Grandma Angela is the greatest cooking teacher you could ever have. She is one of those women who learned how to cook when there were no measuring cups or scales. Her mother was a cook (for weddings, baptisms and all the main religious events they had in our small village) and she keeps all the secrets of the best regional recipes of Abruzzo she learned from my great grandmother. I grew up with her dishes and she’s the one that taught me how to cook. I will always treasure the memories of my childhood summers, when nonna used to teach me how to make a perfect dough for gnocchi and homemade pasta…I was only 5!
I grew up in her kitchen, I’ve been cooking with her all my life, but every time we make something together, I learn something new. This time we made pesche dolci (sweet peaches), called like this because they look like peaches. They are cookies, soaked in alchermes (an Italian liquor that gives them their red colour), filled with crema pasticcera (custard) and covered with granulated sugar.
If you like cooking, you know how difficult it is to give a universal recipe of your dishes. Here’s what I could manage to give you for the cookie dough:
4 eggs
300 gr of sugar
1 kilogram of flour
2 small glasses of milk (1 cup)
2 glasses of olive oil (2 cups)
32 gr of baking powder
1 grated lemon
and for the filling and covering:
custard
chocolate chunks
Alchermes liquor
granulated sugar
Mix flour with baking powder; add eggs and sugar, then oil and milk. Make a soft dough and form small dough balls. Bake them (180 degrees Celsius) and take them out of the oven before they get colored on top (like in the picture below).
Using a knife or a spoon, dig the central part out of the cookies;
soak the cookies in alchermes liquor, then fill half of them with custard and a small piece of chocolate (you can choose the type you like, we prefer milk chocolate);
using the empty cookies, close the filled ones forming a “peach” and roll it in granulated sugar.
…and voilà! Delicious sweet peaches! Anybody wants one?
Recipe © Where The Foodies Go. All Rights Reserved.
Thanks for sharing this, would love to try this one day. Cheers and Happy new year
Thank you for stopping by and for your wishes! 😊 Have a great year! Alessia
Thank you for stopping by 🙂
Your beautiful peaches made me so homesick. My grandmother, and later on my sister, use to make the same peaches (pjeshka in Albanian) using a similar recipe. I haven’t made them ever since moving to Canada, but reading your post and looking at these beautiful peaches made me want to do make them again. Thank you for stopping by my blog and liking my post.
Thank you for visiting our blog! It’s incredible we have almost the same recipe! It is very important for me too because I’ve been making it with my grandma since I was a child. Very nice to meet you! 🙂 Maple
Simply and clearly Awesome, congrats. for the recipe. I´ll make it with my wife Edyta.
Thank you! They are really good, you’ll love them! Nice to meet you! Maple
Maple&Safron , you´re wellcome, and hope you like my recipes, although they are not mine, I love to cook, them sometimes I improvise and add a litle bit of my creativity. Hope to see you soon on my blog.
Hughs for both of you
Thank you for this post! I’ve been looking for a good reliable pesche dolci recipe for quite some time and this looks perfect. I remember the first time I ate them, filled with nutella, it was love. How lovely to learn the recipe from your grandmother! 🙂
Hello Emilia! Nice to hear from you again! Yes, you are right, I was and I am still very lucky! I think there is something special in cooking with your grandma that no one olse can give you! Send us pictures of your pesche when you make them! Ob, and of course we’ll be waiting for you in Abruzzo to make them togetger 😉
So beautiful… do they taste as good as they look?
Yes, they do! 🙂 Come making and tasting them with us 😉
Wow, these cookies are amazing! I’ve never heard of a ‘sweet peach’ but I’d definitely line up to try one if I saw it in a bakery window 🙂 I love that you made these cookies with your beautiful grandmother. She sounds like an amazing woman… there’s nothing like learning traditional recipes straight from the source! Unfortunately, my grandmothers have always been overseas so I haven’t cooked with either of them (though my father’s mother was a terrible cook – I mean TERRIBLE! – so I didn’t miss out on much on the food front). Thanks for this beautiful post xx
She really is Laura! She is a special and strong woman, who crossed the ocean to reach her husband in America while pregnant and started a new life in a new country! Where were your grandmothers from?
Wow. That’s amazing. Strength and resilience in the true sense! My paternal grandmother was English. A red-haired, blue eyed fiery woman who was terrible at cooking but wonderful at telling stories. She used to sing with me next to the piano. She grew up in the war years and still used to ‘ration’ cheese and fruit until she died. My maternal grandmother is part Chinese and part Portuguese. She still lives in Malaysia, she can speak about five languages but unfortunately English isn’t one of them. She was a wonderful cook in the day though. She’s in a nursing home now.
Wow, what an amazing cultural mix, you must be really open-minded and have very special memories!
Wow. These look wonderful. Another fabulous recipe I need to try.
They are really good and easy to make! Our guests love making “pesche” and listening to nonna Angela’s tales of when she lived in Canada after World War II 🙂