The piononos are a wonderful sweet from Granada, consisting of a sponge cake soaked in syrup and cinnamon, with pastry cream on top. Discover how to make it with this traditional recipe.
The pionono is a traditional sweet from Granada, specifically from the municipality of Santa Fe. If you ever have the opportunity to visit the beautiful province of Granada, do not leave without trying this exquisite sweet. According to historical data, the name of this sweet is a tribute to Pope Pius IX, and in Italian it is written like this “Píonono”.
This sweet is a small cake moistened in some sweet liquid, for example a syrup, similar to the sweets we know as drunkards, which is rolled up and on top, like a crown, it has a toasted pastry cream.
If you like to make your own sweets at home, preparing piononos is easy; in this post we will show you how to do it. They are ideal sweets as well as exquisite to taste both for dessert and as snacks.
Granada piononos recipe
Ingredients for the cake:
- 60 grams of pastry flour.
- 30 grams of plain wheat flour.
- 3 eggs.
- 90 grams of sugar.
- A pinch of salt.
Preparation of the cake:
- Remove the tray from the oven and line the tray with baking paper, reserve lined. Preheat the oven to a temperature of 180ºC for 10 minutes.
- In a bowl put the eggs together with the sugar and beat them well until they double their volume.
- We add the sifted flours, the pinch of salt to the beaten eggs and with the help of a spatula we mix the ingredients with enveloping movements.
- Spread the dough well on the oven tray and bake the dough for about 10 minutes at 180ºC. Remove the tray from the oven and let the cake cool.
- Once it has cooled, flatten the cake a bit to make it a little thinner.
- We can help ourselves with a rolling pin and we will do it gently without exerting much pressure and reserve to make the pastry cream and syrup.
Ingredients for the pastry cream:
- 250ml milk.
- The seeds of a vanilla pod.
- Two egg yolks.
- A tablespoon of cornstarch.
- Two spoons of sugar.
Preparation of the pastry cream:
- In a saucepan we put the milk to cook together with the vanilla seeds until it boils.
- In a bowl we put the yolks, sugar, corn starch and beat well.
- Without stopping stirring, we gradually add the boiled milk, being careful not to cut it.
- Again we put the mixture on the fire and cook it without stopping stirring until it thickens.
- Remove the pastry cream from the heat and put it in a bowl, reserve while it cools and then add it to the piononos.
Ingredients for the cinnamon syrup:
- 100 grams of sugar.
- The same amount of water.
- A stick of cinnamon.
Preparation of cinnamon syrup:
- In a saucepan we put the sugar, the water, the cinnamon stick and we put it to cook over low heat.
- Stir continuously until it boils.
- Once it boils and the syrup is ready, turn off the heat and removes the cinnamon stick.
Preparation of the piononos:
- We moisten the cake that we had reserved with the cinnamon syrup with the help of a brush. Roll up the cake so that it is well moistened. Open the cake again and spread the pastry cream on it.
- Sprinkle a little ground cinnamon on top. We roll the cake again, once rolled we cut the cake to form the piononos or small sweets.
- With the help of a nozzle, we put a little pastry cream on top of each sweet as if it were a crown.
- Sprinkle sugar over each crown and with the help of a torch or burner we brown the sugar to give the sweet a golden touch.
When serving them we can present each pionono on a paper capsule.
