Hello, how are you?
Yesterday when my aunt arrived from the farm with two bags of green corn cobs for my mother, I immediately tried to separate about ten for myself, already thinking about making corn cake.
I’ve never been very enthusiastic about corn sweets – sweet tamale without cheese inside I like it, it’s cured and ice cream I find it very sickening. It turns out that last week my mother had made a corn cake like that and the aroma of the cake baking reminded me of the creamy green corn cakes from Águas da Prata.
Águas da Prata is a small town on the border with Minas Gerais, close to Poços de Caldas. Like Poços, in the past it was famous for thermal water tourism and casinos. Today, after a period of decline, the city is recovering with ecotourism/adventure tourism. And that’s where they bottle Prata mineral water, which everyone knows. Well, as a child I traveled there with my parents every vacation, and on every trip it was mandatory to stop at Bosque da Prata to eat corn cake.
The forest is a wooded hillside with mineral water sources, full of craft stalls and, essentially, corn products. The corn cake there was always eye-popping: golden on top, almost burnt, and creamy yellow inside, like pudding. It was sold in pieces, squares that seemed huge to me, still warm, and very fragrant! How I want to make a cake like that!
But the hard part was finding the recipe! Typical country recipes sometimes seem simple but it’s a pure mistake: they’re almost always not precise [after all, the cook’s eye is what gives the measure] and they often end up adapted to the city’s facilities and lose all their charm.
Luckily, as the saying goes, those who have friends have everything: I called Minas Gerais, Gi’s mother, my friend, and she gave me the recipe. Well, saying that she gave me the recipe is summarizing the story too much, right? Gi’s mother, a typical little lady from the interior of Minas Gerais, friendly and talkative, gave me the ingredients for her mother’s recipe. She also shared the version that her manicurist makes [in which the corn is not strained and comes with pomace and everything], she told me about the Easter cod, the family who came to eat it, the fate of the leftover cod, how it is chosen a good cod, from the children, from the grandchildren, from finding little animals among the vegetables [I told about the scare I had when I found a caterpillar inside the ear of corn], that this could be a good sign of little poison used in the plantation, how greedy she is and that’s why she doesn’t make a lot of sweets at home so as not to eat everything herself and, mainly, the importance of always having a little ‘cabornato’ [sodium bicarbonate] at home, because eating a lot of sweets causes heartburn. It was so cute!
I hung up the phone, happy to hear Gi’s mother’s good Minas Gerais prose [and it was only two fingers of prose, she still had a lot to tell, for sure] and went to the kitchen.
And [changing one little thing or another] I made this cake. Hope you like it!
Ingredients:
8 or 9 ears of green corn, peeled and cleaned [should yield about 7 cups of corn kernels];
450ml of whole milk [I used 250ml of whole milk and 200ml of coconut milk];
2 cups of refined sugar;
3 eggs;
3 tablespoons of finely grated Parmesan cheese;
3 tablespoons [45g] unsalted butter at room temperature;
1/2 teaspoon of baking powder;
1 pinch of salt.
Cinnamon powder for sprinkling [optional].
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