Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Un altro esperimento per la gara delle frappe

As I mentioned, I decided I would use my choir mates as guinea pigs for another type of Mardi Gras dessert: le castagnole (lit=little chestnuts) :). This dessert shares a similar recipe with all Mardi Gras desserts, like bugie, if you remember.. you make a dough, cut it into pieces, fry it and pour powdered sugar on top. In this case, the dough is more greasy than for bugie: it calls for butter instead of olive oil, and there is a larger amount of it.
These are the doses, taken again from Comida's weblog (this is one of her mom's recipes):
4 eggs
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup rum
2/3 cup butter
2 1/2 cups flour
1 tbsp baking powder
I made half of this dough, and also, I decreased the amount of butter (I used about half of what said), and since I didn't have rum I used whiskey :)
To make the dough, beat eggs and sugar until you get a creamy consistency, then add the other ingredients, knead for 10 minutes. Roll it into long 'snakes' as thick as your thumb, and cut the snakes into little pieces. Roll the pieces in order to make them spherical. The final size should be similar to hazelnuts.
Here is a moment of the preparation:Once all your dough is transformed into little balls...You can fry the castagnole, a few at a time, in quite a bit of good frying oil (peanut oil is suggested). I had to change the oil after I cooked half of the castagnole, since it was getting dark. Take the castagnole off the oil when they are brown outside, and put them on some paper towel to drain the excess oil.
Pour powdered sugar on top of them, and serve them warm..
Here is my final result:Lucas and I enjoyed a few of them already.. :) It's really hard to stop yourself from eating them.. they're perfectly bite-size, and so good! But I need to bring them tomorrow to the choir practice :) We'll see if there are some left after.. :)

1 comment:

chemcookit said...

Eheh, grazie!
Allora provero' a cuocerle a temperatura un po' piu' bassa.. questi burners senza fiamma sono difficili da controllare..
Grazie ancora :)