This is a little story made by tastes and memories. It’s the story of an heritage that my dear aunt was able to pass on to her daughter. It is the story of a feminine bond, because food has much more to tell if there are memories adding on more special and unique flavors.

To be honest, after reading my biography, I can say that actually there was someone in my family that was able to cook and she was great at it. She was the one I used to call, while I was a student away from home, to have some new recipes: how to make the good pomarola (tomatoes sauce) or the amazing limoncello (lemon liqueur), she was my beloved aunt MariaTeresa.

I could say lots of things about her, she was a generous and sweet women. I could tell you about how she would always be cooking, spending most of her time in the kitchen with her lighted cigarette in the ashtray near the stoves and, believe me, there was no dish that she could not make superbly.
If you would stop by her place at lunch or dinner she was always able to bring 6 to 7 amazing dishes to the table.
She was a Real cook, she learned it from my grandmother Anita, my father’s mother who I have never met.
She was incredibly creative in the way she was presenting the dishes and everything regarding the subject of cooking was very easy for her.
She definitely succeded in passing on her sensitivity towards cooking to her daughter, my cousin Nicoletta.

Nicoletta is a wonderful eccentric woman, she has several tattoos spread all over her body, beautiful colored hair, one day red, one day blue, all of this represents her wild colored life. She has a great passion for cooking as well and…like her mother…she is amazingly good at it.
Today Nicoletta is the one I call when I need advices on the tomatoes passata or when I need some creative variation to it. She is the sort of person that during summer buys kilos and kilos of the best tomatoes to make the sauce and save it for the winter.

It’s been a few years or so that our family’s dinner table has been enriched during the festivities, such as Christmas, with Nicoletta’s delicious cookies.
The recipe is the same as the famous Prato’s Cantucci (Prato is a city in Tuscany/Italy) but with dark big pieces of chocolate instead of the traditional almonds.
Nicoletta was so kind to give me the recipe last Christmas so now I can give it to you and you can have the pleasure of making it with your own hands.

Here are the ingredients:

• 200gr flour 00
• 200gr sugar
• 2 eggs
• 30gr butter softened and made in little pieces
• 200gr dark chocolate in big pieces

Blend the eggs with sugar, add butter and melt it well, add flour and blend the ingredients together for about 5 minutes using a fork. You’ll see that you will have quite a sticky dough and not well knided, that is how it’s supposed to be. Add the chocolate to the dough in big pieces and make some big rolls (usually a diameter of ¾ cm ) on a flat surface with flour over it. First place the oven paper over the special oven board, place the rolls on the board and then put in the oven. Oven as to be at 200° for the first 7/10 minutes then lower at 160°, then let it cook for about 15 minutes. When the cookies present an amber color, they are ready and you can take them out of the oven. Cut them when they are still warm and then leave them to cool down.
After this the chocolate’s cantuccini cookies are finally ready to be eaten.
In my family, when I make this cookies they last for about 4/5 hours, not more!!!