Pasticceria Scarpato - Nice cakes, shame about the website
I won’t say how I found out about the site of Italian biscuit and cake maker, Scarpato, but I decided to check it out. Well, I do like Italian food and one of the aims of this blog is to do a little promotion of all things Italian.
So, off I went to have a mosey around.
What I found was a very interesting selection of Italian cakes and pastries, plus a few other goodies, as you can see in this .pdf version of their 2007 Christmas catalogue. Check out the fun turkey and piggy cakes on pages 16 and 18. Very original. However, although these temptations may well tempt you, there is nowhere on Scarpato’s clean looking site that I could find that actually tells you where you can lay your hands on these scrummy looking delights. Neither within Italy or any other countries.
Not knowing where you can find these things is one thing which lets Scarpato’s otherwise nice little site down, the other thing is that the site is only half in English, and even though you may click on the little US/UK flag, this does not guarantee that everything you will see is in English. Maybe I could rustle up a little translation work from them!
What a great shame - lots of tempting treats all locked behind a virtual window. Another wee problem is that many of the cakes are shown on the main site in their decorative wrappings, but you cannot see what the actual cake looks like.
Yes, I know you could try to contact this company via email or phone, but it would save their and yours if they invested a little more effort in their website. I hope they do.
I might ring the Verona based Scarpato up and gently bend their ears over these little oversights.
PS Please let me know if you have heard of this company. I think I have seen their stuff on sale in the shops here, but I don’t think the Scarpato brand has been etched into my brain in the same way as Barilla, for example.
Yuletide markets in Milan
If you go down to the centre of Milan over the next few days, you will probably notice that there are a couple of Christmas markets - one along Via Orefici and another down near Piazza San Babila. I had a quick look at the stalls, and there are some nice bits and bobs on offer.
So, if you have overdone the festive food and wine a little, and you feel like burning of the odd Yuletide calorie or so, you could head on down to Milan centre and have a browse around the stalls. Then, if you find the crowds rather overwhelming, or if you are one of those lucky people who never puts on the pound, why not head for a nice bar and have a cup of thick hot chocolate with whipped cream on top? Just the thing for this chilly weather.
Try to get there early though, there was a veritable sea of people when I was there this afternoon.
Oh, and if I don’t manage to write anything on this blog tomorrow, which is probable, seeing as we are having a ‘cenone’ (big dinner) with some friends to see the New Year in:
All the very best for a Happy and Prosperous 2008!
from Alex and Gaetano here at Blog from Italy.
Escape from Christmas
Well, the plan was to spend Christmas with the Italian in-laws down in Genova, and we did indeed manage to endure right up until the end of the Christmas day lunch. Then we high-tailed it back to Milan. A combination of dogs not getting on with one another, lively little son causing the downstairs neighbours to shout and knock on their ceiling every five minutes etc managed to dampen that good old Christmas spirit, and we found ourselves yearning for the, relative, tranquillity of Milan.
At least the gastronomic delights of the Christmas Eve dinner over at our friend’s house managed to perk our Christmas spirit up a little. I should add that my son and I holed up at our friend’s house. This friend has a lovely appartment with a wonderful view over Genova harbour, has no barking dogs or grumpy neighbours, and the flat is more spacious and comfortable than our in-laws ‘trapped in the 1950’s’ place, and my little one was happy because he was not being constantly told not to run, not to drop toys, and not to breathe too heavily etc when in the in-laws’ place. In fact, I could not pry him away, and he actually told our friend that he wanted to buy her appartment. Precocious, he is.
Anyway, that Christmas Eve dinner was darned good. We had Oysters and lobster, amongst other things, and everything was washed down with good wine. At least some memories of Xmas ‘07 will be good.
Milan on the other hand seems to be all but deserted, and, oddly enough, much less chaotic than Genova. Everyone has probably popped off to the mountain house, leaving the city wonderfully quiet. It’s sort of like the middle of August, but cold.
By heck, it’s good to be home.
I ‘cooked’ this up for Christmas:
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