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coyle cleoHoney Cinnamon Peach Sopapillas

by Cleo Coyle (Coffeehouse Mystery series)

Traditionally sopapillas are little pillows of fried dough. They can be served with savory ingredients but also as a dessert with honey and cinnamon. You can certainly make them from scratch, but here's a quick, easy, lighter way to make them using flour tortillas. This recipe serves one.

INGREDIENTS

  • 1 six-inch flour tortilla
  • 2-3 teaspoons shortening (my favorite: cold-pressed extra virgin coconut oil, but you can also use olive oil, or your favorite oil, butter, lard, or vegetable shortening - see my note below)
  • Raw honey for drizzling (Health and flavor note: Raw honey is far, far better tasting than heat-processed honeys. It's truly worth the price and makes a huge difference in flavor. If you can find local raw honey, that's an even better benefit for your immune system.)
  • 1 tbsp cinnamon mixed with 2 tsp sugar
  • 1 ripe, fresh peach

DIRECTIONS

Place a skillet on medium-high heat and add your choice of shortening (oil, butter, lard, etc). You must use some kind of shortening and enough of it or the tortilla will not properly bubble up.

When the oil is hot (or the butter melted), place the tortilla in the pan. Allow it to heat up (15 to 20 seconds), then flip it and wait patiently for the tortilla to bubble up. If it does not bubble up, you need to increase the heat and keep waiting. Then flip it one more time to finish cooking and remove it from the pan. Slip it on the plate, drizzle it with raw honey, and sprinkle it generously with cinnamon sugar. Use a pizza cutter to slice it into sections.

To serve, slice up a fresh peach and arrange the slices on the center of a plate as shown in my photo. Drizzle with raw honey and cinnamon sugar. Place the sopapilla slices around the plate, top the center of the peach slices with whipped cream or ice cream and eat with joy!

NOTES

My very favorite shortening for this recipe is cold-pressed extra virgin coconut oil. This is a healthy, delicious oil, and of all the shortenings I tested with this recipe, coconut oil gave the absolute best results. It doesn't brown the way butter does at a high temperature; it brings a lovely, slightly nutty flavor to the tortilla; and it creates a nice, crisp texture in the tortilla as it cools.

CLEO COYLE is the pseudonym for Alice Alfonsi, who writes popular fiction in collaboration with her husband, Marc Cerasini. Like their 13 Coffeehouse Mystery novels, their five Haunted Bookshop Mysteries (written under the name Alice Kimberly), are bestselling works of amateur sleuth fiction for Penguin. Visit Cleo at www.coffeehousemystery.com.

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