Pizza Dolce Abruzzese

The name misleads: in Abruzzo pizza can mean a cake, and this pizza dolce, dialect pizza dogge, is the celebratory sweet raised for weddings, christenings and the great family feasts. It was traditionally the work of the bride's mother, aunts and sisters, who baked the sponges, cooked the two pastry creams, and layered the cake with alchermes, rum and sometimes almond pasta reale or grape jam, building it as much as fifty centimetres across for the wedding table. A version is said to belong to nearly every family and province, the Teramano especially; the recipe is recorded in a 1966 collection of grandmothers' recipes. Long a homemade rite, it is now enjoying a revival in the region's bakeries.

Each forkful runs through several textures at once: sponge made moist and faintly boozy by the alchermes-and-rum soak, cool ribbons of vanilla and chocolate cream between the layers, and a thin, brittle shell of set white icing that cracks under the fork. It is rich and sweet, warmed by the spiced liqueur and scented with cocoa.

The sponge works as a sponge in the literal sense: its open, air-whipped crumb is a network of thin-walled cells that draw the alchermes-and-rum syrup in by capillary action, so the cake drinks the liquid without collapsing and turns moist and aromatic. The two fillings are starch-thickened custards, flour and egg yolk gelatinising and coagulating to hold the milk as a sliceable cream, with cocoa solids stiffening the chocolate one further. The white coat is a simple sugar glaze — icing sugar loosened with a little water and lemon — which loses its water to the air and dries to a hard, matte crust that seals the soft interior and gives the sprinkles a surface to grip.