Saturday, December 18, 2010

Cuccidati, Coffee, Friends and a Day at Home and Good News on DADT to Boot

Cuccidati are a Sicilian Christmas cookie that I've never made before.  My family is not Sicilian so none of my relatives made this delicacy.  It is a pastry filled with figs, raisins, other dried fruits, nuts, honey, orange rind and other good things.  I spent the better part of two days making them.  I was inspired by Clara (Great Depression Cooking with Clara) although I altered her recipe a bit after googling "cuccidati" and comparing a number of recipes.  She definitely had too many eggs in her dough.  I cut it down to 8 instead of 12.  I also had no dates or yellow raisins on hand so used dried cranberries and other dried fruits that were in the cupboard.  The figs are a must however as they are essentially fig cookies.

The dough - 10 cups of flour, plus sugar, lard, eggs, milk, vanilla, salt, baking powder.
The filling was done yesterday.  Put all the fruit and nuts through a meat grinder and added the other ingredients along with some Jim Beam and let it sit in the refrigerator over night.  

Roll out the dough and put in a row of filling

Fold the dough over the filling and cut off the dough

Cutting the cuccidati and then score them (see photo below)

Just out of the oven

Frost the cookies with confectioners' sugar and lemon/water frosting

Put on some red and green sugar (traditionally you use colored sprinkles (nonpareils) but I improvised and made colored sugar.

On the plate

Cookbook close-up

Yummie - MUCH better than a fig newton.

Albert and David were the first to try the cuccidati and gave thumbs up.


Time to go out for some fresh air

Benni enjoying a stick

Woodpile

Leon's favorite piece of machinery (sarcasm).

No this is not a strand of DNA.  Oh, the holidays.

By the way - DADT is finally history.  Finally Obama keeps a promise.  Another step toward equality.

3 comments:

Russ Manley said...

We ain't got none o'them coochy-cootie cookies down thisaway . . . but the Jim Beam is a freakin' great idea!

Frank said...

I'll send you some, though I'm sure there are some closeted Sicilians down thataway who can oblige. Jim Beam had been hiding in the liquor cabinet for years...so I put him to good use.

Cubby said...

My husband and his family are Sicilian, but I've never seen any of them make anything like this. They look terrific.

LinkWithin

Related Posts with Thumbnails