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Sweets
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Focaccia (flat cake)
This is the typical cake of Bagno di Romagna, prepared without the use of yeast according to the 200 years old recipe followed by the baker of the village. The shape is a cylinder of 15/18 cm of height, crumbly and with a thin crust. The inside is soft and sponge-like.
Ingredients for 1 Kg. flat cake:
12 eggs, Kg._ sugar, g. 300 flour, g. 10 g. grated lemon -peel.
Pour the yolk of eggs in a tureen and beat them; add sugar and blend them with the whisk until you have a creamy mixture; pour the egg-whites in another tureen, and beat them to a froth and add them to the mixture in the first tureen, and carefully blend with a wooden spoon. Gradually add flour and the grated lemon-peel, always stirring.
Melt a few butter on a baking-pan and pour the mixture into it. Put it into the oven (160° C.) and cook for 1 hr. and 20 min. Never open the oven during the first hour or the cake goes flat.
When the cake is ready, take the focaccia out of the baking-pan by cutting it out with a knife, turn it upside down and put in a dessert serving dish. It will be more savoury if served the day after. It will be delicious and soft in the next 15 days.
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Sweet Schiaccina
Ingredients:
8 eggs, Kg. 1.7 flour, g. 140 butter, g. 140 margarine, g. 800 sugar, baking-powder for a ring-shaped cake prepared with 4 eggs (already prepared and on sale at the shops in the area), two vanillin doses, a lemon, grated orange-peel, g. 90 ‘Strega’ liquor, 350 g. raisin, two doses yeast, 400 g. yeast for bread, a glass and a half milk.
Preparation of "Formento"
To prepare the cake, by the ‘pasta del fromento’ (this is the dough that is to be dried) on sale at your baker’s and let it stand for two days.
In the afternoon put it in a little of tepid water, melt it and add a little of flour, but mind it has to stay almost soft. In the end sprinkle with a little of flour and cut an ‘X’ on the top of it. Let it stand for some hours, add a handful of flour to the mixture and knead it with yeast previously dissolved in tepid water. Let it leaven until next morning.
Preparation:
Pour the flour on the table to form a heap with a hole in the centre; put the "formento" mixture in the hole and add one dose of yeast dissolved in a few tepid milk.
Pour eggs in a pot, add sugar and blend them carefully. Add melt butter, ‘Strega’ liquor, grated orange and lemon-peel, salt, two doses of vanilla to tepid milk. Mix everything with flour and ‘formento’. Towards the end add the baking-powder for the ring-shaped cake.
Wash raisin and dry it carefully. Let the mixture rest all night long. In the morning add raisin, work carefully. In the meantime melt lard in a baking-pan; put the mixture in it. Let it leaven for about 5-6 hours and then bake it in the oven (160° - 180° C.).
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 Chestnut-cake
(In dialect: e l miecc ed castagna)
Ingredients a medium-size baking-tin chestnut cake
1 Kg chestnut flour, water, salt, shelled pine-seeds or nuts, rosemary, lard or olive-oil.
In a tureen mix chestnut flour, water, salt and a handful of shelled pine-seeds or minced nuts, to obtain a dense, but not too dense, mixture that can drip like honey.
Melt the lard or pour olive-oil (or butter, if you prefer) in the medium-size baking-tin; pour the mixture in the baking-tin to obtain a one-finger-thick layer. Decorate the upper side with pine-seeds or nuts, a few rosemary leaves and a little of oil.
Bake it in the over (150° C.) until the surface is chocolate-coloured and starts cracking, possibly controlling if it is cooked with a tooth-pick.
Let it cool down, cut into small portions and serve it.
Nowadays ingredients of chestnut cake vary from place to place and from person to person. Chestnut and wheat flour can be mixed (almost the same doses) and raisin, grated citrus fruit-peel, milk, liquor, etc. can be added.
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Castagnole alla ricotta
Serves 10
_ kg. flour, 2 hg. ricotta, 3 eggs, 150 g. sugar, 1 glass of ‘marsala’ wine, 1 dose of baking-powder, a pinch of salt.
Mix flour, eggs and la ricotta, add sugar, marsala, baking powder and salt. Knead the mixture until it no longer sticks to hands. Prepare small balls as large as a nut and let them float in a pan with boiling oil. Take them out of oil with a skimming spoon, place them on blotting-paper, sprinkle with sugar and, if you please, with alchermes.
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 Sweet tortelli of chestnut flour
Serves 4
Ingredients:
360 g. flour, 100 g. sugar, 50 g. butter, 250 g. dried chestnuts, 100 g. plain sugar, 100 g. sweet almonds, 2 eggs, milk to taste, 1/2 baking-powder dose, icing sugar and salt.
Preparation of the filling:
Put chestnuts in a pan in the water for 4 or 5 hours. Boil them in the same water for 15 / 20 minutes, strain them and smash them. Peel almonds off and slightly toast them in the oven, pound them finely and mix smashed chestnuts. Add grated chocolate and gently mix to have a soft cream.
Preparation of the rolled-out pastry:
To prepare the pastry, pour flour on a table, add slightly melted butter, sugar, one yolk of egg, salt, half dose of baking-powder and a few milk to have a soft and smooth dough. Wrap the dough up in a cloth and let it rest for about one hour. Roll the pastry out to form a sheet, but not too thin.
On one half spread half a spoon of filling. Make many heaps at the distance of 6 cm. one from the other.
Cover with the other half of the sheet of pastry, press the pastry between one heap of filling and the other, cut into squares with a pastry cutting wheel to obtain ‘tortellini’. Melt butter on a baking-tin. Lay them on the baking-tin one distant from the other. Brush each ‘tortellino’ with the yoke of an egg beaten in a bowl.
Put the baking-tin in the hot oven and cook at mild heat for 25 minutes.
Sprinkle with icing-sugar and serve hot or cold.
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First Courses
Basotti
Tortelli filled with potatoes, with butter and sage
Tagliatelle with hare
Cannelloni with ceps
Ceps soup
Main Courses
Little birds roasted on the spit and jugged
Lamb fricassee
Lamb scottiglia (lamb stew)
Roe deer diced meat casserole
Single Dishes
Tortelli on the slab
Wheat flour migliaccio (pastry) with “formaggio di fossa”
Sweets
Focaccia (flat cake)
Sweet Schiaccina
Chestnut cake
Castagnole alla ricotta
Sweet tortelli of chestnut flour |
