Vincitori e Perdenti

Vincitori

For Pasqua (Easter) I decided to make a coconut cake. I had a recipe from my grandmother, but I was not pleased with it. My results did not turn out like Grandma's: Grandma's cake = rich and moist, tastes like coconut; my coconut cake = sawdust, tastes like sawdust.

I Googled "Italian Coconut Cake, even though coconut is not indigenous to Italy. After all, coconuts could have been carried to Italy by swallows (African or European) gripping them by the husks.

My Google results took me to a web site called New Italian Recipes (hey!), to a recipe with a warning label: "Let's don't kid ourselves, this coconut cake recipe is decadent." Just what I was looking for.

The recipe calls for all kinds of cooking that involves whole-fat dairy products, sugar, eggs, and coconut. I baked the cakes, and made the syrup, the filling, and the icing, and assembled all into a teetery, slippery, sticky tower of coconutty goodness. The results were fantastic. The only thing I might do differently next time--and I can't wait to try this again--is add a liqueur to the syrup and soak the cake in it instead of just drizzle. Otherwise, it was Perfetto!


Perdenti
I roasted a leg of lamb last year, and what with the coconut cake and all, decided to go easy on myself this year, so I bought a spiral sliced Holiday Ham. A brilliant move on my part! Not so brilliant were the biscuits I made to go with the ham.


I used to be a very good biscuit maker having descended on both sides of the family from accomplished biscuit makers. However, at some point between the cake (above) and the biscuits, I forgot that the flour was not self-rising. I peeked in the oven a couple of times to check on my biscuit progress: they were baking and browning, but they were not rising. Hmmmm...I-wonder-why-oh-yeah-now-I-remember. The result there was more of a Passover biscuit, a couple of days too late. Mom to the rescue--she picked up some brown-and-serve rolls on the way over, and all was not lost.

I decided to save the Passover biscuits for the birds, and a couple of days later I entertained myself by hurling them (now like clay pigeons) into the woods. Once again, I didn't really think things through. Matt, the border collie, fetched every single biscuit back into the house. Fortunately they were too hard for him to eat, so as he would try to slink past me, hiding a biscuit the size and density of a saucer in his mouth, I would engage in a little tug of war and retrieve it from his snarling jaws.

On a happy note, I did make a more successful batch of biscuits on Sunday. "Light" and "fluffy" did not really come to mind, but they did rise, and the family did eat them. I think I will go back to self-rising flour.