Mandarin-Pistachio Ring Cake
Plus a Q&A with Victoria Granof and a book giveaway.
I met Victoria Granof during a Cherry Bombe magazine photo shoot. Victoria was the food stylist and recreated my signature meringue cake to grace the magazine’s cover. It was such an honor to have her baking one of my creations, such a joy for me and a day I will never forget.
Victoria can do it all, she’s a baker, stylist, writer (her book is a GREAT read), and a passionate traveler. I ordered her book, Sicily, My Sweet*, when I decided to travel to Sicily and wanted to immerse myself in the baking culture before I went. Her book captures the beautiful tradition of baking but also the heart and soul of the ancient city and her relationship to the place.
*affiliate link
After reading her book from cover to cover and baking from it, I asked Victoria to share a bit more about herself with all of us. I am so grateful that she not only shared her story but also the recipe for this Sicilian Mandarin and Olive Oil cake. It tastes like what I imagine being in Sicily feels like. Blending whole mandarin oranges with olive oil and combining it with pistachio flour is rich and decadent but also feels like a cake you want to eat for breakfast.
The recipe for her cake is available to my Extras subscribers below and she’s also giving away a copy of her book to THREE lucky readers! Details below.
Victoria Granof, Food Creative - Author, Stylist, Director, Baker, Hungry Eye
Q: What inspired you to write Sicily, My Sweet?
I'd written my first Sicilian baking book several years ago at the beginning of my career, before I'd really developed my own voice and visual language. It was admittedly not very attractive and I'd always had the intention of doing a 2.0. It was just in the past few years that I felt I'd reached the point where I was ready to have another go at it. I'm lucky to have Hardie Grant as a publisher; they gave me full creative control over the entire book. It was a dream!
Q: In the opening pages of the book you talk about your Nonna's biscotti in your freezer, tell us more about that.
My Nonna made one cookie consistently - the Treccine recipe in my book. She kept them in a tin on top of her fridge and they never weren't there. When she passed away, the thing that made me sob like a baby was that I would never again have one of those biscotti. So I saved one like a relic and kept it in my freezer. It would have been 15 years next month had we not had a power outage and not thinking, I dumped the entire fridge and freezer.
Q: You talk about your family's history with food going back 2,000 years and the connection to Sicily. Is there a recipe in particular that represents that historical connection?
Yes, the aforementioned Treccini and also the Pupi cu l'ova - sweet bread/cookie with a hardboiled egg on top. My Nonna made them for Purim which happens in the spring, when those same breads are made for Easter.
Q: Who or what inspired you to get into food?
My mother was a reluctant cook and I knew I could do better! I began baking when I was about 8 years old, not very successfully. Once I ran out of flour for chocolate chip cookies and substituted baking powder. Ugh. They didn't bake so much as festered in the oven. Then I decided to bake my way through Joy of Cooking but for some reason we never had butter in the house (but plenty of olive oil) so I could only make oil-based sweets. Which brought me to those Treccine, and from then on, I learned from my Nonna. I learned a lot from her.
Q: What is your most memorable food experience?
I have so many! The one that springs to mind at the moment is when I had a small catering company in Los Angeles in the early 90s. I'd catered a party to celebrate a ballet production of "From Russia with Love" and managed to get a Russian importer to donate two kilo containers of caviar. One of the kilos remained untouched so I took it home and immediately (it was well after midnight) called 4 or 5 friends and told them to rush over with whatever they could bring to put the caviar in/on. We sat on my floor with the caviar, potato chips, scrambled eggs and Pepperidge Farm thin sliced bread toasts and ate it until we couldn't eat anymore. The cat ate the rest.
Q: What would be your perfect Sicilian meal? Paint us a picture of where, with whom you would share it, and of course, what would you have for dessert?
I would love to dine with Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of "Il Gattopardo," The Leopard. We would eat lunch at a simple table with a hand-crocheted cloth among olive trees in autumn. Lunch would start with a piece of Ragusano cheese, a tomato warm from the garden (he would cut it for me with his bone-handled pocket knife) with salt and olive oil; tender boiled octopus at room temperature with a squeeze of lemon plucked from a nearby tree; spaghetti with fresh sea urchin, a bottle of Grillo, and for dessert, gelato made from Bronte pistachios grown on the slopes of Mt. Etna with chewy Fior di Mandorla almond cookies with a nice strong espresso. Not that I've given it much thought lol.
Q: What's your favorite piece of kitchen equipment and why?
I love my Danish dough whisk (affil. link). I use it to mix pancake batter, fold in egg whites and it's even strong enough to mix bread dough.
Q: What are you working on next?
At the moment I'm organizing a wonderful, soulful Spring retreat in Sicily! We'll be staying in a restored 18th Century masseria - farmhouse. We'll bake recipes from the book, visit friends' farms, cheesemakers, a biodynamic winery, learn to make pastries at a traditional pasticceria, stroll the Ortigia market, learn how to make Modica chocolate in Modica, forage for botanicals to make amaro, wild spring veg to make an idyllic lunch in an olive grove, swim, sunset yoga, and so much more.
A long-term project I've started is writing an historical novel about Mary the Jewess, the 3rd Century alchemist who invented the Bain-marie, and of course directing food commercials, ghost-writing/developing cookbooks, food styling and coaching emerging food stylists.
Q: What's your favorite cookbook and why?
Mary Taylor Simeti's Pomp and Sustenance (affil link). It's a luscious, soulful, fascinating book that covers 25 centuries of Sicilian food.
Q: Favorite bakery?
Raf's on Elizabeth Street in NYC. Their almond and candied orange croissants are magnificent!
Giveaway!
We’re giving away THREE copies of Sicily, My Sweet to three readers. Just “like” this Substack post (click the heart at the top of the post) or comment below to be entered for a chance to win. US addresses only.
Exclusive Recipe: Mandarin-Pistachio Ring Cake
From Victoria: Sicilians eat cake and cookies and ice cream for breakfast. What’s not to love about that? This is a table cake that’s especially suited for breakfast, since it’s made with whole raw mandarins—kind of like having your juice in solid form. If there’s any cake left over, it gets better and moister as it sits, and it is just as good with tea in the afternoon. You could use any type of mandarin or tangerine, Satsuma, or minneola for this, as long as they total one pound.
