Making Brazilian Cheese Bites at Home

I've been having lots of fun baking for the last couple years. There's been something I've wanted to try for a while, but had held off until I had the right audience and the right ingredients. 

Brazilian Cheese Bites! My Colorado family loves fresh bread and cheesy things. Perfect!

These fluffy and chewy bites are delicious when they're hot and fresh out of the oven. I'm used to seeing them at those all-you-can-eat Brazilian steakhouses. They are great, but who wants to fill up on them when there is all that steak to be eaten. 

These cheese bites are chewy, which is going to call for a different kind of flour than what I've ever used before. Tapioca Flour! 

My recipe today is coming from SimplyRecipes.com. Along with the tapioca flour we'll need eggs, milk, olive oil, salt, and of course, cheese! I chose some of the favorites from our Sharp Cheddar taste test we had a few months ago. Cabot Alpine and Tillamook Sharp. 

The assembly of all the ingredients couldn't be more simple. Add everything to a blender. 

All of it at the same time. 

Then blend it all up! The result will be a very liquid batter. You can either bake it up immediately or refrigerate it for later. If you do wait though, it will start to thicken as the tapioca starts to absorb the liquid. 

That batter then gets poured into a greased mini muffin tin. It goes in a liquid. 

And after 15 minutes in a 400F oven, that liquid has puffed up.

Mmm, hot bread fresh from the oven. They certainly made the house smell good. 

Different than a regular quick bread or yeast bread, these are chewy still on the inside. The outside is crunchy though. 

Sometime you'll get one that looks like these. I was reminded of my disdain for the Dole Whip Void of Disappointment, and was told that I made one with a void of disappointment myself. 

The Brazilian Cheese Bites are delicious. Cheesy, chewy, and a bit different than what I typically make. My brother Patrick thought of a way to improve them even more. Dip them in Pesto or Pizza sauce! I gotta say, he was right. 

Enjoy Gram! 

They were great, but next time I might alter the recipe a little bit. I've seen that Cassava flour is another option instead of Tapioca flour. Both are made from the cassava root, but cassava flour uses the entire root and has more flavor than the tapioca flour which is just the starchy root which is mostly flavorless.