 |
| Forgot to add the confectioners sugar for the photo but beautiful nonetheless! |
I've got an entire blog post on the Sfogliatelle (July Archive: Sfogliatelle-Italian Crack) that I remember as a little girl with the ribbons of pastry that encase a wonderful ricotta filling....might need to take a morning coffee break and go find one in my freezer. They are pure heaven. However, I won't lie. They take time to make because of the pastry dough ribbons. It's one of those things that is really fun to do but you need to plan for doing it.
All is not lost! If you want to experience the basic flavor of these little guys, you won't be disappointed with this recipe. They have a shortbread style crust on the outside and a great ricotta filling that cooks up more like a dense cake on the inside. These are actually pretty easy to make and have all the same great ingredients including my new-found friend..LARD!
These moon shaped pastry/cookies were a big hit with family last week so they'll be on the 'cookie tray' for my niece's wedding in April.
Cookie Trays!!! Historically, the bride's Italian aunties would make trays of cookies for wedding celebrations. I suspect that the reason they aren't made by aunts of the groom is because the bride's aunts would think it was some kind of competition and then all hell would break loose resulting in a shortage of flour, sugar and lard throughout the region.
At my own wedding in 1972, the most wonderful baker in our family was my dad's sister, Aunt Eva. I couldn't believe the tonnage of cookies she waltzed into the house on the day after the wedding when my parents hosted a get-together for family and friends. Granted, there were almost 150 people who stopped by but she probably had 1000 cookies (and 20 different varieties) on those trays. No one left without sampling almost all of the different cookies so they actually disappeared. She set the bar pretty high for the next generation of aunties!
In Italy, wedding venues might be more receptive to a tradition that allows someone to bring these platters of cookies to a reception. However, in the US, unless something comes out of a professional/certified kitchen, the ability to bring your own cookies into most venues is largely frowned upon. This complicates the ability for Italian 'Aunties' to drop a 100 pounds of cookies on a table for the bride. Consequently, those of us who want to uphold tradition need to first make sure that there's going to be an 'after-party' the next day. Otherwise, the bride's parents will need to buy a freezer to store those cookies for the year it takes to eat them.
I've only made cookies for my niece Lauren's wedding (5-7 years ago?). This was because my brother, Mike, hosted about 150 at his house for an Italian style BBQ the next day. I made a bold decision to try replicate what Aunt Eva had done for me as a young bride. Recalling the mountain of cookies that she had created, I went to work a few months in advance and filled up the extra freezer I had with every variety of Italian cookie I could remember my aunt making. This took a bit of trial and error to get recipes right but when I was done, I had made 15-20 different types cookies. Each batch was between 3-6 dozen. I never counted precisely but I'm sure it was respectably close to the 1000 cookie limit.
Every time I slid a new bag of cookies into my immense freezer, I would step back to admire the accumulation...not realizing that transporting them was going to be a hell of a task.
Original plan was to drive to Indiana from Rochester but then we decided to fly. How in the heck do you transport 1000 delicate cookies on a plane? The decision was made to check luggage with clothing. Who cares if we'd lose wedding attire...but, god forbid the cookies don't make it! Each of us carried duffels filled with plastic bags of cookies as carry-ons. At that time, I was a twice weekly business traveler in Rochester and knew all of the TSA guards by name. Nothing I was taking on-board was illegal but they got a huge chuckle out of me being a secret cookie monster when I was normally lugging my PC and briefcase. Before I left the TSA area, I unloaded a few dozen cookies to my favorite TSA guards. Unlikely that he'll ever read this but a big shout out to 'Levi', my all time favorite TSA staff member. He and I bonded over who wore the most exotic eyeglasses. We each had a drawer filled with strange colors and shapes. He might have edged me out when he came to work wearing extra thick white huge frames. They would have made Elton John proud.
The rest of the cookies made it to Indiana (minus a few we snacked on en-route but who was going to miss a dozen when you had almost 1000). I need to mention that cookies are heavy....very heavy. I couldn't wait to unload them on my brother. When we got to his house and began to unpack, he was noticeably hurt by the fact that I had forgotten that he was deathly allergic to hazelnuts and other nuts (except almonds). Italian cookies either have some kind of fruit or nut in almost all of them so I had to carefully steer him towards the only safe cookie....lemon anginetti. Next April, when his second daughter and my lovely niece, Jenna, gets married, I will be bringing another batch of Italian cookies to his new house for one of his epic after parties. He also has a lot more freezer space so I don't have to worry about over-baking and I don't have to transport them on a plane.....so overbaking will just be a happy accident. This time, I'll remember to substitute almonds for hazelnuts so his wife won't have to run for the epi-pen again.
To my children, nieces and nephews.....this recipe isn't hard at all and doesn't require special equipment...or any equipment except your hands....so give it a try. You can buy some of the ingredients that I choose to make...like the candied orange peel or whole milk ricotta. You can get orange peel on your Prime account for $8 a pound so there really aren't any excuses. But, if you want to save money, you can make the orange peel by just eating a few oranges and boiling the peel in sugar (follow the recipe in the July archive for 'Sfogliatelle-Italian Crack' ). There's also a homemade ricotta recipe that's also fool-proof but the grocery store version can be used too.
