Pastries

These delectable muffins are so rich they can be served with nothing more than a large green salad for a luncheon.

My brother Bubba confines most of his cooking to his charcoal grill, but he does come into the kitchen quite often to bake up these great biscuits.

These biscuits have become one of our signature items at The Lady & Sons Restaurant. Everyone really looks forward to us bringing them out, whether it be after they are seated or while they are waiting in line.

Pasticcerie, pastry shops, also referred to as Catlisch (a name inherited from the Swiss), are a grand tradition in Palermo. The city was greatly influenced by the French and Swiss in their pastry-making. When I am in Sicily, cannoli and desserts made with citrus are my favorites. In Palermo, I always enjoy desserts and a great cup of espresso at my dear friend’s pastry place, Pepino Stancanpiana’s Catlisch. My Sicilian chef at Felidia, Fortunato Nicotra, makes an elegant version of this, Sicily’s favorite dolce, with deep-fried disks of cannoli pastry stacked high with layers of ricotta cream in between. I like to fry squares of pastry in a skillet—no deep-fryer needed—and build a crispy, creamy cannoli napoleon. In Sicily, cannoli filling is made with sheep’s-milk ricotta, which has a distinctive flavor that can’t be matched by ordinary processed ricotta. Fresh cow’s-milk ricotta, which is widely available now, is what I use. Be sure to drain it well, sweeten lightly, mix with chopped bitter chocolate, candied orange, and toasted almonds for real Sicilian cannoli and add a touch of Grand Marnier for additional flavor.

Babà al rhum is a favorite dessert in Naples, found in most pasticcerie, filled with whipped cream, or crema pasticciera (custard cream), or cannoli cream—or just oozing with syrup. In this recipe, I give you a limoncello syrup to soak the babas, and you can fill them with ice cream or whipped cream, the ricotta filling for cannoli (page 307), Espresso Zabaglione (page 156), or the cream for Limoncello Tiramisù (page 120). If you don’t have baba molds, you can bake the cakes in small (not mini-) muffin pans. You could also use two small Bundt pans.

You must be familiar with timballo from the film Big Night—maccheroni dressed with a wonderful sweet tomato sauce set in a big round form of pâte brisée to bake. A sweet crust with savory pasta might seem an unlikely combination, but the timballo is delicious and represents much of what is left of the Neapolitan kitchen from its aristocratic days under French-Spanish rule. These delightful pizzelle—small half-moon turnovers of raised sweet dough, stuffed with braised escarole, garlic, and sausage—are a wonderful and much simpler rendition of the timballo. The bitterness of the escarole and savory flavor of the meat, enveloped in the sweet crust, reach a perfect balance. These pizzelle make a great hors d’oeuvre, passed around still warm from the oven. They will win you much praise, and you do not need to labor over them at the last minute. You can make the dough and filling a day before. Moreover, the assembled pizzelle can be frozen and then baked when needed.

Strudel seems like a complex dessert, but once you have a feeling for the dough and its elasticity, all else is elementary. I recall my grandma saying that for the strudel to be good you need to be able to read the newspaper through the stretched dough, so rolling and stretching it as thin as you can is the key to a special strudel. Keep one idea in mind: do not be afraid to handle the dough, lift it up on the back of your hands, curl your fingers into a fist, and stretch the dough with your knuckles. It will yield and stretch without tearing. Or grasp one edge and lift the sheet above the work surface and let it hang free—just the force of gravity will make it stretch. Or, if you have someone to help you, pull the dough from opposite sides—it will stretch that way too. Don’t worry if the edges remain a bit thicker: you can cut those off with a pizza cutter before filling the strudel. This is a large strudel; it can be served for a couple of days. Baked strudel freezes well, so leftover pieces can be wrapped securely and frozen for a couple of months. Defrost when needed, and reheat before serving.

My dear friend Roberto Santibañez and I have had a lot of fun over the years since we began working together at Rosa Mexicano, cooking together and creating dishes inspired by our land that we so often miss living in New York. This is one of the desserts that we still talk about. The name for this dish comes from mixiote, which is the thin film from the maguey leaf that was traditionally used to wrap savory dishes that are baked or steamed, releasing the leaf’s wonderful herbal sweetness. Nowadays, most mixiotes actually use parchment paper or banana leaves, alluding to the way the dish is prepared rather than the original definition. In this version, the pears are cooked slowly in a sweet piloncillo syrup inside these little pouches, and are then served warm over a slightly salty cheese filling. When the pouch is cut open, it releases the amazing syrup fragrance that balances perfectly with the flaky, buttery cheese pastry.

Milhojas, or “thousand leaves,” is the name given to this pastry because, just as in the fall, when the autumn leaves trickle down and move as the wind blows, tiny pieces of this crunchy, flaky pastry fly around when you take a bite of it. This recipe is one example where the French influence in Mexico began to be very apparent during the rule of Porfirio Díaz at the beginning of the twentieth century, and a love for classic French pastries has remained part of our tradition ever since. Milhojas have remained a favorite dessert and are found all over Mexico in many pastry shops and bread bakeries. As with many other desserts, they are often sold by the slice. Although milhojas are often filled with jams, mousses, and whipped cream, this one is layered with pastry cream, which I find to be the most representative one of all. The addition of mangoes and coconut gives it a nice freshness and tropical flavor. Traditional puff pastry is a bit time-consuming to prepare, so I have provided a quick “mock” version that will work very well when you don’t have the time or patience required to make the real deal.