Cesira will show us her mastery in giving shape and soul to the bocconotto from Montorio , an art learned from her mother and grandmother, year after year, first as a child watching and then as a girl participating in the group preparations in the houses, when the women gathered to cook together on the occasion of the most important celebrations of the community: weddings, baptisms, and communions. Not surprisingly, the bocconotto is also known as “the bride and groom pastry”.

Through Cesira’s hands generations of women from Montorio will reveal to us the small but important details necessary to give the right touch to the preparation of this dessert. Among them a characteristic feature is precisely the quality of the sweet shortcrust pastry which is the sign of a well-made bocconotto. Moreover, in order for the pastry to become  fine and crumbly it must be baked in very special hand crafted tin moulds: “Without the mould you can’t make the real bocconotto from Montorio” Cesira firmly declares. In fact, even today in some homes, they keep the bag of “signed” moulds in memory of when the baking tins were marked with the initials of the family’s name, so they were not mixed up when the women prepared the cookies together.  The crumbliness of the pastry together with the right amount of filling create the necessary balance to make the bocconotto beautiful, that is, with the “teardrop” of jam that rises up to the surface during baking and oozes out, like a little volcano.

During the workshop the participants will be shown the whole process of the preparation of the “weeping pastries” with local ingredients. It will be possible to see the preparation of the filling of the bocconotto and steal from Cesira her secret techniques. Then you will make the  the sweet shortcrust pastry, line and fill the special tins, and wait together for them to cook, before finally tasting the freshly-baked bocconotti and taking a bag home!