Bustrengo

A dense wet cake of leftover bread, cornmeal and fruit, with nothing to raise it.

Egg. Vegetarian, but not vegan — contains egg, dairy (milk), honey.

Ingredients

• 200 g stale breadcrumbs
• 100 g fine polenta
• 100 g plain flour
• 600 ml milk
• 120 g honey
• 2 eggs
• 2 apples, grated
• 100 g dried figs, chopped
• 100 g raisins
• the zest of 1 lemon and 1 orange
• 4 tablespoons olive oil
• a pinch of salt

Method

1. Warm the milk and pour it over the breadcrumbs. Leave 30 minutes until they have swollen and broken down.
2. Stir in everything else. The batter should be WET — pourable, like a thick cake batter, not a dough.
3. THERE IS NO BAKING POWDER AND NO WHIPPED EGG IN THIS, and that is not an omission. It is a cake made of what was left in the kitchen, and it is supposed to come out dense, damp and sliceable rather than risen. Adding a raising agent gives you an ordinary fruit cake.
4. Oil a deep 24 cm tin and pour the batter in. Level the top and trickle the last of the oil over.
5. Bake at 170C for 1 hour 10 minutes. A skewer will come out damp rather than clean and should.
6. Cool completely in the tin before turning out. It firms up as it cools and will break if moved warm.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under Italy · All recipes