Tonight, for the first time, I consciously considered my mother’s tools in the kitchen. I am making Joulutorttu (Finnish Prune Tarts), which require a cream cheese and butter pastry. It occurred to me, as I tossed butter and cream cheese chunks into the food processor, my mother did not have a Cuisinart. She must have worked the shortening into the flour with a hand pastry cutter and that must have taken ages. And elbow grease.

We know from watching Julia Child, that practice does make it easier to whip cream by hand or make mince out of 20 lbs of onions. So perhaps my mother was simply practiced. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it was less work. But it was work she did often: Mixing yeast breads by hand, kneading and rolling dough; chopping citron for holiday cookies and stollen (and freezing because why not?); cooking down pots of fruit and sugar throughout the summer (in a kitchen with no air conditioning). I love to bake, but I don’t even like to boil water if it’s more than 80 degrees outside.

I stood in my kitchen, with the tattered hand-written recipe card, my mom’s citrus juicer and measuring cup and saw – this is what it means to bake with love. My mother sweated over those pots so we could have a bite of summer in the winter; she rolled all that dough and cut all that shortening so we could quite literally take in her love and her caretaking, her motherhood and warmth, with every bite of the things she made for us.

These thoughts filled me as I zested and squeezed oranges, rolled and warmed cinnamon sticks, and set the prunes to simmering (remembering that a low simmer helps the cinnamon infuse). I was suddenly woozy, overcome with longing for my mother. I put my hands to my hot face, smelled oranges and cinnamon, and remembered my mother’s hands, strong and capable, showing me how to roll dough.

I’m not washing my hands tonight. I’m going to get into bed and breathe my mother’s love until I fall asleep.

Torta della Nonna

When I went to Italy last fall, the first dessert I had in a proper sit-down restaurant was the Torta della Nonna: Crema pasticcera layered between a top and bottom pate sucree-like crust, topped with pignoli and a generous dusting of zuccero al velo. The restaurant, a neighborhood trattoria around the corner from my Florence hotel, was about as homey as you could ask for. And on a chilly evening (after a carbonara worthy of many international texts), the waiter brought over the torta (complimenti della casa) and from the first bite, I was hooked. When I was down to my last forkful, the waiter came by; I told him I was sad because the dessert was almost over. He gently took my fork and divided that last bite into two micro-bites. “Due morsi,” he said with a smile. (That concept of “two bites” came to define my experience of Florence.)

When I got home, torta della nonna was the first thing I wanted to bake. But I held off. I wanted it to be a pure experience – which, for me, meant I wanted to bake it from an authentic Italian ricetta written in authentic Italian. Just about one year later, I made it.

The recipe: Torta della Nonna

The crust: Pastry continues to be my culinary rovina (bête noire). It simply doesn’t like to work for me. Pate sucree is a particular challenge: I have never successfully rolled it, it’s always a patch job of scraps layered and smoothed into the dish. This was no different. I assembled the bottom crust in pieces and for the top, I rolled it between waxed paper sheets and chilled it for 10 minutes. It worked, but it took work to achieve and it was, in the end, too thick. The crusts I had in Italy were very thin. Mine was about 1/8-inch and a bit like al dente pasta. (The ricetta did not call for blind baking the bottom crust, but next time I will because the pastry gives me such a hard time.)

The crema pasticcera: Friends, I could live on this and it’s something I can make in my sleep. The ricetta asked for farina rather than cornstarch as a thickener; it also called for what, in my opinion, was a huge amount of zucchero. The flavor was terrific (if sweet) with the lovely limona and vaniglia notes. The texture was a bit off, not super smooth like you get with cornstarch. Next time I would dial up the limona and vaniglia, cut the zucchero by a third, and use cornstarch in the crema.

Finish: Super easy, especially if you’re a dab hand with the crust. The downside is that you absolutely have to let the torta cool completely and then chill a bit before cutting. I could not wait and my portion, while tasty, was not at all pretty.

This ricetta makes a large 10-inch dessert. That’s alotta torta. I’ve got half in the freezer, will report back on how it holds up. With a bit more practice, I think Torta della Nonna will become a spring dinner party staple. Ciao!

San Francisco seems to be, among many other things, the city of the letterpress. There are likely as many small presses as caffe presses in town, most doing cards and many doing them memorably. At last fall’s Renegade Craft’s Fair, I bought a stack of yummy almost bespoke cards, including about 10 of these for obvious reasons.

I later realized that the card should speak to the recipient and not the sender, and I don’t know all that many bakers…. At any rate, I share them with you in case you have bakers and other clever foodies in your life. They are from Nourishing Notes which has an Etsy shop.

In researching the details , I learned that this particular card is pressed in Chicago, not the Bay Area.

Ah me.

I hadn’t realized how long it has been since my last post! Much has changed in those nearly two years (!). I’ve moved from Los Angeles to Oakland/Bay Area. It’s been a bit of a ride, this transition, but the upside is that (a) I haven’t stopped baking, and (b) there’s a wealth of new bakeries and patisseries to discover! I always imagine I’m going to post every week and yadda yadda. No promises, just good intentions.  Promise!