Empadinhas de Camarões (Brazil)

Quite nice small pastries with a filling of prawn, tomato, red pepper, lime and coriander, but with one major drawback: the pastry cup didn't bake properly, was soggy and made it thus impossible to eat this as finger food, if that was what you were planning to do. Luckily, we did not, so it was less of a problem for us. I do wonder if they would have turned out differently if I had used a metal muffin tin instead of a silicone one.

Other than that, they tasted quite nice. DH thought that there was too much pastry, or that the pastry was too thick (depends on how you frame it) - in any case, that there was too much dough in relation to filling, and he does have a point with that. I had rolled out the pastry as thin as possible, so the only thing I can think of is omit the pastry lids.

The dough was also a bit of a pain to work with, it tore very easily, but it tasted nice once it was baked. However, it took the empadhinas a full 30 min to bake, which meant that the prawn had started to turn a tad dry.

Looking back, what I would do next time is bake the pastry cups and fry the filling separately, then assemble at the very end. Omitting the lids gives you more pastry to make cups anyway, which you'll need - I think we still might have about a quarter of the filling leftover, even though I managed to make the full 16 pastries. We had 14 of these pastries for dinner (just the two of us), though for an appetizer I would definitely serve not more than two per person, and certainly not four.

Fun fact: I just looked up the meaning of the recipe - turns out 'Camarões' is Portuguese for Cameroon! If I had known that, I would have kept this recipe for the day of the match between Brazil and Cameroon in two weeks. Empadinhas simply means pastries, similar to the Spanish term empanadas.

Edited 22 May 2015: I made these again, this time using store-bought pastry which I rolled out until it was quite thin, and then placed in a muffin tin - this worked really well! Some of them still turned out a bit soggy, and using a muffin paper liner didn't help - drying the pastry before filling might help a little, as might coating it with an egg yolk before you pre-bake it - will have to try both of these methods next time.