Holiday Post 1: Strufoli

So this year, I told my five key family members to think of something exotic, hard or rare treat that they would like me to make from scratch for them as their holiday gift from me. It all went splendidly, I did all the shopping and baking the day before we celebrated, I packaged everything well and it all transported there wonderfully to rave reviews. The only problem was that my phone was stolen from my job the day before all of the baking. And I take all of my photos with my phone. So...I was able to take some photos, but they came out horribly overblown. I will be posting what I could salvage.

My grandmother requested Strufoli. I had never even heard what this was. She gave me a recipe that she had written down from a chef she likes, Mary Ann Esposito's priest. He actually measured everything in eggshells! Here is a photo of the recipe in my grandmother's handwriting:


I started with these quality ingredients:


Since the recipe called for "1/2 shells" too, I presumed that 1 shell of water would be filling both sides of the shell. This is a very overblown photo of what the dough looked like:


It was sticky, but I rolled it out onto a well greased cutting board and pulled off pieces to fry.

They looked like this as they came out of the fryer:


And after tossing in some hot honey and adding some citron, the finished product looked like this: