Néró

I regularly read and follow Csak a Puffin's blog. When I saw the recipe of this pastry which reminds everyone of our childhood (in Hungary), I knew that I need to try sooner or later. To my mind only a few people makes néró at home up to this day, I think most of them dare not go about it because they consider this pastry a typical confectionery cake what they can't prepare at home.

However this won't beat me, I thought. I sent the recipe to mum to know when I go home for the weekend, we will bake nero. On Friday evening as soon as I arrived we got down to bake.   First we made the below amount what we regret because this amount proved too less.

Since then we tried other recipes as well, with different rates of flour-butter-sugar, but this was far the best, soft and short. I am sure there will be repeat.

Ingredients (small portion - to my mind :)):

25 dkg all purpose flour (+ 2-2 tablespoon cocoa powder for the cocoa biscuits, flour for the white biscuits)

20 dkg butter
1 tablespoon fat

2 eggs + 1 egg yolk

10 dkg castor sugar

30 g vanilla sugar (3 small package)

1 lemon's zest (This is one of my favorite ingredients. If it is not vary from the cake too much, I am capable to put lemon zest in everything.)

+ mum's home- made apricot jam

+ dark chocolate for decorating

In a big bowl crumb the soft butter with the flour then add the caster sugar, vanilla sugar, eggs and egg yolk, lemon zest and knead together the ingredients. When it's ready, divide it into two parts. To one half add the cocoa powder (I always use only Dutch cocoa powder), to the other half add the two additional tablespoon flour. When we mixed both doughs, put them in the fridge for half - one hour.

Because the dough was too soft to shape small balls by hand but too hard to fill it in pastry bag therefore we used cookie press what we could shape same sized biscuits on the baking paper with.

In the meantime preheated (170°C) oven bake them within 8-10 minutes. Be careful, not to burn them. 

After the biscuits cool, glue together two biscuits with apricot jam. You can put together same coloured or mixed biscuits. Finally sprinkle their tops with melted chocolate. 

Afiyet olsun!