Hummingbirds

I forgot to show these pictures that we took when we went at Lucas's parents last time. Their house in this season is gorgeous, immersed in the green, and staying on the patio drinking tea and watching the birds is so relaxing.
They have this red bird feeder that attracts the hummingbirds. I never saw any in my life, before, and they're just amazing. They're so tiny, and they move their wings so fast that when they fly they make the same noise of a big bee.
They're super fast, but we managed to capture a few pictures of them.. so here they are:

I due dolci preparati per la festa di compleanno

I will write here the recipes for the two desserts that I made as surprise cakes for Crissy and Alison at my birthday party.

Crostata di frutta (hard-crust fruit cake)

You saw two versions of this dessert in the previous two posts. It's a wonderful summer dessert, when all the fresh fruit is available. To make it you need:
300 g flour (~2.5 cups)
200 g sugar (~1 cup)
100 g butter (1 stick) - must be at room temperature before you use it
At least, these are the 'original' ingredients. In my version, there is about half the sugar and a little less butter/flour ratio. Mix the flour and the sugar. Add the butter. Work it with your hands in the flour and sugar dough. Usually, I cannot get a dough that sticks together using just these ingredients (maybe because I cut a little bit on the butter?) so I add a little amount of milk in order to get to a workable dough. But don't add too much otherwise the crust will be too hard.
Spread the dough with your hand on the bottom of a baking pan (better if you have some antisticking foil or if you butter and flour the pan), and use some dough to make some borders a bit higher than the bottom of the crust. Before putting the crust in the oven, you need to add some dried beans on top of it. Now, I'm not crazy. :) They are necessary to prevent the dough to rise. It needs to stay flat.. so you put beans all over the dough and when the cake cooks, it will not rise. You can also use pasta, but if you do, then you have to throw away the pasta once the cake is cooked because it gets slightly burnt - instead, the beans are fine and you can reuse them in some soup later on :) :) So, cook the dough with beans on top for ~20 min at 400F. It should begin to show a golden color once you take it out. If the beans were spread correctly, the dough will be flat when you take it out. Let it cool down. Once it's cold, remove the beans from the top of the crust! They should not be stuck.
While the dough is cooking you can make the cream to spread on top. This cream can be very variable. If you're really lazy you can just use some jam. Strawberry is good :)
Otherwise you can make a custard - or custard-like cream. My favorite cream is this:
2 tbsp flour
3 tbsp sugar
lemon peel
~2.5 cups milk
1 egg
Mix the flour and the sugar in a pan. Add the egg and mix together. Slowly add the milk, keep stirring, until all the milk is added. If you do it slowly you don't get any clumps. Put it on the stove and bring to boil, slowly, stirring from time to time. It will begin to stick to the bottom if you don't stir, after a while. Add the lemon peel in big chunks when it begins to boil. After it boils, keep stirring for ~5 minutes or until it has the consistency of a spreadable cream or a little bit more fluid (it gets harder when it cools down, obviously). Then, let it cool down. When it's cold, take the chunks of lemon peel out, they gave enough flavor.
There are as many variations as you may think of for this cream. You can add vanilla flavor (strongly recommended), for example. Or, you can use some spicy tea instead of part of the milk :) I did this once, it turned out good and the cream had a nice orangy color :)
When both the crust and the cream are cold, spread the cream on the crust and decorate with fruit. I'd suggest to sprinkle some lemon juice on the fruit before, so it doesn't turn black. Or, you can prepare some unflavored gelatin, and throw it on top of the cake. This will make the cake look very professional, but I don't like its taste and consistency, so I never do that :) Have fun with the fruit decoration of the cake! And obviously, the cake can have any shape you want.. I showed some rectangular ones in this blog, but I used to make round ones.

Torta di cioccolato e nocciole (chocolate-hazelunt cake)

I love chocolate-hazelnut cakes, and I thought it would be good for Alison, since she likes chocolate too :)
120 g (~1 cup) roasted hazelnuts
200 g (~1.5 cups) flour
5 eggs
~2.5 tsp baking powder
~1/4 stick of butter, melted
~1 cup milk
2 tbsp sweetened cocoa powder
~0.5 cups sugar (use more if you use bitter cocoa powder)
whipped cream
Grind the hazelnuts in a food processor until they are as fine as a flour. Add this flour to the chocolate and mix it.
In a bowl, mix the baking powder to the (normal) flour and add a tiny bit of salt. In another bowl, mix the egg yolks with the sugar with a mixer until they become foamy and yellow. Add the egg yolk mixture to the flour/baking powder mixture. Add the melted butter to it, keep mixing. Add the hazelnut/cocoa mixture. Add the milk to this batter. It should now have a nice soft consistency. Whip the egg whites until very hard. Add them gently to the rest of the ingredients.
Pour the batter in a baking pan. Originally they suggested to bake the batter in two separate pans, half and half. I didn't have two pans of the same size, so I used only one pan deep enough to contain all the dough. Cook at 350F for ~35 min. Let it cool down in the oven semi-open.
When it's cold, cut the cake in two discs if you didn't bake it in two different pans. Add whipped cream on one of the discs and put the second disc on top. Decorate with more whipped cream on top and serve soon.

