
I confess, I do have some difficulty at times recognizing what in the United States is defined as Italian food. I hope I won’t burst anyone’s idyllic image of my land, but I never ate Fettucine Alfredo before coming to America, and Italian Wedding Soup is still a mystery to me. Biscotti is a generic term we use for cookies, not a specific one. The ones you call biscotti are cantucci, typical Tuscan cookies. And there plenty of places in Italy in which we don’t take two hours to eat our lunch and have a siesta – Milano being one of them. In fact, my colleagues and I used to eat our salads in the office in front of a computer, while working.
So you can imagine my surprise when a month or so ago I saw this recipe for Italian Cream Bundt Cake from Bake from Scratch. In all honesty, I had no idea what an Italian Cream Cake was. I imagined, from reading the recipe, that it’s a layer cake studded with coconut and pecans and filled with cream cheese frosting. In the Southern part of Italy ricotta is at times used in desserts – in the Pastiera Napoletana and in Cannoli Siciliani for example. Though coconut and pecans are not native to Italy, and we do call cream cheese Philadelphia, I believe, because of where it originated. Nevertheless I thought that the Bake from Scratch version sounded delicious in its simplicity, so I am presenting it to you, in my gluten-free adaptation. It’s dense, moist, slightly nutty, and I can attest that it’s hard to stop eating it!
ENJOY!