easy recipe

Single portion Tiramisu in country cups

Pubblicato il by undolcealgiorno
Single portion Tiramisu in country cups

Tiramisu is an Italian classic.
It’s probably the most famous Italian cake in the world. Because of course mascarpone cheese is damn good!
Probably it’s not so easy to find abroad, and likely quite expensive, but when you will try this cake, you will not regret about your efforts to find it.
The name “Tiramisu” litterally means “pick/lift me up” because the legend says it has aphrodiasiac powers. I honestly doubt it ahaha but of course it’s a very energizing cake!
I prepared these nice single-serving Tiramisu-s because my mother often teaches cooking classes for foreign people who want to learn both Italian language and cooking 😛
There’s a famous language school near our hotel, they teach foreigners language of course, and we take care of the cooking part!
Tiramisu is a very fast and easy recipe. It doesn’t need to be cooked, just stored in the frigde.
If I have to compare Tiramisu to a famous English dessert i would say “trifle”, even if the flavour and method is totally different.

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Sweet baked ricottas with chocolate and almonds

Pubblicato il by undolcealgiorno
Sweet baked ricottas with chocolate and almonds

The sweet baked ricottas are an anti-panic recipe. That recipe you will need when uninvited or unexpected guests will land at your home and you have nothing to prepare a cake, no flour, no butter, no milk, nothing!!!
To prepare the sweet baked ricottas you just need three common ingredients: ricotta, eggs and sugar.
Then you can add everything you want, or that your pantry offers, I had almonds and milk chocolate, but you can easily add other flavours: nuts, hazelnuts, pine nuts, pistachios, dark chocolate, white chocolate, lemon zest, mixed berries, vanilla, cinnamon, or everything you want….just don’t add…broccoli for example 😛
Or if you don’t have anything else, they will be damn good also using the three basic ingredients.
They are ready in 3 minutes, they cook for 30 minutes, in 35 minutes you will have a dessert ready to be eaten. They are good served warm, with the chocolate still melted.
Prepare them in a nice small casserole so you can serve them to you guests inside the baking dish.
The ricottas will rise a lot in the oven, and the chocolate will probably run long the side of the casserole, don’t worry! They will look country, rustic and home-made (of course they don’t look so much elengant and chic :P), and that’s a warranty of freshness and good quality.
The sweet baked ricottas are a gluten free recipe, so they are perfect for celiacs.
When you will plunge your spoon inside those ricottas you will find a creamy cake with melted chocolate inlays and a crunchy almondy surface.
Simply amazing.

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Coconut cookies with dark chocolate cubes

Pubblicato il by undolcealgiorno
Coconut cookies with dark chocolate cubes

This is a family recipe. My mom used to prepare the coconut cookies when I was a child.
As all the good recipes it never gets old.
I took this recipe from one of her old crinkled agendas. To flip through those pages is like to do a big jump in the past. Cut outs from 70/80ies cooking magazines, recipes written by hand, footnotes printed in the same agenda about home economics, and how-to-dos: how to keep the house clean, make the laundry, wash the dishes correctly, take away tenacious stains, etc.
I had much fun reading all this weird stuff, I must admit.
The original recipe didn’t have chocolate in it. My mom added chocolate drops, while I put an entire chocolate bar inside these cookies, cutted into pieces.
The result was amazing! The coconut cookies have a crunchy and golden surface, they are soft and fragrant thanks to coconut and butter, and have a creamy inside, thanks to the big quantity of chocolate, which melts during the baking and looks like black lava who tries to come out from the cracks on their surface.
I really loved them, and so did everyone who ate them!

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Mini nutella cheesecake in a jar

Pubblicato il by undolcealgiorno
Mini nutella cheesecake in a jar

I am an Italian who loves cakes, this is a matter of fact!
Given that, when I prepare a cheesecake, which better ingredient than Nutella should I use? No one else! This is the right answer 😛
If you have read the intro of the English section of this blog you probably know what I’m speaking about.
I’m in love with both Italian and Anglosaxon cakes (American AND English), especially muffin, cupcakes, brownies, pies and cheesecakes. When I’m baking a cake I always take a look to the original recipe but I try to rearrange it using Italian ingredients, for three main reasons: 1. availability, 2. tradition 3. sometimes just because they are damn good, like nutella, mascarpone, almonds, fruit, etc.
For example we use to flavour nearly all our cakes with lemon zest instead of vanilla seeds, because you know…we have plenty of lemon trees, while vanilla it’s very expensive here!
When I have prepared these mini nutella cheesecakes i wanted to use one of the most famous italian products, Nutella, for creating a classic English cake, the no-bake cheesecake.
I have choosen the no-bake cheesecake because i think that cooked Nutella isn’t good. After undergoing a high temperature its flavour will be terribly ruined…
I also used a typical American way to serve mini cheesecakes, which i find really lovely, into little mason jars, those jars used to store home-made marmalades and conserves.
This way you can easily offer to your guests/friends a single-serving cheesecake in a tiny and cute jar without getting worried about slices and portions.

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Spiced muffins with almonds and cream

Pubblicato il by undolcealgiorno
Spiced muffins with almonds and cream

This recipe mixes the italian taste with the american/anglosaxon one!
The italian taste is of course represented by almonds and cream, while the anglosaxon by spices and muscovado sugar which is inside the muffins.
I prepared this muffins for some friends of mine who are really “picky” 😛
One is allergic to nickel, so when I have to prepare a cake for him I’m always in panic. I cannot use chocolate, cocoa, wholewheat flour, shell fruit (nuts, pine nuts, hazelnuts).
the only ones I can use are almonds, which are tolerated by allergic people…
The other one (my boyfriend :P) doesn’t like dried fruit and fresh fruit….so as you can understand I was in real troubles.
I built this recipe specifically for them, trying to create something good with the few elements I had, and I have to admit it worked!!!
Those muffins were soft and spongy thanks to the cream, had a crunchy surface thanks to the almonds, and an intense flavour, because I put ginger and cinnamon to spice them.
The brown colour is given by the muscovado sugar, no wholemeat flour was killed for the making of this muffins.

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Milka brownie cake with toffee and hazelnuts

Pubblicato il by undolcealgiorno
Milka brownie cake with toffee and hazelnuts

I know, i have tons of brownies recipes in my blog (english translations will come, sooner or later) but i can’t resist!!!
brownies are among my favourite cakes!
the brownie cake takes inspiration from this Milka chocolate bar, i bought two bars about six months ago. i ate one of them in 3 evenings, then assaulted from guilt i promised myself i would use the other to make a cake, so i put it into a closet and forgot about it for half a year.
yesterday i discovered it again, it was going to expire, so i decided to make a brownie cake.
this wonderful bar is made from 5 layers. yes, you read it right! 5 layers!!!
milk chocolate, white chocolate, toffee, hazelnuts and milk chocolate again. 2 centimeters thick, half meter long. 300 gramms of lightness.

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