La Dolce Vita

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With a little time on my hands and the desire to increase my Italian cultural knowledge, I enrolled in the local cooking school in Imperia. On the student menu was Dolce…. ah, so we were going to learn all about desserts, pastries and cakes.

I showed up a little before the class started and slowly an eclectic mix of people gathered. One couple were clearly new lovers and the course was a gift from him to his lovely partner; they were learning to make dolce together in between loving looks and stolen kisses, others were mother and daughter who ran a restaurant and wanted to increase their repertoire, ladies looking to amaze their guests, or husbands with their new found knowledge and the donna inglese backed up in her corner. We were given a glass of wine to loosen things up and told to choose a partner. I ended up with a lovely Italian lady who is off to Australia soon and wanted to improve her English, so win-win !

We were given 10 recipes to choose from and each pair had to get on with following the recipe and produce… Plumb Cake (our choice of bake). She and I got on with our putting the ingredients together until the pop in the oven stage, the Maestro paced and checked, muttering questo e quello (this and that), pushing a lock of hair out of his eyes and then taadaaah! into the oven our masterpieces went. Whilst they were baking, we were given a lesson on flours in Italy and how it’s the protein content that we should look for on the packet as a guideline. For example 00 has a low protein content (7-9%) and is finely ground white cake flour; then as the numbers get higher the flours get more grainy, darker and more concentrated in protein (10% and more) bread, pasta and pizza flours until you reach integrale (11%) which is good old whole-wheat flour. With this info under my belt, and the ovens pinging their readiness, the Maestro dressed plates of delicious goods hot from the oven with a cloud of icing sugar across the tops of our feast; the smells spiralling up our nostrils to entice the senses. We then finished the cutting and presenting lesson by Maestro and were offered more wine and a chance to enjoy the bakes of our labour. All this was done in Italian with lots of sign language and pictures drawn – my notes are a work of art – but as was the goal, I learned about the art of Italian Dolce.