Pão de queijo - a German experience in making cheese bread

If you are not Brazilian, I sincerely recommend you try this.

Step one: Ingredients.

Spend half an hour googling the difference between tapioca and manioc. Do I have the right thing? It's white, it's powder, it's used to wash laundry in Senegal. Yeah, that's tapioca flour. Dad flew to Senegal last year and brought some back. Exclusively so I could make Cheese Bread. My parents are so supportive.

Okay. Milk, water, oil... yeah, I have those.

Cheese - man, I love cheese - parmesan, not the pizza kind, and mozzarella, not the watery kind. My mum goes shopping the next day and brings me the right cheese. Or cheeses? Is that a word? I'm studying linguistics. Two days ago I read a paper on plural marking in the English language, and yet here we are. Nevermind, where was I?

Eggs and salt. Our salt is running low. Should have told mum before she went to the store. I hope she doesn't notice.

Step two: Lose your mind over American measurements.

Why, America? What the frick is a cup? Do I punch the parmesan into the cup til I have a good half kilogram in there or do I loosely pack it and get 200g? What do you want? Why do you hate me? I ask my mum what a cup is. She kindly reads the handle of the cup measurement we have, the gram equivalent is written next to the cup amount. I quietly go back to measuring.

Step three: Some cooking, some dough, some baking.

This is a perfidious recipe. It combines cooking AND baking. Madness. I can do one on a good day.

Boiling milk, water, oil, salt goes fairly well. There is now oil in the seam between the stove and the counter top. We'll deal with that later.*

Next is the tapioca flour. "Put it in the bowl of a stand mixer-" I don't have a stand mixer. I have a hand mixer and carpal tunnel. The recipe says it will be like fondant, but it's a lie. The milk-water-oil mix combines with the tapioca flour into a sentient mass. It oozes, it creeps up the mixer, it smells like burning rubber.

The eggs schlorp into the evil paste, it feels like this is the stuff they insulate buildings with. You know the white springy stuff around window panes?

Now the cheese. I cannot believe I've managed to mix anything else into this, let alone cheese. So far, the burning plastic smell has kept me from eating anything, but the cheese makes me weak. I eat several handfuls. I should not be allowed to cook.

The cheese is finally in the dough. The recipe says 'SOFT and sticky' but all I'm getting is sticky. I start making ball-shapes. Water is supposed to help- and I forgot to preheat the oven. My hands are covered in dough. Mum to the rescue. I start making balls again, the oven is giving me a temper(ature). I should have taken my jacket off BEFORE this dough got on my fingers. More water. Water is surprisingly helpful, just the other day my turkish friend taught me to use water to roll sticky rice for kimbap. Sticky rice is a gift from heaven compared to this devil-spawn tapioca dough. I've made 20 cheese balls. I'm exhausted. Into the oven with them.

* I forgot to clean up the oil.

Step four: Keep your family away from YOUR cheeseballs.

I'm just kidding, these are for everyone. They are DELICIOUS. I'm a little scarred by the burning rubber smell, but now that they've baked they just smell like cheese. And they taste AMAZING. We spend the next few days eating cheese balls with every meal and reminiscing about brazilian barbecue. There's honestly nothing like it. And as Germans, we know what a good barbecue tastes like!

I send pictures of the cheese bread to Gabi, my brazilian friend, she's extremely happy. She gets the credit for introducing me to them. I don't know what to do with myself once they're gone.

I need to buy more tapioca flour.