• Recipes
• Pastry
• Cookies
• Baci di dama (chocolate-filled hazelnut cookies)

There is really only one way to make baci di dama, if you're going the traditional way and you want melt in the mouth results (and you should). It is a recipe of perfect proportions (just look at the measurements in metric weight) and the bare essentials that every Piemontese signora probably knows or has had passed down to her. But despite it being a simple, what Italians call “casalinga” (literally, “housewife”) recipe, these delightful biscotti require a certain amount of technique and skill in order to retain their delicate shape and texture. <br />And there are plenty of tricks to getting this right and if you're familiar with working with short crust pastry, this won't be new – you want that perfect dome to each cookie half, so delicate that they fall apart in your mouth. One, work quickly; two, use very cold butter and three, they need to be barely cooked in a very cool oven. Following this traditional method, not only do they keep their shape and don't melt into a puddle, but they remain so wonderfully soft they literally melt as soon as they hit your tongue. <br />While the method is always the same, you'll find these most commonly made with almond meal like they do in Tortona, but depending on the area of Piedmont you're in, the recipe may be made with a mixture of almond and hazelnut meal or, like they do in the area of Cuneo (the land of hazelnuts – this is, after all, where Nutella was born), just hazelnuts. <br />Many modern recipes include eggs or milk or other unorthodox ingredients that help stabilize the cookies during cooking so that you don't need to be so careful with the preparation or the cooking to lose that domed shape. But you can tell the difference – they're not as light or delicate. <br />Try these with a filling of homemade gianduia (hazelnut and chocolate) too – to the dark chocolate, add a handful of hazelnuts, whipped into a creamy paste in a food processor, together with a couple tablespoons of powdered sugar. Heaven.

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