Dolce Italiano: Desserts from the Babbo Kitchen

Gina DePalma is the pastry chef at Manhattan's Babbo, home of Mario Batali's most acclaimed Italian fare. In Dolce Italiano, DePalma offers 90-plus doable recipes for a wide range of traditional and signature Italian sweets, such as Chocolate and Walnut Torte from Capri, Venetian Apple Cake, and Sesame and White Corn Biscotti. DePalma also provides illuminating asides on techniques and ingredients, including information on such "indispensable" items as honey, ricotta, mascarpone and grappa. Particularly notable chapters explore fried and festival sweets.

DePalma writes passionately about "dolce," revealing at one point her obsessive attempt to track down the best ricotta cheesecake. Most readers will share her attraction to the Italian dessert repertoire, which, though it lacks the richness and invention of, say, its French equivalent, appeals through simple good taste. Readers seeking a thorough introduction to Italian dessert making, presented in the context of its bounteous history and the author s devotion to her subject, can do no better than to explore Dolce Italiano. --Arthur Boehm