The Tuscan pine nut cake – a recipe with a story

My granddad Remigio used to walk with a cane, more for habit than necessity, and often waved it like Charlie Chaplin. He also had the same funny walk, and loved to wear his hat at a jaunty.

Once in a while, when mum was at work, I spent an afternoon with him in San Gimignano. Our main activity was going to the park to pick up the pine nuts. The park was right outside the city walls, with gravel paths surrounding the shady flower beds and big pine trees, huge.

Now the park is unfortunately different, they cut down my huge shady pine trees, but if I close my eyes I can still hear the gravel crunching under my child feet, and the balsamic smell of the pine resin, the birichicchero, as my granddad called it.

After the walk with my eyes pointed down in the winding gravel paths searching for the tiny precious gifts, I sat in the entrance of my granddad’s house, on a marble staircase, and opened the pine nuts with a small hammer that he kept just for us grandchildren. The hammer blows, a bit insecure, roared into the hall and the pine nuts shells flew everywhere.

I ate one pine nut after the other with my hands blackened by the fairy pine nut shell dust, leaving just a tiny handful for a possible cake. That’s why I waited so long to make my first pine nut cake! This is a recipe with a long story, my favourite kind of recipes as you may already know, just like last year Laura’s Sacher Torte.

This year the protagonist is Rita, Laura’s mother. This is Rita’s pine nut cake, passed on by Giuliana, who seems to have had the recipe from a famous Sienese pastry shop… here the mystery deepens, but since it is Christmas I want to tell you this perfect recipe. The pine nut cake recipe had all the credentials to succeed, I had tasted it several times at Laura’s and I really wanted to bake it again, that’s the result!

The recipe, tried and perfected for years by more than one family, is a reliable one: it is simple to make and gives a tremendous satisfaction to take it out from the oven, hot and sprinkled with toasted pine nuts, not to mention to eat it, with a fondant custard heart dotted with juicy raisins soaked in sweet wine. Talking about the silky custard, don’t miss the recipe, it has become the standard procedure to make custard at home!

Now just have a look at this slice of pine nut cake, it looks exactly like the cake showed in the San Gimignano pastry shop windows I looked at  with greedy eyes coming back home from the park with my granddad, with one hand secured into his huge hand and the other one holding tightly my bag of pine nuts.

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