Baking day

Baking day is quite an undertaking at Lucia and Rogelio's in Sontule. We're not just talking about knocking up a quick victoria sponge or a batch of flapjack, there's a bit more to it than that. A large, igloo-shaped clay oven, a good two metres across, occupies part of the yard near to the kitchen. The oven is made from bricks and clay and requires a red hot pile of firewood inside to get the whole thing baking hot. The embers are then pushed out of one side and the baking is ready to be popped in the other side. The oven spends most of its time redundant, except for occasionally housing a laying hen, so baking day makes for a good spectacle.
Rosquillas were the main item for the oven, in their hundreds. These are small biscuits made from cooked and ground corn, cuajada cheese and a bit of margarine. Some are savoury and shaped like a little hoop, others are round and sweet, filled with an unrefined dark sugar and called hojaldras. There are always people selling them on buses and they're available in cafes and corner shops, but their quality varies greatly. They are definitely at their best when they're warm, but Lucia's rosquillas were particularly impressive and kept us coming back for more for a good few days. They go down especially well with a coffee.All the members of the house got stuck in to the baking process. Lucia and Endira did the preparations and Rogelio was in charge of the oven. Jackson did a bit of fetching and carrying, while we were taking photos and employed to clear the trays of cooked rosquillas and place them in a bucket. This involved plenty of sampling.

From one side of the oven to the other. It doesn't look hot in there, but it's baking biscuits in 15 minutes.
We took a photo of ourselves nibbling rosquillas in Esteli, which for some strange reason turned out like a promotional shot for a rosquilla company.

'Mmm...rosquillas'