Date-Nut Delight

…or delizia as Mario Batali calls it, but we tend not to get quite that fancy around here at joepastry.com. I’d been wanting to try this for quite a while, and a visit by my parents-in-law this weekend provided me with the opportunity (and anyway, a lot of you out there teased me about my Halloween long johns).

What is a date-nut delight? Really just a slightly richer version of a tea bread, albeit with quite a lot more chopped dates and toasted nuts. Quite decadent and good. The original recipe (created by Gina DePalma and found in the Babbo Cookbook) calls for a creamy, orange-scented whip on the side, composed of a roughly 50-50 mix of ricotta and crème fraîche, sweetened with sugar and grated orange zest. Fiore di Latte, (the “flower of the milk”) as Mario refers to it. I’ll stick with creamy, orange-scented whip.

The reduced cider sauce garnish was my idea, since I felt it needed a little extra zing (no offense, Ms. DePalma). It seemed to me in the spirit of the season. It’s essentially the cider syrup recipe I linked to on Friday, only severely reduced, almost to the point of a caramel (you can still see the bits of apple in there). I thought it worked, well, rather nicely.