Good Recipes Make Good Neighbors

When one moves, whether to a different neighborhood or a different country, one can never quite know what sort of people you’ll be sharing a street with.

But when it comes to our neighbors here in our little town in Italy, we feel like we won the lottery.

Our apartment is on the top floor of a very narrow building, built alongside a much larger 4-story multi-family structure. The patriarch of the family next door, Pietro, built the house we live in before building his current house. His daughter Giuseppina, more or less our age, was born in our house.

From the moment we set foot in our house, this family gave us the most gregarious welcome anyone could ask for. Always offering to help with anything, giving advice on how to deal with various little household issues, lending a stepladder or a tool or a kitchen tool, and bringing various foodstuffs: Biscotti, pasta dishes, produce and eggs – Pietro was a 4th generation contadino who still worked some property just out of town, and he was always happy to share the bounty from a day’s work.

We’ve tried to repay the generosity and kindness in our own humble way when we could, sometimes with food offerings of our own. Especially when we make something that’s more traditional American fare, we often bring them a sample. Chocolate chip cookies or brownies; chicken soup or chili; even a couple of Matt’s homemade bagels, complete with caraway seeds and delivered with a little container of formaggio spamabile (better known in the US as Philly cream cheese).

Our all-time winner recipe, though, came from making a cake for Giuseppina’s 11-year-old daughter a couple of years ago. (Zeneba even stenciled her initial “L” in powdered sugar on the top!) When Giuseppina reported on this cake the next day, she exclaimed one word:

"SQUISITO!!!"

Exquisite, indeed.

The crust is the difficult part; the rest is so easy. This is one of those recipes that looks like you worked super hard, when you really didn't. It came from a friend, who got it from a restaurant in Italy. Here’s the recipe we used:

• Crust:

1 1/4 cups flour (almost 200g)
1/4 cup sugar (50g) 
sprinkle of salt
1/2 tsp baking powder 
1/4 C cold butter (55g)
1 egg

• Filling: 

1 pound ricotta (500g) 
About 1/4 C powdered sugar (start with a little, add more if you like) 
2 TBSP heavy cream 

• Topping: 

8oz dark chocolate, chopped or in chunks
1 C heavy cream (250g)
1 TBSP dark cocoa powder

You could try doing this with a store-bought crust, but I think the homemade one is worth the trouble. The filling is so easy, and the topping is too, so nearly all the work of this pie goes into the crust. 

Put the flour, sugar, salt, cold butter, and baking powder in to a food processor and grind. You will end up with a kind of crumble. Then add the egg and pulse a few more times. I always have to remove the crust at this point to a glass bowl and just work it together in to a ball with my hands. Put the ball of dough in a piece of wax paper and let it sit in the fridge for an hour to cool. 

After an hour, take the dough out, and roll it out. You can do this on a counter with flour, but I find it is easier to roll it out between two pieces of wax paper. I can't find wax paper here in Italy, so I use parchment paper which works just as well. When the dough is rolled out large enough to fill a pie tin, pull off one of the layers of paper and put the dough side down in the pan. Then slowly peel off the other layer of paper and press the dough in to the pan. You can use any scraps you have to fix up the edges of the crust. Then cover the crust (you can use the parchment paper you used to roll the crust out), and put it back in the fridge to chill for another hour. 

After an hour, preheat the oven to 350F (180C). Take the crust out of the fridge, poke a few holes in it with a fork, and put it in the hot oven. Bake for about 10 minutes until it starts to turn golden brown. Be careful not to overcook it! 

While it is baking, you can mix up the filling: put the ricotta, 2 TBSP cream, and a little sugar in a bowl, and whisk it. I like to whisk it to get it creamy, but not super fluffed. I use just a couple spoons of sugar, because I don't like the filling to be too sweet. The chocolate topping is usually sweet enough, and the crust has sugar too. 

Take the crust out of the oven, and when the pie crust is cooled, fill it with the ricotta mixture, then bake that for about 20 minutes. Pull it out of the oven and let it cool. It must be room temp when you do the next step. 

Put the chocolate in a heatproof bowl (or just use a soup pot). For best results is a good idea to either use good quality chocolate chips, or cut the chocolate bar in to small chunks or chips, so it melts easily.  Add the cocoa powder in with the chocolate (you can also skip the cocoa if you like, or you don't have it on hand). Heat 1 cup of heavy cream over low heat until you see small bubbles on the sides of the pan. (Low heat is important so you don't scald the cream). When it is good and hot, pour it over the chocolate and stir immediately -- the cream will melt the chocolate. When it is all melted, pour it over the ricotta filling and use a rubber spatula to spread the chocolate. 

Let it set in the fridge for 2-3 hours to set the ricotta and the chocolate, and then it is good to go! If you want to make a big impression, you can create a stencil in notebook paper, and lay that on top of the chocolate, and then push powdered sugar through a sieve over it. Pull up the stencil and voila! There is a monogrammed cake.  Note: if you do a powdered sugar stencil, it only lasts for a hour or so before it melts in to the cake, so do this if you are serving it to a bunch of people and plan to eat it immediately. Otherwise, just leave it with the glossy chocolate top!

Buon appetito!