Dolce Italiano: Desserts from the Babbo Kitchen

Gina DePalma is the pastry chef at Manhattan's Babbo, home of Mario Batali's most acclaimed Italian fare. In Dolce Italiano, DePalma offers 90-plus doable recipes for a wide range of traditional and signature Italian sweets, such as Chocolate and Walnut Torte from Capri, Venetian Apple Cake, and Sesame and White Corn Biscotti. DePalma also provides illuminating asides on techniques and ingredients, including information on such "indispensable" items as honey, ricotta, mascarpone and grappa. Particularly notable chapters explore fried and festival sweets.

DePalma writes passionately about "dolce," revealing at one point her obsessive attempt to track down the best ricotta cheesecake. Most readers will share her attraction to the Italian dessert repertoire, which, though it lacks the richness and invention of, say, its French equivalent, appeals through simple good taste. Readers seeking a thorough introduction to Italian dessert making, presented in the context of its bounteous history and the author’s devotion to her subject, can do no better than to explore Dolce Italiano. --Arthur Boehm

Scrumptious, easy-to-make Italian desserts from the hand of a master.

"Follow the seasons. Keep the flavors pure and straightforward. Use proper yet simple techniques." Applying this aesthetic to the Italian tradition, Gina DePalma has created a cookbook of the desserts that have wowed diners at Babbo, New York's most coveted reservation since it opened eight years ago with DePalma as pastry chef. From her exciting imagination spring desserts such as Sesame and White Corn Biscotti, Little Grappa Soaked Spongecakes, and Chocolate and Tangerine Semifreddo. Recipes for classics like Cassata alla Siciliana join new interpretations of traditional desserts such as White Peach and Prosecco Gelatina. More than just a cookbook, Dolce Italiano reveals the ten ingredients you need to know to make Italian desserts, along with wine pairings to accompany the recipes. Never before has a cookbook given home cooks a chance to experience the full variety and subtlety of Italian desserts. Mario Batali has called Dolce Italiano "pure inspiration." 2-color throughout; 32 pages of color photographs; 1 map.