Schoolhouse Recipes: Blackberry Cookies and Apricot Pie

Cook like an Italian, speak like an American...
What's for snack today? Blackberry cookies and a slice of pie.

So like the rest of Rome we are off and on vacay the entire month of August.
One of our favorite places to go is my husband's mother's house in a little town in Umbria called Spoleto.  Actually, she doesn't live in the town...that would be too cosmopolitan.  She lives on a mountain just outside of Spoleto.

Standing on top and looking down always makes me want to break out in song--

Last week while picking wild blackberries just outside of her house-

the blackberries kept disappearing--I think these four year-old hands were to blame.

We managed to bring back a few.

I really wanted to make these delicious strawberry cookies that my husband's mom has the recipe for, but there were no strawberries to be found. So we tried to the same thing with our more (pronounced mo-ray--that's Italian for blackberries).

Here's how you do it:
*note-Americans reading this--grab your converter. We're using the metric system today.

so you'll need a scale

300 grams of flour

150 grams of sugar

150 g of margarine or butter

one egg yolk

and another whole egg

grab your mixer

mix egg yolk, whole egg, and sugar together until creamy 

add in other ingredients and form a ball with the dough
then wrap it in plastic and place it in the fridge for one hour

take the dough out of the fridge and grab your rolling pin
sprinkle a good amount of flour on your cutting board or wherever  you're working

Flaviano said I didn't need all of that dough just for cookies-
so he stole 1/2 of it for his own purposes.

roll out the rest of the dough

you can use cookie cutters

or cut the dough into squares and fold them to make little envelopes of yumminess

place them all on a tray with your fresh blackberries in the middle-
we put apricot jam inside of the square cookies.

bake at 160 degrees Celsius using ventilated oven or 180 degrees Celsius using a regular oven.
Bake for 18-23 minutes.
Or if you're the type to eyeball it, just wait until they look golden brown.

Forest to plate eating!

and THIS is what Flaviano did with the other 1/2 of the dough.

He used the jam he made the other week.
Show off.