Christmas

You ask, what could be more decadent, and I say absolutely nothing. Cartellate are traditionally made during Christmas. They are traditional Pulgiese fried pastries, filled with roasted almonds, honey, spices and chocolate.

They are a holiday cookie and although mostly made at Christmas time, they are our star dessert on our Thanksgiving table. They just seemed so suited to a beautiful Thanksgiving dessert table. 

These cookies are a labor of love and not easy to make, but the good news is that you can place the shells in a brown paper bag and keep some for Christmas.

http://turosdolci.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/traditional-holiday-cookie-cartellatecluster-are-filled-with-honey-nuts-spices/ 

We always have some Italian dishes during our holidays. Whether it is Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve or Easter, there is always ravioli on our table as a first dish. We would set up an assembly line with all of us pitching in to make hundreds of them before Thanksgiving so that we could have them for Christmas also. They freeze very well, but don’t ever defrost them before cooking them, just put them into a large amount of salted boiling water directly from the freezer.

http://turosdolci.wordpress.com/2009/10/27/ricotta-ravioli-from-“the-old-country”/

A late entry. For Christmas I made stollen with a recipe that looked like it would produce something close to what I know from The Netherlands.

Dutch Regale's Almond/Rum Stollen

I did look at many recipes, but finally decided on a mix of two recipes. I used mostly the recipe from Glezer's Artisan Baking across America for "Dutch Regale's Almond Stollen," but incorporated a slightly different mix of dark and golden raisins with a small amount of candied cherries, all soaked overnight in rum. Dutch stollen uses something called "sukade," but I haven't found that available here.

I suppose this is not an easy recipe (recipe post here). The first try resulted in something that was delicious, but a little flat and dense. It was almost more like a somewhat moist shortbread. For the second try I did the same recipe but worked more on developing the initial dough. The result was better (see picture, although this is not a picture of the best specimen: it disappeared before I could take a picture) and surely was declared delicious by all that ate it.

The almond paste was made from equal weights (250 g) of almond flour (I'm too lazy to blanch and grind almonds), fine granulated sugar, and an egg. I made three times this recipe about two weeks ahead of time. The texture and taste improves notably by keeping it in the fridge over that time.

The stollen went to us and some close friends where we celebrated Christmas. For many other friends and neighbors I made Panettone. We had a progressive block party on the 29th and my wife signed us (me) up for the bread course. I baked 4 baguettes, 3 epis and 3 loaves of Tom Leonard's Country French. I've pictured all these before, so no new pictures.