Lady Lunchalot

This year I decided to get in touch with my Maltese roots and make figolli, a traditional Easter biscuit.

When I was a kid, one of the highlights of Easter time was making the trip over to my nanna’s house to get our figolli. Every year nanna would make 16 elaborately decorated figolli, one for each of the grandkids, and as it was a case of first in best dressed it was a crucial Easter strategy to get in early so you could pick one with the most icing or the biggest Easter egg.

Figolli are traditionally enormous shortbread style biscuits sandwiching an almond filling. They’re decorated with icing in over the top patterns, and always always always have an Easter egg stuck on them somewhere.

I remember figolli as being huge - way more than even the most enthusiastic seven year old could get through in one sitting. Consequently they took days to eat and had to be jealously guarded from older brothers who ate much faster than you. Nanna would always make them in very non-gender specific shapes: cars and boats with blue icing for the grandsons, hearts and stars in pink for the girls. If you’re a figolli purist, a fish shape is probably going to make an appearance too.

But I decided to put a modern twist on an old family favourite. I made mini figolli at a normal cookie size. Unfortunately my sweet tooth has faded from what it was when nanna was making figolli, and my patience with a piping bag isn’t quite up to her standards, so my sparsely decorated figolli would have certainly been the last left on the kitchen bench after 16 grandkids had made their choices.

Figolli recipe
Biscuit
200g caster sugar
400g plain flour
200g butter
Grated rind of 1 lemon
3 egg yolks

Filling
300g caster sugar
3 egg whites
Grated rind of I lemon
1 tsp orange flower water
300g almond meal

Make the pastry first. Mix the sugar and sifted flour, and rub in the butter until it looks like breadcrumbs. Add the grated lemon rind and the egg yolks and knead into a dough. You may need to add a little water. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for about an hour or overnight.

Next, make the almond filling. Mix the almond meal with the sugar, a few drops of orange blossom water and the lemon rind. Mix in the egg whites.

Roll out the pastry and cut into fish shapes, hearts, or whatever you like. You’ll need two shapes per biscuit as you’ll need to make a little sandwich with them. Be careful of shapes with pointy bits, like stars. It’s hard to sandwich the filling into the edges. Mama Lunchalot told me that Nanna used to have some big templates that she used year after year.

Place a teaspoon of almond filling onto each shape and sandwich with another shape. Seal the edges. You might want a wet pastry brush for this. Bake for about 20 minutes until golden brown.

Cool and decorate with different coloured icing and small easter eggs.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 10:30 am and is filed under Recipes . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.