Semolina Pastries

It was pretty some time that I wanted to try this recipe, that could be found in the Artusi cookbook, because I love the taste and texture of semolina but I had some really hard problems in its making. These cakes should remain moist and soft inside, but not wet, instead every time they came out from the oven completely soaked. You can't imagine how much Paoletta laughed when I was explaining to her my failures. At the end, pretty frustrated by the latest debacle and noticing that also other cakes had cooking problems I decided to buy a new oven. Then the new oven arrived, shiny and brand new and... insert your preferred swearing here... still these cakes were too much wet! At that point Paoletta, still sneering for revenge on me and my critiques to her photos, confessed her "Artusian" secret: "You fool! At the time Artusi wrote eggs were half the size of the giant one we're accustomed to use today. Just halve the eggs in the recipe and it'll be fine." Done and success at least!
If you don't understand why I tried so hard to make these pastries is because you never tasted any of them, try it and you'll figure it out.

Ingredients for about 20 pastries: 1 cup of semolina, 1/2 cup of of sugar, 1/3 cup of pine nuts, 3/4 oz. of butter, 3 1/3 cups of milk, 2 eggs, salt, lemon zest, breadcrumbs, icing sugar.

Preparation: warm the milk in a pan on a very low heat. When the milk will start to boil pour into semolina being careful to not create lumps. When semolina will start to thicken add pine nuts, previously minced, sugar, butter and some lemon zest (that you'll take way after a while). When the mixture will become pretty thick, take it out from the fire, cool it and then add the eggs: yolks first and the whipped whites next. Then butter the molds, sprinkle them with breadcrumbs and fill them with the mixture. Put them to cook in the oven at 350 F for about half an hour and at the end sprinkle the cooked pastries with icing sugar.