Beat drained ricotta with icing sugar until smooth. Fold in chocolate chips. Refrigerate 1 hour.
DESSERTS · SICILY
Cassata Siciliana: the most Sicilian thing that exists.
Sponge cake soaked in liqueur, sweetened ricotta, marzipan, royal icing, candied fruit. The cassata is baroque, excessive, and entirely deliberate. It takes two days to make. It was brought to Sicily by the Arabs in the 9th century. Nothing about it is subtle.
METHOD
6 steps, and one will define the dish.
A 24cm springform. Line sides with strips of marzipan.
Base layer, soak with liqueur syrup, ricotta cream, second sponge layer.
Covered, overnight.
Unmould, cover top with royal icing.
The more elaborate, the more correct.
WHY IT WORKS — THE SCIENCE
The decoration is structural, not decorative.
The cassata is the most maximalist dessert in Italian cooking. It is also, if you trace its history, the oldest — the Arab word qas’at, meaning a large round vessel, arrived in Sicily in the ninth century along with almonds, sugar, and the technique of making marzipan from Sicilian almonds. The green pasta reale coating, the baroque decoration of candied fruit, the ricotta filling scented with orange blossom — all of it arrived with a civilisation that changed Sicilian cooking permanently.
Today the cassata is the centerpiece of Sicilian Easter tables and the showpiece of every serious Palermo pasticceria. It takes two days to make. The first day is for the components; the second is for assembly and decoration. You cannot rush either.
The pasta reale
The green marzipan that coats the outside of the cassata is made from Sicilian almonds, sugar, and enough green food colouring to produce the specific shade of pale pistachio that is the cassata’s signature colour. It is rolled thin, cut into strips, and used to line the sides of the mould before the sponge and filling go in. When the cassata is inverted and unmoulded, the pasta reale forms the outer shell. Without it, you have a ricotta cake. With it, you have a cassata.
“The cassata is Sicily in one dessert. The Arab almonds, the Spanish sugar, the Norman sponge, the Baroque decoration. Every layer of Sicilian history is in it somewhere.”— CORRADO ASSENZA, CAFFÈ SICILIA, NOTO
