A fluffy brioche dough is the base for this recipe for Italian-style bombolonis. They are soft and buttery, filled with a limoncello pastry cream and tossed in sugar.

Have you ever had a meal that sticks with you for years to follow? Mine includes bombolonis, an Italian-style brioche donut, filled with silky cream, and I’ve been dreaming of making them at home ever since I tasted them.

About 4 1/2 years ago, we had just moved to Nashville and my cousin and his wife were visiting. We had heard endless recommendations about a new restaurant in an up-and-coming neighborhood called Rolf and Daughters. We waited outside in very cold weather until a table opened up in the dreamy, brick-walled, dimly lit restaurant and we were seated in a table just close enough to the kitchen to be warmed by the heat emanating from the stoves and to take a peek at every dish coming into the dining area. I remember the meal in snapshots- vibrant green cocktails peppered with jalapeño, dark, tannic red wine, two or three dishes with pork and whatever vegetable was popping up on Tennessee farms that week (all of which tasted completely differently, but all exceptional). As we were eating, we kept seeing roasted chicken after roasted chicken, balanced on the shoulder’s of servers coming out of the kitchen. We wondered amongst ourselves about the kind of person who orders roasted chicken at a restaurant with so many more diverse options on the menu, but our curiosity finally got the best of us and we asked our waiter, “What’s with all the roasted chicken?”. “It’s unlike any other roasted chicken,” he replied, “It’s the best I’ve ever had”. We were sold and even though our stomachs didn’t really need chicken, our mouths did. Our waiter was right, it was the best chicken I’d ever eaten. Happy that we didn’t miss out on the chicken, we finished the meal with bombolonis, tennis ball sized rounds of brioche, fried and filled with the perfect pastry cream.

A few years, and two cities later, Bon Appetite published the recipe for the Rolf and Daughters Garlic Confit Chicken in the now-retired R.S.V.P section of their magazine and the splattered, torn sheet of magazine paper still hangs from my refrigerator, a daily reminder of that night, that chicken, and those little bombolonis.

When I started doing research for the brioche dough for the donuts, I stumbled on a recipe from Thalia Ho at Butter and Brioche. I intended to use it as my starting point, testing and tweaking as I went, but after making them once, I couldn’t find anything that needed changing. For this recipe, I simply adapted her recipe to reflect both metric and U.S. measurements and rounded out a few ingredients to make it a little easier for a home baker without a scale. (And if you haven’t already, check out Thalia’s blog and Instagram. Her work is whimsical and unique and her photography is stunning!)