Sarena Solari .'s Italian Baking Book

We were all glued to the television set for another new season of Heel Holland Bakt in 2015. Beautiful things were made by amateur chefs from all over the Netherlands. The assignments were difficult and the competition tough. But there was a winner: the Italian Sarena Solari from Groningen.

She was a perfectionist and set high standards for herself, yet she was also realistic enough to deliver. Now, six months later, her own baking book is in the shops. The Italian baking book.

A book with a beautiful design, fresh colors and a clear layout. It looks very sympathetic with pictures of Sarena and her Italian grandmother sitting on a bench or baking a cake together. It is really a family affair, that cooking at the Solari family.

The Italian baking book

There are chapters on cookies, on little sweet things, pies, filled pies, bread and savory pie. There is also a chapter with the Heel Holland Bakt toppers. I flipped through that last chapter, but apart from the fact that you sometimes have to spend three hours in the kitchen for those cakes, you also have to master quite a few techniques. I don't think I'll try any of that. I think it's a really nice book that does justice to the high standards that Italians themselves would demand of their Italian cuisine. The baked goods are authentic Italian, you can tell.

Italian ingredients

There are certainly a few recipes on my bucket list to try, but for some recipes I have to go to the Italian (web) store. If there Amaretti biscuits As an ingredient for a cake, I'm not going to make those cookies myself first. That's taking too long for me. Amaretti, mustard en Holy wine for example, are difficult to obtain in the supermarket.

There are also recipes with chestnut flour and with cooked chestnuts. Very nice, those seasonal recipes. I once brought chestnut flour from Italy and made it castagnaccio with me, a Tuscan pie. I thought it was terribly dirty. So I hope I will like chestnut flour in another recipe. That would be nice, because the chestnut is a versatile ingredient.

Merenda

My favorite chapters are those of the piccoli dolci and the tarts. There are really tasty things in there. From the chapter piccoli dolci I made the fete al latte, chocolate cakes with a sweet milk filling. real snacks are snacks for kids coming home from school, and my four-year-old has just started school for three weeks, so I thought it would be fun to give him something like this snack a succes story.

It didn't look very difficult on paper, but when I had to spread the mixture over the baking paper for the top and bottom layers, I thought: is this really going to be a cake, or is it so thin that it looks more like a cake? Wouldn't it burn? It came out a little thinner than I had hoped, but it was definitely still a nice slice.

The filling also almost went wrong, I think I did not whip the whipped cream enough, it could have been a bit fluffier. Still, if you have the snacks from Sarena next to mine, I think she wrote a good recipe. And the children were a wildly enthusiastic jury.

What are you baking?

We hope you will also try something from Sarena Solari's The Italian Baking Book! Post a photo of your creation in the comments below or on Facebook and let us know how it tasted!

Sarena Solari .'s Italian Baking Book
an introduction to - NL
by: Sarena Solari
176 pages
Release date: February 25, 2016
Price: € 24,99
Cosmos Food & Health
ISBN: 9789021561707