Italian Delicacies a la Russe

It’s the season of a Italians-invade-St-Petersburg all over again here – it’s August!

These two Italian recipes were made with a little Russian flair… Not only just using the Russian ingredients but also adding this something à la Russe to them (or rather à la mienne…).

The first recipe, a sweet treat, might also be applied to the leftovers category – we’re still using that enormous amount of apple-everything left from last year – meanwhile making new batch of jams or varenye! This time – with red currants ; )

photo taken at my new job, will surely make a photo-post on this place

Cake with Quadruple Chocolate and Tangerine Apple Marmalade (Torta al quadruplo cioccolato e marmellata di mandarini) translated and adapted from www.kitchenbloodykitchen.com (Grazie, Alice!) will make a super dolce (sweet) and morbido (soft) gingerbread-like cake. My remarks are in italics.

Ingredients:

• 230 g flour – Italian type 00
• 60 g potato starch – I added less, I think you can use cornstarch too
• 150 g sugar
• 50 g unsweetened cocoa
• 7 g baking soda – I made a mix with baking powder + added cinnamon + nutmeg + cardamom
• 150 g natural soy yogurt – I used prostokvasha + milk
• 70 g rice or corn oil – I used sunflower seed oil
• 300 g tangerine or orange marmalade – or try apple jam with bits like I did
• 50 g dark chocolate broken in pieces
• pinch of salt (un pizzico di sale – love it! : )
• chocolate shavings , to decorate – I skipped that

For the syrup: – I skipped that too

• 150 g water
• 80 g sugar
• 5 g unsweetened cocoa

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 180ºC.  Line a 24 cm baking pan with parchment paper.

In the bowl of your mixer, place flour, starch, sugar, cocoa, soda and a pinch of salt. Mix everything well.

Add yogurt, oil and marmalade. Mix until the mixture is homogeneous. With the mixer running, add 100 g of boiling water (I was making everything by hand and so it was quite a challenge to mix and add hot water at the same time…). Stop the mixer and add chocolate in pieces and mix briefly.

Pour the batter in the prepared pan, put in the oven and bake for about one hour. Test with a wooden stick inserted in the center – which I did and realized that after just 42 minutes my cake was already done, so keep an eye on it. 

For the syrup:

Five minutes before the end of baking place all the ingredients for the syrup in a saucepan, bring to boil and keep simmering for 5 minutes.

Once the cake is out of the oven, make indentations all over its surface with a wooden stick or a very Italian tool – uno spaghetto : ). Pour the boiling syrup over the cake. When the cake is cooled, take it out of the pan and decorate with chocolate shavings.

This is the traditional Russian handicraft – Zhostovo_painting on metal trays – which is still perpetuated in Zhostovo village near Moscow. This one is obviously with red currants ; )

Result: My cake didn’t rise as much as the author’s torta thus becoming more dense than it should, probably. But it didn’t prevent the cake to be super soft and chewy with all the apple bits inside. It was also quite sweet and now I think it was better that I (got lazy and…) skipped the syrup part of the recipe. So yes, I cheated a bit – my cake was not a quadruple chocolate delicacy, it was just triple chocolate… haha, JUST =)

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And now some bread. Some panini, to be precise. Some cute spiky panini all’olio which go well with summer herbs and hard or soft cheese. I made these with Spanish olive oil but I’m sure it didn’t prevent them to be as tasty as they would with true olio Italiano.

I added some wholewheat flour and bran to make them a bit tangier (and healthier). As I said, I transformed both Italian recipes into something ‘mine’ (as usual).

Italian Panini all’Olio adapted from wiseanticsoflife.blogspot.com will make cute and very soft rolls. Here are the changes I’ve made to the original recipe and the measurements in grams for those who do ignore ounces : )

you’ll need 453.6 g flour (I mixed in some wholewheat flour + rye & wheat bran), 14 g dry yeast (I threw in a mixture of instant + active yeast, less than 14 grams), 226.8 ml lukewarm water, 2 tsp salt and 4 Tbsp olive oil. For the instructions on how to proceed with the recipe, follow the link above.

I baked my rolls just about 20 minutes, although I made less than 12 rolls all in all.

Result: Easy no-worry rolls with cute spiky crust . They keep well and are soft inside (and wholewheat is good in them too!).

Soon a post on my new job which is already going to be my ex-job soon… Ahaha, I’m mad, I guess!

With the Italian Panini all’Olio recipe I’m glad to participate in the August edition of Panissimo, a monthly bread showcase created by Barbara and Sandra. Each month there’s a great collection of varied bread recipes, be it yeast or sourdough or sweet bread. Check it out!

G.