Sorrento Lemon Sospiri

Author: Serena

Ingredients:

For the sponge cake:

5 Eggs
150 gr. of Flour
75 gr. of Sugar

For the confectioner’s custard:

1 Litre of Milk
400 gr. of Sugar
150 gr. of Flour
8 Egg Yolks
1 Vanilla Bean
1 Lemon Peel

For the Topping:

1 Litre of Milk Cream
4 Lemon Peels
Some Candied Cherries

Directions:

To create the sponge cake called Sospiri, separate the egg whites from the yolks and beat them with ½ squeezed lemon until they become smooth and foamy. Add then to the yolks the sugar and beat everything together obtaining a very dense mixture, then add the flour. Now mix together the two mixtures moving your hand from the bottom to the top.

Cover a baking pan with some greaseproof paper. Take a pastry bag put the mixture into it and form several half spheres.

Making the sponge cakes with the pastry bag

Put then the baking pan into the oven at 160° cooking the spheres for more or less 20 minutes.

To prepare the confectioner’s custard, mix in a saucepan the sugar with the flour homogenize everything together adding a glass of milk and the yolks. Put then the saucepan on a low heat and slowly mix the custard with a wooden spoon until it starts boiling. At this point remove the pan from the heat, add the vanilla bean and stretch it out on a surface and let it cool off. Once it is completely cool, add to the confectioner’s custard ¾ of cream together with the minced peel of 2 lemons and mix everything together.

Deprive the cooked and cool sponge cake spheres from their internal part and fill them with the mixture made up by custard and cream bathing each one of them in a liquid made up by “Strega” liquor, water and sugar. After that put them on a tray.

The cooked and cool sponge cake

The filled sponge cakes

Take the remaining custard adding in it some milk until you obtain a liquid sauce sufficient to cover the Sospiri. Decorate them with the remaining cream putting on their top ½ candied cherry and some lemon peel julienne.