Festive biscotti with cherries on top These festive looking Sicilian almond biscotti (image below) topped with red and green glace cherries are a soft almond punch of sweetness on the inside with a light golden chewy bite on the outside.

I (for some reason) bought ground almonds with the skin on (peeled was called for in the recipe) and I mixed and moulded the ingredients by hand. I didn't see the bit about using the mix master and didn't have a piping bag but...they turned out ok.

Baking Sicilian almond biscuits Packed full of ground blanched almonds, fine caster sugar and egg whites these little almond biscuits are easy to make. 

It is basically a delicious mouthful of soft, ground almonds baked. Put the ground almonds (almond meal) in a bowl, add the sugar, mix well, add three or four egg whites (I used three and didn't add the suggested almond essence), form little balls and dust them in icing sugar before they go in the oven for close to 15 minutes. 

  Summer eating at U Bagghiu   During the summer in the back garden of Santina and Andrea’s restaurant, U Bagghiu (down Polizzi’s via Gagliardo) there are trees laden with pears and apples and tables sit under the shade of a wisteria vine and fruit trees. 

And to eat in the garden at U Bagghiu is for warm summer days .

A few weeks ago I came across (for the first time) a delicious looking biscuit named after the heroic and dashing ‘leader of the Italian movement for national liberation’, Giuseppe Garibaldi. 

My curiosity was stirred.

The Italian hero and his English biscuit Garibaldi, who fought to unify Italy under the one monarch, Vittorio Emanuel II in 1861 (when he and his 'Redshirts' freed Sicily and Naples from the rule of the Bourbons in 1860) not only has street after street (plus lots more) named in his honour all the way down the peninsula from Venice to Palermo but he was so popular in England by 1861 that the English made a biscuit bearing his name.