Crostata alla Crema Pasticcera e Fragole Fresche (Italian Custard Tart with Fresh Strawberries) This is the tart that fills the window of every Italian pasticceria from April to June: a crisp shortcrust shell, a thick layer of vanilla pastry cream, and fresh strawberries laid on raw. Nothing about the fruit is cooked, reduced or sweetened. The dessert is assembled cold, in the last hours before it is eaten, and it lives or dies on the thin coat of glaze brushed over the berri

Crema al Marsala (Italian Marsala Pastry Cream) Crema al Marsala is a pastry cream that carries a fortified wine inside it, and that single fact changes how it has to be cooked. Marsala brings sugar, alcohol and a real acidity into a mixture of yolks, milk and starch, and every one of those things pulls the setting point of the egg lower than it sits in a plain vanilla cream. What comes out is a filling the colour of pale amber, carrying the dried fig and walnut aroma of the

Crema al Torrone (Italian Nougat Pastry Cream) Crema al torrone is what an Italian pastry kitchen does with the nougat that survives Christmas. Broken bars, end pieces and the corners nobody wanted are melted into milk and turned into a pastry cream that fills cakes, profiteroles and panettone. It is simple work with one arithmetic problem hidden inside it, because nougat is mostly sugar, and a cream that ignores that arrives at the table sweet enough to stop a conversation.