Every June, Brazil largely stops what it is doing and holds a party. Festa Junina is a month of harvest festivals — bunting, bonfires, quadrilha dancing, everyone dressed as an exaggerated version of a country farmer — and the food is almost entirely built around one crop: corn.
For once, the calendar works in Christchurch's favour. June in Brazil is the dry season winding down; June here is properly cold, the same stretch of the calendar that brings Matariki. Either way, the food is the same, and it is exactly right for a Canterbury winter.
Why corn
Festa Junina is a harvest festival before it is anything else, and the corn harvest is what is being celebrated. That is why the traditional table is stacked with bolo de fubá (corn cake), canjica, pamonha and roasted corn, with peanuts running a close second.
Our Corn & Guava Cake is the version we make — known in Brazil as bolo de fubá com goiabada. Corn and coconut, topped with house-made guava jam and coconut shavings, and crafted with no added gluten, so it is one of the few festival cakes everyone at the table can eat. Our kitchen is small and without exclusive production areas for all of our different recipes, so traces may occur and nothing is guaranteed safe for severe coeliac disease.
Paçoca, the peanut one
Paçoca is Brazil's most beloved peanut confection — crumbly, sweet and salty, somewhere between fudge and shortbread. Our cake takes that flavour and builds it into a moist crumb infused with roasted peanut, glazed and dusted generously with crushed paçoca.
It comes as a 25cm bundt for a table or a mini bundt for one person and a coffee, which is how most people meet it.
Churros, without the fryer
Cinnamon runs through the whole festival, and our Churros Cake is where it lands — a tender sponge carrying warm cinnamon and spice, in a bundt or a loaf. It is the most immediately comforting thing we bake, and mid-June in Christchurch is precisely when you want it.
The rest of the table
No Brazilian party happens without brigadeiro, and Festa Junina is no exception — there is more on why in our piece on it. Warm pão de queijo covers the savoury side, and a dark Belgian hot chocolate is the closest thing we do to quentão, the spiced hot drink the bonfire is really for.
Where these cakes sit the rest of the year
All three are bundt and loaf cakes, which is our most everyday format — not a celebration centrepiece, just a very good cake to have in the house. The full range is in bundt cakes and tea cakes and loaves. The Corn & Guava also sits in our no-added-gluten range.
How to order
Festival cakes are made to order like everything else — order online and choose a collection date at least two days out. Our Festa Junina page carries the seasonal line-up, or browse the whole menu. Collect from The Welder on Welles Street, 10am to 6pm Tuesday to Friday and 10am to 3pm on Saturday.