Have fun with these. They are a great pastry to bake, freeze and enjoy whenever you want something special!!!
Ingredients:
Pastry:
- 1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 3 oz. lard (if you don't have a scale, this is about 6 tablespoons of lard..but get yourself a cheap weight scale. It's such a useful tool in the kitchen)
- 3 Tbs water
- 1 large egg yolk, for brushing the top of the pastry when finished
Filling:
- 1 cup semolina flour (you can find this in most grocery stores near the flour or special nutrition section).....I like Caputo but you need to order this on-line in most locations.
- 1 cup whole milk ricotta (you can make this with 8 cups of whole milk and a thermometer...but most rational people just buy it)
- 1 1/4 cups sugar
- 1 large egg, beaten
- 1/2 cup chopped citron or citrus peel (I made my own candied orange and lemon peel but you can order on-line if you can't find it)
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
- 2 drops Cinnamon Oil (I ordered mine on-line since I use it a lot these days with Italian pastries)
- Salt (just a dash....about 1/8th teaspoon)
Confectioners sugar for sprinkling on top when baked
Instructions:
This recipe doesn't make use of a mixer. Those wonderful nonna bakers in Italy like to get their hands into their food. I'm getting to like it since it doesn't require nearly as much cleaning up bowls and mixer equipment. However, I don't see why you couldn't use your mixer to make both the pastry dough and the filling. Both are the consistency of cookie doughs so whatever works for you should be fine. I'll demonstrate the 'hand mixing' in the attached.
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees. For the record, the cookbook had the temp at 250 degrees for 9 minutes! This is one of the reasons I'm making a record for all of these recipes. Many of them require a high degree of interpretation or good judgment...:). Use parchment paper on your cookie sheet. Parchment makes these easy to assemble and bake on the same sheet. Plus, they never stick and then you throw out the parchment...easy cleanup!!
- Pour flour into a mixing bowl. Create a well.
- Add sugar, lard and water to the well and mix this up with your fingers gradually bringing in the flour as you 'squish' the lard between your fingers. Regarding lard, it's easy to still find in grocery stores. I found mine in the Mexican food section. Thank goodness (or foodness) that some Latino cooks still use lard for frying tortillas. Lard really enhances the flavor of these pastries so I encourage you to try it. If it goes against your diet or principles to use lard, I think solid crisco might be the only decent alternative because it has the same type of texture.....but you'll sacrifice flavor. Once you get it to the point where most of the ingredients are basically incorporated, you can start to knead it lightly until you've got a smooth ball of 'cookie like' dough. This is where it's probably just fine to use a mixer, as you would with any type of cookie dough. This isn't a springy pasta dough so when you put your finger into the middle of it, it won't spring back.
- Wrap the dough in plastic and put it in the refrigerator for about an hour or overnight. The dough won't harden because it contains lard (or crisco if that's what you choose to use) but it makes it a little more stable when you start to form small cookie discs. Using butter instead of lard or crisco would probably make it a little harder to work with.
- Make the filling by chopping the citrus peel and then mixing all of the filling ingredients in a bowl. Don't forget the salt..... just that little dash kicks up the flavor. I tried mixing with a spoon but this is where I had to get my hands dirty again. So this is probably another step you can use your mixer if you want. I just re-purposed my dough bowl and saved the time of cleaning yet another bowl! Because this filling contains semolina flour, it's more like a cookie dough itself. As I've mentioned....making your own citrus peel is easy. You can find the recipe in the July archives for my blog on the original ribbon pastry 'Sfogliatelle-Italian Crack'.
- Take the dough out of the fridge, divide it into 12 pieces. Dip each piece in a little bit of flour to make it easy to mold into a flat oval. Don't use a rolling pin. Just pat these little pieces into a 3 by 4 inch oval and you're ready to fill.
- Fill each oval with about 1/4 cup of the filling, fold the dough into a moon shape. They will feel overstuffed and you might have tears or breaks in the dough but the filling won't ooze out because it's a dense filling with flour and egg. If you have a pastry trimmer, clean up the edges or just use a knife. Heck...you really don't have to clean up the edges if you don't want to but they look a little neater.
- Brush the tops of the pastries with the egg yolk, bake for 25-30 minutes in the center rack of your oven. When they are golden brown on the bottom and top, they are done.
- In spite of the fact that I stuffed these little moon pies to the breaking point, I still had about 2 cups of leftover filling. I sprayed a little souffle cup and filled it up. You can probably use cupcake tins as well. I baked in the oven about 45-50 minutes. These were like dense cupcakes when I turned them out. So...if you like this option vs. the pastry option, you can skip that pastry part and go straight to cooking up the ricotta filling....but that pastry adds a really nice flavor and texture so give it a shot.
- Sprinkle with confectioners sugar (OK, I forgot this step when I took the photo). These freeze easily so you just defrost and serve at room temp.
Give these pastries a shot. They really are easy. The hardest part is filling and folding them because you start to feel like you're trying to stuff way too much into the pastry. It doesn't matter if the dough breaks a little or the filling comes out the sides. They bake up without any problem.
Enjoy!
Buona Mangiata
