Italian cuisine isn’t ‘big’ on desserts – it’s the least important part of most meals. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have some delicious traditional desserts to try. This recipe for Torta della Nonna comes from the kitchen of Convivio Rome Italian Cooking Holidays, and was passed down to head chef Guido Santi by his grandmother. If you click here you can read more about their courses.
Torta della Nonna
This means grandmother's cake, and is a Tuscan and Roman classic. There are many variations – well, grandmothers vary. You will nearly always see some sort of Torta della Nonna on sale in pastry shops – they generally look like custard tarts or flans, but sometimes the name is given to basic plain cakes.
Torta della Nonna can be served at the end of a meal, but is just as good by itself – perhaps taken with a coffee in the afternoon.
Ingredients
For the pastry:
- 500 g of flour
- 4 - 5 egg yolks
- grated orange peel
- vanilla flavouring
- 300 g of butter
- 200 g of icing sugar.
For the ricotta cream:
- 300g of ricotta
- 4 egg yolks
- half a litre of milk (room temperature, not straight from the fridge)
- 60 g of plain white flour
- 150 g of sugar.
- Pine-nuts to decorate.
Method1. Prepare the pastry by mixing all the ingredients carefully and leave this mixture in the fridge for a while.
2. Now prepare the custard. Mix the egg yolks in a mixing bowl with the sugar and vanilla flavouring. Slowly add the flour. Add the warm milk and mix carefully.
3. Put the mixture in a pan on a low heat. Continuously stir the custard for 3 minutes after it starts boiling. Then mix the custard together with the ricotta.
4. Take the pastry mix out of the fridge. Roll out the pastry mix with a rolling pin until thin. Form half the pastry into a 'bowl-like shape' inside a round ovenproof dish or flan case.
Then pour the ricotta cream into the pastry.
5. Top with more rolled out pastry and seal the cake around the side. Brush some egg on top of the cake and sprinkle some pine-nuts on top. Bake at 160 C for 30 to 40 minutes if oven is fan forced, gas mark 3, 325F, otherwise for 1 hour. Serve with icing sugar on top if you like.
Cakes similar to this, made from ricotta, appear all over Italy. Some whisk the ricotta first to lighten it and use the grated rind of a lemon, instead of an orange. You can also make a ricotta pudding, flavoured with dark rum.
Try this recipe for Chestnut Cake from the Garfagnana. Or have a go at some traditional English baking with this recipe for Lardy Cake.
Rebecca Ford - I'm a UK based freelance travel writer and photographer - and the country I most like to visit is Italy. That's not just because of the ...
