From Italy with Love - Torta della Nonna
In celebration of Valentine's, this weekend some may be lucky enough to book a favourite restaurant (pandemic restrictions lifted) or staying in to prepare a special dinner or ordering in. What we all can agree on no matter what .... we need the perfect dessert to go with it!
Second only to tiramisu in popularity, this Italian dessert was created by the late chef Guido Samorini who ran a restaurant in Florence until relatively recently. When his customers lamented the lack of choice in cakes for dessert, Samorini invented the Torta della Nonna, also known in English as "Grandma's Cake"
This recipe is straight from an article "Wanted in Rome" by Emily Kreiter - a monthly magazine published in English, for expats living in Rome
Photo: Torta della Nonna - Florence, Italy
No time to get the ingredients or energy to prepare today? No worries ... there's always another day to celebrate love.
Ingredients:
For the pastry:
375g plain flour
225g butter
150g powdered sugar
3 egg yolks
Zest of 1 lemon
Handful of sliced almonds
For the custard filling:
200g sugar
1 litre milk
8 egg yolks
40g flour
60g corn starch
1 lemon peel
1 fresh vanilla pod
Directions:
Custard:
Scrap all seeds out of the vanilla pod and place in a saucepan with milk and lemon peel and bring to a gentle boil. In a large bowl, beat the egg yolks with the sugar until light and frothy. Add the flour and continue to beat. Remove the vanilla pod and lemon peel from the milk and gradually add the milk to the egg mixture, beating constantly. Slowly reheat the mixture, stirring constantly, until it's thick. Let the mixture cool with saran wrap clinging to the surface of the mixture so that a skin does not form.
Pastry:
Cut the butter into small pieces, and on a wooden surface, work the flour, sugar and butter together until the butter is completely worked in. Make the mixture into a mount and make a well in the center. Add the egg yolks and lemon zest to the well, and work the ingredients together until you have a smooth, soft dough. Wrap the dough in saran wrap and refrigerate for 30-90 minutes.
Assembly:
Once it has cooled, divide the pastry in half and roll out one half into a disk and place in a tart dish, approximately 1 cm thick. Pour the custard into the tart dish. Roll out the remaining pastry dough into another disk and place it on the custard to close the pie. Decorate the top with sliced almonds. Bake in a preheated oven to 180C for 25-35 minutes until the pastry is golden and the almonds are toasted. Leave to cool and dust with powdered sugar.