Feste di compleanno - 2 e 3

The next birthday party that I had was with Lucas and his parents.. they were really nice and came down to visit us on Friday night, and brought us out for dinner - and they also gave me a lot of wonderful gifts! Some glassware that you'll see in my blog soon :) We had a nice dinner at a Cuban restaurant (Carmen's, in Morrisville). I liked my spicy shrimp, and the fried small plantains were very good :) Although, their dulce de tres leches was not comparable to the one that Luisa made for Jorge's birthday party :)

On Saturday, we had a potluck birthday party (they forbid me to cook on my birthday) :) - it was really fun! People brought a lot of wonferful food from all over the world.. we had stuffed cabbage by Rich, Shish-Kabab by Lucas, broccoli salad by Alison, squash casserole by Crissy, Indian tomato rice by Selina, Russian salad by Alina, stuffed peppers and mango apricot by Yan Li.. it was wonderful :)
People talked a lot, which was the goal of the party.. :)
And in the end, we had three cakes! In fact, I made two since I wanted to celebrate also Alina's and Crissy's belated birthdays. So, I'll show here the pictures of the cakes:
My cake - a hummingbird cake, nicely bought by Lucas :), which was really good (nuts and cinnamon and cream)
Alison's cake - it was a chocolate-hazelnut cake that I'll give the recipe of shortly, because it turned out very good :)
Crissy's cake - another crostata di frutta, with a different fruit drawing :) - I'll give the recipe shortly

I received a lot of gifts, and the nicest thing was to see how many friends I know. If you want to see their pictures, go on my picture website.

Feste di compleanno - 1

Yes, if you can read Italian... :) you will understand that I had more than one birthday party!! In fact, so far I had three :)
The first party was a great open-air party at Gisela's house, meant to be a party for three birthday-girls! We all turned 28 in the same period, so we decided to get together and have a common party.
It was great!!!!! I had really a lot of fun. We had it on July 8th, right after Italy won the world cup.. so the other Italian girl who was having the birthday with us (Ross) was superexcited and happy!! I don't really care too much, to be honest :) - I tried to watch the match, but fell asleep, so I decided to keep cooking for the party :)
In fact, between Gisela, Ross and I, we brought a humongous amount of food to the party :) There were focaccia, with pesto/ricotta or with onions and tuna or with tomatoes, then I made eggplants under oil and garlic and parsley, a quiche, two rice salads, and Ross had two pasta salads, flatbread, and Gisela made a baked chicken, and we had spreads.. I will not write recipes here, also because I made most of the food for other parties, so you should be able to retrieve the recipes using the 'search' option of the blog, if you want.
We also had three wonderful home-made cakes:
This was my cake (crostata di frutta). I made it - I love it, and my mom used to make it for me for my birthday. It's not hard to make, and it's fun to decorate, and delicious..
This was Gisela's cake, made by chef Vlasta :) It's a great walnut/chocolate cake, it's so professional!
This was Ross's self-prepared dessert: two wonderful real tiramisu!
I was so happy that so many of my friends came, from different places. Joanna took the pictures of the party for me, and you can see them on my picture website.
I'll just post here this one of Lucas and I. I love this picture. Thanks Joanna!
To see more party pictures, click here.

Quattro luglio

I haven't posted again in a too long time -well, my life has been really busy recently. But I'll try to post some summaries about the main 'events' that could be interesting..

First of all, the wonderful party that we had for the 4th of July at Kelley's parents.

(per chi non lo sa: il 4 luglio e' la festa della liberazione americana, come il 25 aprile in Italia, ma con un numero di bandiere decisamente piu' elevato.. :) )

Kelley's hobby is fireworks.. and for July 4th, every year, she puts up a wonderful show for her family and friends.. this year Lucas and I had the privilege to be invited to attend it!!
We arrived on Saturday, and we stayed overnight at Jason and Kelley's place - and Jason prepared a wonderful dinner and breakfast for us! Then, we left to go to Kelley's parents. They have a house in north Virginia. I found out that I love that place. It reminds me so much of Italy! It's hilly, and full of vineyards, and trees, and farms. I really thought about where my grandparents live, close to Turin. So, this put me in a great mood. :)
We arrived there around 12, and we started munching on the appetizers a few hours later. They were delicious! Kelley and Erin made spinach/artichoke and crabe dips, and some deviled eggs.. it was impossible to resist.
But dinnertime was not too far! We grilled chicken drums, and we had wonderful ribs and potato salad, and other really nice side dishes.
To see the pictures of the party, please go visit my picture website.
We had a really nice time with all the people, during the dinner. At the end, we also had some wonderful desserts - tiramisu, cupcakes, and some lime cheesacake.. so wonderful!
But the climax of the party, that we were all waiting for were.. the fireworks!!
I was really impressed by Kelley. We could see her figure moving around with a torchlight at the bottom of the valley were she was starting the fireworks from.. in the sulphureous smoke.. while we could enjoy the amazing fireworks she was setting off for us!!
I managed to capture a few good images of them.






... But it was impossible to really capture with a camera the movement and the greatness of the fireworks!

On Sunday, Lucas and I went for some wineries that we found out are very common in Virgina.. we found some really good ones. The best was Hartwood Winery - strongly recommended if you happen to be around there.