely to do so for centuries yet.

What to do if you can't find self-raising flour

You may have already noticed how self-raising flour is not easy to find in Spain – it's not normally seen on supermarket shelves – but, clearly, that's not a huge problem, given that spongecakes and soft pastry or biscuits are, indeed, made here.

If you live on the Costas or the islands, you may be in or close to a cosmopolitan community or an international tourism destination, meaning you might have a British supermarket nearby which sells self-raising, or your mainstream grocery store chain may have an 'international' section selling goods from all over the world, particularly Latin American, European and northern African countries.

Otherwise, your secret weapon is baking powder, added to plain flour.

Different guidelines exist as to the ratio, with some baking sites saying you should sieve two teaspoons with every 150g and others, one teaspoon to 200g, but the standard proportion is about 5% baking powder on top, or five parts of this to 100 parts of flour.

Baking powder in Spain is sold as levadura de repostería, which translates literally as yeast for cake-baking, although it's not yeast of the type used in beer or making bread.

Icing sugar is widely available, but tends to be in small, 200g or similar-sized pots with a perforated top, like a talcum powder container, as it is used more for garnish or coating in Spanish cookery than for making butter icing.

Again, an international grocery shop or section in a supermarket may well provide you with larger packets, which can work out cheaper or, at least, more convenient than stocking up on the much smaller plastic tubes of it.

If you're inspired to get yourself in front of a steaming stove and prolong the culinary side of Easter – or give yourself a year's worth of practice to perfect your skills in time for the 2023 holidays – take a look at our selection of some of the best Easter recipes offered on a plate by a handful of Valencia's most élite restaurants.