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?
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