My Sicilian father-in-law taught me to love this tender, outrageously sweet dessert
Learning to dip the knife in hot water before using it to spread the icing on the marzipan made me feel like a pastry chef. I must have been 10. Having spread the brilliant white and glossy royal icing like plaster, family tradition dictated it had to be roughed up for “a snow effect”, which everybody knows is a shortcut for families who can’t decorate properly. I don’t think we even had a piping bag.
While time has edited and airbrushed most Christmas memories into moments of harmonious commensality, this one has stayed defiantly vexing. I remember my disappointment at the snow effect, followed by my horror as my brother and sister competed with each other to press decorations (some of which still had the sugar-concrete residue from the previous year’s cake) into the royal snow. Tying a ribbon around the cake was a consolation of sorts, as was covering the whole thing with a glass dome, which made it look like we had a huge snow globe on the sideboard.