Golfeados are very interesting from an outside perspective. If someone didn’t know any better, they would have been shocked to bite into a savory-sweet combination of unrefined cane sugar and cheese. I was too because I handmade some golfeados over the weekend and they were NOT what I was expecting at all.

Baking is a very fun experience, but it’s very meticulous. If you add too little, the science within baking is disrupted which leads to poor texture, flavor, and/or structure. If you add too much, it throws off the chemical balance, leading to gross/wrong textures, collapse, a bitter taste (from too much leavening), an oily mess (because it overdevelops gluten), disrupts rise, or prevents proper mixing. This is why baking is so much harder than cooking.  

While cooking, you can change and add what you want. Baking means mixing many ingredients before putting them in an oven, forcing you to make sure the mixture is perfect before you finalize everything. Baking is a complicated science that many people new to the kitchen will be bound to mess up one way or another.

Now onto the baking: Following the instructions of Caroline’s Cooking, I made some golfeados for myself and it was a pretty fun experience to bake something (after all, this was my first time baking anything). However, I was very put off by the taste of the golfeados at the end. Granted, I didn’t use EXACTLY the same ingredients that Caroline had used in her recipe (using my own grated parmesan cheese instead of a mix of cheeses, probably adding a bit too much aniseed, and needing to grind my own panela). Other than that, I followed everything to a T.

Now to the less interesting part, my review and my opinion. The taste was very strong, almost too strong. Despite being labeled as a “sweet-savory combo,” I could not taste anything sweet. It was, quoting myself on that day, “A huge NO. I feel like I need some sugar after eating this.” My mom had tried some as well and her verdict was, “They were okay? The cheese was pretty strong, but that’s really the only downside.”