{Food} Sopapillas

My aunt and uncle invited the family over last night for homemade chili rellanos and we all ran with the Mexican theme for dinner. My mom made sweet potato burritos and there was chips, salsa, guacamole, beans - everything!

I wanted to try to make the sopapilla cheesecake that's all over Pinterst. The problem is that the recipe calls for canned crescent rolls and I'm not a fan. Sure, it would have been extremely easy but I HATE artifical flavors (especially butter, which is in most of them) and the fact that they add caramel coloring (which has been linked to causing cancer). So, I set out to find a recipe online that was from scratch. Since when did "from scratch" mean adding a few ingredients to a box mix? If so, every single dinner I ever create is "from scratch"... anyway.. I found an easy sopapilla recipe and made two batches. I didn't necessarily set out to make two but I was afraid my yeast didn't work in one, so I made a second to then find out both worked extremely well. So I made a batch of sopapillas (above) and a pan of the sopapilla cheesecake.

Here are the recipes:
Sopapillas - great recipe, however I added the sugar to the yeast first, waited a bit and then added the butter. I did that once, followed the directions once and my version of butter later made the dough raise a bit more. These make a lot. I'd recommend cutting them into squares or "chunks" and frying them in small batches. I only used maybe an inch of oil in a smaller saucepan and so I threw in maybe 5-8 chunks of dough each time, all about the size (before frying) of a half-dollar or so.

Sopapilla Cheesecake - this is where I substituted the above recipe for the crescent roll dough. I simply let the dough raise and then rolled it down to a 1/4 inch then cut to fit in my pan. It needed to bake a little longer and I baked it at 350 for 30 minutes so maybe 45 or so to test. But we were impatient and so this may be something I try again to tweek. It was good though! I also used a lot less butter, just cutting little pieces (maybe 1/8" thick, 1/2" by 1 inch in shape) and dotting around the pan, every couple inches. There was a large puddle of butter in a dip of the dough. I also just poured the cinnamon and sugar on top then dotted with the butter. It worked really well.

(Sorry the second picture can't enlarge, Blogger seems to hate my photos.)