Sweet Breakfast Arepas

Delicious breakfast arepas stuffed with banana slices, mashed raspberries and sweetened cream cheese.

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Arepas – South American corn flat breads – are delicious, naturally gluten free and best of all, very easy to make!

They’re also quite versatile. From sweet to savoury, you can fill them with pretty much anything. They can be baked, pan fried, deep fried. They’re most commonly made into little pouches with fillings put inside, but you can also simply eat them with toppings.

I tend to always go down the savoury road, but I felt like trying something different this morning so I improvised these breakfast arepas with banana slices, mashed raspberries and sweetened cream cheese and the result was just perfect!

What you’ll need is pre-cooked white cornmeal, like the one shown in the picture below.

1 cup of pre-cooked white cornmeal + 1 cup of warm water + 1 Tbsp olive oil + 1/2 tsp salt is all you need. And feel free to remove the salt when making sweet arepas like these.

. Mix everything together with your hands until there are no lumps left.

. Make patties and press on the edges to smooth them up and get rid of cracks. Be careful not to make them too thin. They need to be thick enough to have an opening sliced into them and be filled with food without falling apart.

. Pan fry on low/medium heat, in a bit of olive oil (or low calories oil spray), for 4 to 5 minutes on each side (until the outer layer becomes crispy). Note: but if you want to cut down on calories, they’re just as good baked in the oven. 🙂

This recipe yields 2 large arepas or 3 to 4 small ones.

Once they have cooled down, slice an opening into them.

Then add the fillings. In this case I used sweetened cream cheese (3 Tbsp plain cream cheese + 1 Tbsp golden syrup), 1 sliced banana and 1 large handful of raspberries, mashed and mixed with a tiny bit of golden syrup. 😛