Zeppole!

Wow! Simone and Valeria came to dinner last night and they brought an "experiment" with them: these deluxe zeppole. If you look for zeppole recipes online you'll mostly find instructions for rather standard fried dough dusted with powdered sugar. If you have ever been to an Italian-American street fest, you may have eaten some doughnut-like things in brown paper while walking down the street, but you would NOT be prepared for what we tasted last night.

What Simone and Valeria propose is an egg-rich cream puff dough (something like this) piped in concentric circles to make discs and then deep fried. This is then covered with "crema pasticcera" (pastry cream) piped in the same way and then topped with a small dollop of "amarena" (sour cherry preserves - I can't believe what they're charging for them on this site!). Valeria is from Naples, so she has a lot of experience eating these traditional Neapolitan St. Joseph's Day pastries, but this is the first time she and Simone made them. I think they did a great job.