Cenci (Sweet fritters)
- Preparation time: 30 minutes.
- Cooking time: 15 minutes.
- 400g plain mwhite flour.
- 2 eggs.
- 3 dessert spoons sugar.
- Half a glass Vin Santo (or sweet sherry).
- One lemon.
- Extra-virgin olive oil.
- Icing sugar.
- Salt.
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Mix the flour, eggs, sugar, Vin Santo, grated lemon ring, three tablesspoons of oil and a pinch of salt in a large bowl. Knead well, forming the pastry into a ball and roll out on a pastry board to a thickness of about two millimetres. Cut into ribbons about eight centimetres wide and then cut obliquely into section. Fill a frying pan with oil, heat and drop the pastry in. When the cencil become crisp and golden, remove, put them on kitchen paper to dry well and then shake plenty of icing sugar over. You can make the biscuits look prettier by cutting the ribbons with a pastry wheel, or you can use your own imagination to cut it into different shapes and forms. Roll the pastry out as often as necessary to use it all up. Cencil, like the Florentine schiacciata, are traditional Carneval time biscuits.
They are found throughout all of northern and central Italy, and have different names according to the region. In Bologna, for example, They are called
frappole (fringes) and in Milan,
chiacchiere (chatters).
