Struffoli

Struffoli are small spheres of sweet dough, chickpea-sized or barely larger, deep-fried and then tossed in honey warmed with citrus peel. They are piled into a ring or a cone on a serving plate and decorated with cubes of candied fruit, toasted almonds and diavulilli, the tiny multicoloured sugar nonpareils that are as essential to the look as the honey is to the taste.

This is not a fork dessert. You take them with your fingers, one or two at a time, and the plate stays on the table from the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on 8 December through to Epiphany on 6 January, shrinking a little each day.

The dough is unleavened: flour, whole eggs, a little butter or lard, a spoonful of sugar, grated lemon and orange zest, and a splash of anise liqueur or rum. It does not puff. It dries out in the fryer and stays small, which is exactly what makes the ratio of crisp surface to honey work.

The texture that results is specific and hard to fake: a thin crisp shell under a film of honey, and a dense, faintly chewy centre that is never dry.

Honey and citrus, in that order, over something that eats like a very small doughnut. The honey is the dominant flavour and it is not diluted, since struffoli are coated rather than soaked, so the quality of the honey shows immediately. Orange and lemon zest run through both the dough and the honey and are what keep the whole thing from being flatly sweet.

Underneath is fried dough: rich, eggy, slightly savoury from the butter or lard, with a faint aniseed lift from the liqueur in the mix. The almonds add bitterness and crunch, the candied peel adds chew, and the sprinkles add nothing but colour and a faint sugary grit, which is the point of them.

Eating them is oddly compulsive. Each ball is a single mouthful, so there is no natural stopping point, and Neapolitan families are candid about the fact that a kilo does not last as long as anyone plans.

By day four they soften. The shell gives way to the honey and they become chewier: different, and to some people better.

Struffoli are assembled rather than cooked, but the timing matters more than the technique.

Roll the dough into pencil-thin ropes, cut them into half-centimetre pieces, and roll each between floured fingers. Half a kilo of flour produces several hundred balls, which is why in Naples this is done by two or three people around a table with the radio on.

Fry at a moderate temperature, around 170°C, a small handful at a time, stirring so they colour evenly. Too hot and the outside browns while the inside stays raw.

Warm the honey gently with a strip of citrus peel and a spoonful of sugar. Never let it go past about 110°C: above that it caramelises, turns bitter, and sets the balls into a single solid block instead of glazing them individually. Tip the warm, drained struffoli in and fold from the bottom with a wooden spoon.

Shape the ring with lightly oiled hands while everything is still warm. An oiled glass placed in the centre of the plate and removed at the end makes the hole. Decorate immediately: candied fruit, almonds and sprinkles only stick while the honey is soft.

To work ahead, fry the balls up to three days early and keep them bare in an airtight tin, or freeze them for a month. Honey them on the day you serve.

At room temperature, on the serving plate under a dome or a loosely laid sheet of foil, struffoli hold four or five days. The honey coat slows things down, but each day the thin crust gives up a little more and the balls soften: on day three they still have a centre with some bite, by day six the texture has gone the other way entirely.

The fridge is the wrong place. Cold crystallises the honey and stiffens the fat in the dough, so they come out hard and dull, and warming them does not reverse it.

To work ahead, split the job. Fried balls without honey keep three days in an airtight container at room temperature, or freeze for up to a month and come back with five minutes in a 160°C (320°F) oven. Warm the honey and dress them on the day. Struffoli already coated do not freeze: as they thaw the honey draws out water and the balls slump and lose their shape.

Start with size. Well made Neapolitan struffoli are small, barely bigger than a chickpea, and slightly irregular, because they are cut by hand from a rope of dough. Balls the size of hazelnuts, all identical, mean an industrial batch or a domestic shortcut: they change the ratio of crust to crumb and the dessert turns heavy.

The balls should still come apart. If the mound is a solid block that breaks in shards, the honey was heated too far and caramelised. One struffolo should lift away between two fingers, carrying a thread of honey and nothing else. The colour is a warm, even gold: pale patches mean an overcrowded fryer, dark ones mean tired oil. Read the candied peel the way you would on a cassata, translucent and soft rather than glassy and unnaturally bright. The sprinkles are coloured sugar by definition and belong to the look.

American bakeries sell the same thing as honey balls, sometimes as pignolata, which in Sicily is a larger, often chocolate-glazed sweet. Greek loukoumades are bigger, softer and soaked in syrup.

In the US, Italian-American bakeries make struffoli through December, especially in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago, though some list them as 'honey balls' or 'honey clusters', which is the same thing. Expect 18 to 35 dollars per pound for a decorated tray. Order a week ahead in the fortnight before Christmas.

They travel poorly and are genuinely easy to make, so buying the ingredients is often the better move. Mild honey, candied orange peel and nonpareils are the only things worth being fussy about.

In the UK, struffoli are rare outside Italian delicatessens in London and a handful of Neapolitan-run bakeries, at roughly 25 to 45 pounds per kilo in December. Imported tins and shrink-wrapped trays appear in Italian food shops from late November; check whether the coating is honey or glucose syrup, which is the standard industrial shortcut and immediately obvious in the taste.

Whatever you buy, avoid anything refrigerated. Cold crystallises the honey and hardens the dough, and it never recovers.

Naples in December, and nowhere else quite works. From the middle of the month every pastry shop window in the old centre carries rings of struffoli alongside roccocò, mostaccioli and susamielli: the whole Neapolitan Christmas repertoire on display at once.

Via San Gregorio Armeno, the street of the nativity-figure workshops, is at its most crowded and most Neapolitan in the same weeks, which makes it the right setting as well as the right season. The neighbourhood bakeries of Vomero and the Rione Sanità often make better struffoli than the tourist-facing names on the main streets.

Out in the province (Torre del Greco, Pozzuoli, the Vesuvian towns) you find the older school: smaller balls, more honey, less decoration.

Outside Campania, Neapolitan pastry shops in Rome, Milan and Turin make them in December, and the Neapolitan diaspora keeps the tradition alive abroad more faithfully than almost any other. If you are invited to a Neapolitan family's home between Christmas and Epiphany, the plate will be on the table.