Istrian recipe: SMALL PEACHES AND SUGAR BISCUITS

No wedding, christening or any big family gathering in Istra is complete without these indulgent and delicious sweets. Their names Breskvice and Cukerancici literally say what they are. Breskvice are small peaches as they resemble the fruit and Cukerancici are silly shaped biscuits covered in sugar.

Making these cakes is extremely time-consuming so they are rarely made for an ordinary Sunday afternoon coffee treat or just to have something sweet on a normal day.

My late auntie Marija was a real master in making these traditional Istrian sweets. Many years ago, when just old enough to bake cakes, both my sister and I separately spent two days at Marija’s orchard house assisting her, writing down the recipe and ‘learning’ how to prepare the dough, how to shape the pastry, bake them and finalise them. However not until two decades later did my sister and I pluck up courage, roll up our sleeves and make our own breskvice and cukerancici in my London kitchen; all in the sad memory of our late aunt who died in May 2010.

My sister and I could not quite comprehend how and why or by whom such a complicated and time-consuming recipe could have been invented; probably someone who had plenty of time and money. Even if most farms in Istra had walnuts, flour and eggs, you still needed to buy rum, butter, sugar and food colourings.

INGREDIENTS

FOR THE PASTRY:
4 eggs
12 dessert spoons of sugar
125 g butter
8 dessert spoons of oil
1 vanilla sugar (7-10g)
2 baking powders (7-10g each)
a little bit of rum and lemon
flour – as much as it takes to make a soft and almost sticky pastry

FOR THE FILLING:
200g ground walnuts
Crumbs (the one taken out of the “half peach” when making a hole for the filling)
125 g butter
200g sugar
A little rum, cocoa powder and desiccated coconut

HOW TO MAKE BRESKVICE & CUKERANCICI

Beat the eggs with sugar, then add butter, oil, vanilla and baking powder. Add some lemon juice and rum. Fold in flour and with your hands make soft and sticky dough. When the dough is just about manageable, cut off pieces and roll in a longish strip Kneading chunks of pastry into a long strip and cutting identical pieces off makes it just a little bit easier to do your next task, which is to make “half peaches” out of pastry; it’s very important that you make the “half peaches” of very similar size. Shape each piece between your palms into small balls and put them on a baking tray a couple of centimetres apart.

It’s very important to have two flat baking trays, as by the time you bake the first lot, you can also knead the second one. We used 2/3 of the dough for “Breskvice” and only the last third for “Cukerancici”. My late auntie used to do half-half, but she also always made double amount (by just doubling all the ingredients) and she usually spent two days preparing these sweets. For shaping “Cukerancici” you need to put a strip of dough in a horseshoe shape and then make a cut at each end separating the edges, as well as one small cut on the top, which resembles a branch.

Let the “half peach” pastries cool down and then with a sharp knife dig a hole in each of them saving the crumbs that you take out. Be very careful as the pastry is so fragile that the “half-peaches” can easily break under the pressure of your fingers on one side and the knife on the other.

When all halves have a pit resembling a hole, you can prepare the filling. Mix together ground walnuts, crumbs, slightly softened butter and sugar. At the end add some rum, cocoa powder (it’s up to you how dark you want the filling to be), and some desiccated coconut, again it can work without it, but I like the taste of coconut and tend to put in everything I can.

The next time-consuming task is to find half-peaches of approximately similar size that make a nice peach when put together. Fill the holes and make sure the filling overruns on the edges so that it can also ‘glue’ together the two halves, so as to make a biscuit that looks like a peach, and put them on a large tray. From this recipe we managed to make approx. 35 peaches.

Next step is to prepare the colouring – as the peaches need to be half red half yellow, like the real fruit. Auntie Marija used to dissolve the colour in wine, but we opted for water and we used the ordinary icing food colourings widely available in every supermarket. You need to soak each one in red colour on one side and yellow on the other and then return them to the tray. When you finish all the peaches start again from the beginning – this time roll them in caster sugar and arrange them on the tray as the colour and sugar need to dry for a while. If you roll them in sugar as soon as you soak them in colour, the sugar will melt, but if you give the colour enough time to settle, they will be just wet enough for the sugar to stick onto them. I soaked “Cukerancici” only in red colour and then in sugar.