Empanadillas

Let's start with the positive aspects: they are delicious, and they're ideal finger food because they won't get soggy if you wrap them and they won't drip or spill either.

However, it's a lot of work to make them, and most of all, the dough was a disaster. It wasn't entirely clear in the beginning what the ideal consistency was, but even when I thought I had reached the best result I could, the dough kept tearing holes and kept shrinking once I began to move it.

DH actually made the first batch with the double amount of filling and dough - never mind how much he rolled out the dough, in the end he was only able to use half of the filling. He used a plastic empanda cutter. Quite a lot of his empanadillas burst. I suspect that the plastic empanada cutter trapped some air, which then expanded when it became hot and made the empanadillas burst.

Seeing what happened to his empanadillas, I filled mine by hand, rolling out the dough a second time even after I had cut the circles, and made sure mine didn't trap any air. This worked (though before baking, mine weren't looking as nice as his - that changed a lot after baking!), but I hated having to find out by experimenting; a good book would have addressed both the trickiness of the dough and would have pointed out the problem with a air; thus only 3 stars instead of at least 4.