Dessert Desert

In a land renowned for its gastronomical delights, Italian sweets and desserts never cease to disappoint me. Other than a few specialties, tiramisu comes to mind, there is little for dessert junkies like Amy and me to rave about. Even there, though well made tiramisu is a fine dessert, I can think of dozens if not hundreds of things that I would rank ahead of it. Our local pasticcaria is filled with hard dry cookies, bland filled sweets and simple meringues. Even some of our new Italian friends swoon at the idea of a soft baked, American-style cookie.

Candy. Forget about it. Even large supermarkets, the equivalent of Shaws, Big Y or Stop and Shop, carry no more than a handful of kinds of candy. However, at least a few of those are chocolate so perhaps all is not lost. For instance, they do sell small bags of M&Ms at a cost of approximately 15 Euros/kg which translates to approximately $8.50/pound.

The only dessert option left is to make things for yourself and there it becomes even more complicated. I am thinking particularly of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies and chocolate blackout cake, my two signature baked goods. In running down a list of ingredients, most like flour, baking soda, salt, etc. can be found with little difficulty. There are a few notable exceptions. Apparently vanilla extract is not sold as such in stores. You can buy a tiny bottle, and I do mean tiny since it is less than half a teaspoon, or you can get powdered vanilla. That would be interesting except we have been warned that more often than not it also contains yeast as well as vanilla since the kind of baking an Italian would use it for would include both ingredients. We are currently looking into buying whole vanilla beans and steeping them in vodka to make our own vanilla extract. Next comes brown sugar. They just don’t sell it here. They do have something they call brown sugar but it is really just less refined, granulated cane sugar lacking the essential moisture content of what we have in the states. Finally, there are the all important chocolate chips. In the US we have the pick of half a dozen major manufacturers (Hershey, Nestles, Girardelli, etc.) and many different flavors and bag sizes. Here we have been lucky enough to find one brand/type/size in one of the four supermarkets we have been to. I will persevere. Cookies will be made even if I need to persuade visitors to bring things across the Atlantic and secret them through customs for me.