When I reflect upon growing up Maltese in Melbourne in the late 70 and early 80's I can distinctly recall certain food memories with great fondness. Then there are a whole host of food memories from my childhood associated with my father's harebrained schemes and experimentations, which I prefer to bury and repress.


God knows how much I love my crazy Gozitan father, but how I wish he could have kept (and eaten) his own culinary experiments to himself, rather than inflict them upon his poor, unsuspecting children!

Hence, one of the fond food memories and subsequent traditions from my childhood that I cherish is of making figolli with my mum at Easter time. I suspect that the fact that figolli are made out of comforting ingredients such as flour, eggs, butter and sugar may have something to do with the memory being so sweet. That, coupled by the fact that dad was usually far from the kitchen when my siblings and I were tossing flour and sugar at one another.



I have now been making figolli with Hoover and Fussy ever since they were both able to stand on a stool next to me and sink their chubby little hands into a mound of soft, sifted flour. Easter to them is now synonymous with figolli making and that is a huge source of comfort and joy to me.



I may have failed dismally at passing on the Maltese language to my children, but one thing I am determined to do is to bring Malta Down Under to them at every available opportunity. And so on Good Friday we teamed up yet again with our dear and crazy Maltese friends for our annual figolli bake off. We managed to make sixteen figolli in record time this year thanks to the figolli cutters that we recently sourced from Queen Baker.

Nirringrazzjak ħafna Claire and Sylvana, for having the foresight to import figolli cutters all the way from Malta this year.