Italian Rice Cake Bites

The rice cake is a typical cake from Bologna, Italy. I've been eating it since I was very little but for some reasons I never realized how good it was until a few months ago.

It's a very soft yet crispy cake and its particular consistency makes the flavor even better. The rice and almonds make it very crunchy, but the rest of it is very soft and tasty, very similar to a flan.

You can cut and serve it as a regular cake, but tradition says that you have to cut it into small diamond shapes that you can grab using toothpicks. For this reason it's perfect as a snack.

I must warn you though: one piece won't be enough!

• 1 l milk
• 140 gr rice
• 140 gr almonds
• 5 eggs
• 250 gr sugar
• 50 gr powdered sugar
• 80 gr candied citron
• 30 gr amaretti cookies
• grated lemon peel

First of all, pour your milk into a large pot and put it on the stove at a medium flame. When the milk starts boiling, pour the rice in it. Let it cook in the milk, stirring it from time to time.

Once your rice is al dente (not completely cooked), remove the pot from the stove and let everything cool down a little.

When your milk and rice are not too hot anymore, add the powdered sugar and mix everything together.

In the meantime (you can do this while you're waiting for the milk to cool down), put almonds, amaretti cookies and candied citron in a mixer and chop them up. Don't chop them too much, you don't need them to become a powder.
Of course this depends on your taste, you can cut them into smaller pieces if you don't want your cake to be too crunchy inside.

When you are done, put them in a bowl and add the granulated sugar to them. Grate the peel of a lemon and mix everything together.

Now add the eggs and mix everything together again, being very accurate. Finally, add the almond-amaretti-citron-eggs mix into the milk too and stir them together.

Cover a rectangular baking pan with parchment paper and pour the mix in it.

Preheat the oven at 180°C and bake for 30-40 minutes. At the end of that time, use a toothpick to prick the cake and make sure that it's well-cooked: if the toothpick comes out dry, the cake is ready!

Remove the cake from the oven then let it rest and cool down before cutting and serving it. I actually waited till the next morning to do that.

Finally cut it into pieces. As I mentioned before, we usually cut it into small diamond shapes here, so I first made some horizontal cuts to form thin strips, then I made other diagonal cuts and obtained my diamond-shaped pieces.

You can also insert a toothpick in each piece so that they will be easy to grab and eat.

Now you can finally taste this delicious rice cake!