Forno fighting

For the third time, finally...well let's say i didn't lose this time.From my arrival to Italy i wanted to bake a cake. Not an Italian one...not yet. A Czech cake. I chose the "countess' cake" since i like this one and it ain't particularly difficult. At leat at home it wasn't.
It took me a while to get the ingredients. Well, sugar was easy, jam, apples and eggs as well. With the fat it took me a while to find the right one, but Gradina seemes ok - it says it has "sapore gustoso e legero", i.e. delicious and light taste. I'd say it's a bit exaggerated because it's just a vegetable fat. Whatever. Well, and then there's the flour. In Italy you can buy quite a lot different types of flour: the clasic 0 and 00, for pasta, for piadina, then the wholegrain flour, flour for polenta... But they are all fine. I mean fine-grained. No way could i get our Czech half-coarse-grained or coarse-grained flour here. The 0 and 00 had to do. And the last part was the baikng powder. That one took me like five minutes to find, because i knew that i was not looking for yeast (lievito) but for baking powder (didn't look for the name in my dictionary). Well, surprise surprise...it's also called lievito. Bought lievito pane degli angeli (yeast for angels' bread) and it works :)

 

And then, to make a long story a little shorter...i was just desperate using the oven (forno in Italian), feeling like i forgot how to cook overnight. I have to admit i haven't been using gas oven for some time, but this one seems to have some problems with thermoregulation (always blame electronics, no one knows how that works, anyway). You just have to keep increasing the temperature, since it runs for some time and then switches off and lets the temperature drop way below the required value. At the end you either manage to not bake the cake enough and then burn it when trying to bake it a bit more (first time) or you keep increasing the temperature until at the end the part of the cake is still not done, but the bottom is burned (second try).

Well, finally i remembered an old tip i heard years ago and put a cup with water on the bottom of the oven. Almost worked this time. Voila!

 

I think next time i'll try some italian sweets like pandoro or crostata, because for that i am sure to find the right ingredients straight away...