Baking Easter Figolli

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Baking Easter Figolli

With Easter being just a week away, I wanted to try and bake figolli (on my own) for the first time! For those that know me, know that I am not the greatest cook/baker, therefore I asked Jannik to help me (& to calm me down when I feel like I’m making a mess out of the recipe ?).

To our readers that are not familiar with figolli they are an Easter traditional pastry filled with an almond mixture which can turn out to be super yummy (and piggy!)

For the recipe, I used one that I found online and for the method, I basically used my mum’s knowledge! For the dough I used:

500g of margarine (butter works too)
800g of flour
250g of caster sugar (can also be normal sugar)
3 egg yolks
Grated lemon rind

For the filling I used:

500g of caster sugar
500g of ground almonds
3 egg whites (we used the empty bottle method to separate them).

With the above, we managed to make 8 figolli, however, we still had a lot of filling left.

Firstly, you start with mixing the flour and sugar together, then add the margarine, the egg yolks, the lemon rind (just about half a teaspoon) and mix together. If you don’t have any fancy electronic mixture, like us, the best is to use your hands to make the dough smooth and as one whole (due to the big amount this recipe is usually done, you may opt to split the dough into two big chunks.) Some recipes suggest that you put the dough in the fridge for around 30mins, however, we only put it in the fridge until we prepared the filling.

The ingredients for the dough/pastry (very important that here you need to use the egg yolks and not the egg white as shown in the picture!)

The filling is done quite easily and fast – you just need to mix everything in a bowl and ‘work’ it until it becomes one whole thing.

The magic of creating the proper figolli starts now – you need to knead the dough using flour so that it does not stick to the surface and the rolling pin. After, cut the dough in the shape you want using your cutter. You would need the same shape twice, one for the bottom and another for the top.

In the middle, put a layer of the almond mixture – you can decide how thick or not you would like your dough and the almond filling. A thicker almond filling would give a more yummy taste to the figolli. When the figolli are filled and covered, put them in oven for around 40mins at 175 degrees until they are golden brown.

Once they are ready and you take them out – you should be very careful how to handle them – they tend to be fragile and can break easily (as happened to one of our cars). The best is to let them cool for a moment before moving them.

Then comes my favorite part – decorating. We used melted chocolate instead of icing. We melted the chocolate ‘banju marija’ and used a knife to spread the chocolate on our figolli. We then put colorful vermicelli. We also put chocolate eggs on top (because why not make them more piggy?!) This is optional and you can get as creative as you like.