Tania Villanueva didn’t like baking much before the pandemic. But during that time at home she started to dabble and one recipe has stuck with her: the Peruvian alfajor.
“People describe it like a sugar cookie, and it's two of them. And in the middle it's a filling of... dulce de leche,” she said. “Most people describe it as a caramel type of texture.”
She said the original recipe was from the internet, but she has refined it over and over again so that now she has it memorized.
Now Tania has her own cottage bakery business, Ñawi sweets, selling alfajores from her Windham home. She explained that “ñawi” is Quechua for “eyes,” which was her childhood nickname.
“It makes me proud that I can, in a sense, show a little bit of where I'm from to other people, even if they're from Peru, because I think everyone has their own flavor to things.”
Baking is not her only work: Tania has a full-time job, another part-time job and a young son. Despite the long hours, she says that she hopes that her hard work will show her son to dream big.
“I have to do this,” she said. “To make sure that when he grows up, he can accomplish his own dreams, his own goals. He's like, ‘Oh, my mom went after this. My dad went after this.’ And he knows that he can go after whatever he wants.”
