Lemon Cream Empanadas
The crust for empanadas is pretty much nothing more than pie crust, so you can use the recipe I give, or use your own favorite recipe.
I was looking for something fun to do at work and decided to make these. The recipe for the crust is:
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup white sugar
8 ounces cold butter
1/4 cup ICE COLD water
Mix the flour, salt, sugar, and butter in a mixer or a food processor. Mix till little balls about the size of peas form, then add the water and mix till a dough forms, wrap in plastic, and chill for 1 hour.
After the dough chills, roll out on a lightly-floured board till about 1/8 inch thick. Cut rounds, or cut squares if you choose. I did not have a round cutter, so I pulled a lid off of a jar of spice and used that.
How big you make them will determine how much filling you put in them. I put about 2 tablespoons of filling in them. That was a little too much. Put a little egg wash around the entire rim of dough, then, put lemon curd, or your choice of filling, in the middle, and pull one end over and seal by pressing down with your finger or a fork.
After you fold them over, brush lightly with egg wash, and dust with white sugar.
The recipe for the lemon curd I used:
2 large eggs
8 large egg yolks
1 1/8 cup white sugar
3/4 cup lemon juice
2 ounces of cold unsalted butter
Mix everything but the butter; cook over a double boiler till it hits a temp of 165 degrees F. Make sure you stir the curd to keep it from jelling into a mass of cooked eggs. After you remove it from the heat, strain and mix in cold butter, then put over ice bath till chilled. Once you’re done, put the empanadas in the oven at 350 degrees F and bake till golden brown, 20-25 minutes. After you remove them from the oven, whip some heavy cream with a little sugar till stiff. Then, mix in a little lemon curd, put in a piping bag or paper cone bag with a number 5 piping tip. Stick the tip in the side wherever a small crack is, and pipe in some lemon cream, you can feel right before they break before putting in too much cream. I will leave it up to you to decide how much cream to make. It depends on how many, and how big, you make the empanadas. You can make them as big as calzones if you want.
As far as both recipes go, I honestly do not remember where I got them from, I own about 50 cookbooks and have worked in 3 states over 22 years - I picked them up along the way somewhere.
