HappyTummy              

Taormina sits high on a cliff in the eastern province of Messina on the Italian island of Sicily. It is a charming little town… exactly like what you’d picture a quaint European village to be. Dozens of cafés, bakeries, gelato shops and restaurants line the streets, as do small clothing boutiques and stores filled with little trinkets.

We arrived in Taormina after visiting Mt. Etna, just 30 miles away, where we climbed a crater bed and marveled at the view. After a while on Mt. Etna, we were tired, cold and coated in dust and dirt from the crumbly volcanic rock. We loved the hike, but by that point, we were ready to spend some leisure time in Taormina, eating sweets and browsing shops.

The first thing I wanted to do when we arrived was to find a cannoli. A big, fat, crispy-on-the-outside, creamy-on-the-inside cannoli. Maybe dipped in chocolate, maybe not. I stepped into dozens of little pasticceria, and always thought to myself, These look great, but let me check out the next place, just in case!

I don’t know why I thought one particular bakery would be better than another… pretty much everything in every place I stepped into looked so delicious. Mini apple tarts, chocolate puff pastries, pies, biscotti… I wanted to eat everything!

When it comes to food, Sicily is known for frutta martorana, which are traditional marzipan sweets hand crafted in the form of fruits and vegetables. Americans know marzipan as a sweet, thick, moldable almond paste used mostly in candies or rolled out as a type of icing for a cake (like fondant). In Italy, marzipan is slightly less sweet and often molded into different shapes.

You wouldn’t believe how realistic these candies are! The details of the leaf and stem on an apple, the seeds on a strawberry, the rind of a watermelon—they look like the real thing!

Last stop on our walking tour of Taormina: La Bottega del Buongustaio, a fabulous little pasticceria selling everything from wine to pasta to jams. But the real beauties there were the cookies in the display case. Almost all the cookies were variations on paste di mandorle, or almond paste (though this is not to be mistaken for marpizan—they’re different). Some were orange flavored, others were studded whole almonds, and still others were topped with little dried fruits.

I left Taormina not with the cannoli I’d hoped for, but rather with one of the most delicious cookies I’ve ever eaten in my life. Studded with pistachios and sporting a beautiful green hue, this cookie totally captured my attention as I peered into the bakery case at La Bottega del Buongustaio. But it wasn’t until I bit into it that I truly fell in love. Extremely chewy on the inside but with the contrasting crunch of the nuts on the outside, this cookie was an explosion of flavor in my mouth. I can still taste it now… and I hope to someday create this little masterpiece in my own kitchen!

Other stops on our Mediterranean cruise:

• Barcelona, Spain
• Athens and Santorini, Greece (We went to Greece last year too, and ate so many yummy things!)
• Istanbul, Turkey