CHIAVARI, Italy – I’ve
been obsessed this entire week with the idea of making a zuccotto. I have friends coming from the States next
week and I thought it might be
a good dessert to serve since I can make it ahead of time and freeze it. It all
seemed so simple when I first started looking for a recipe, but then things got
complicated.
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| A Super Duper Zuccotto |
With practically every
town in Italy having its own variation on the zuccotto theme, there seemed to
be as many zuccotto recipes as there are stars in the sky. There’s the Tuscan zuccotto,
the Sienese zuccotto, the Florentine zuccotto, the Neapolitan zuccotto,
the chocolate zuccutto, the cherry, the ricotta, the ice cream, the
whipped cream, the zuccotto triffle and even baby zuccotto.
There were so many recipes from so many sources I was beginning to think I was
the only person in the world who had never tackled this Italian specialty.
In the Italian
cookbook world a zuccotto is a dome shaped dessert made with sponge cake
soaked in liqueur and filled with custard or whipped cream and chocolate.
In the real world the cake part can be either cut up sponge cake or ladyfingers
that have been brushed or dipped in a variety of liqueurs or flavorings.
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| Zuccotto with Almonds |
Here in Italy you can
buy ready made sponge cake and ladyfingers in the grocery store, so it’s just a
matter of putting everything together.
The cake is used to
line a bowl or mold which is then filled with…. and this is where you have your
choice of ingredients. Then the whole business is put into the freezer for at
least 3 hours, unmolded upside down on a plate and decorated – or not.
The zuccotto recipes
made sense, even without quantities, and I was happy with all of them until I
came across recipes for Sicilian Cassata which sounded very much
like the recipes for zuccotto. Then I was confused.
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| Sicilian Cassata |
It seems to me that cassata
and zuccotto are very similar in construction and ingredients, maybe
brothers from different mothers? But as much as they are similar, there are
also differences between them. First of all, a cassata isn't dome shaped
which zuccotto is, and secondly a cassata is covered with
marzipan and heavily lah dee dah decorated, which zuccotto is not.
But they are made the same way and basically with the same ingredients.
The zuccotto got it's name from the word zucca,
which means pumpkin in Italian, probably because it looks a little like a
pumpkin. But zucca is much more than just pumpkin.
For example, you might
call someone a zuccone or pumpkin head if you though they were not
particularly bright. But in the case of this cake, the name probably comes from
its resemblance to the domed, metal helmets 15th century Italian soldiers wore
to protect their heads (zuccas) when they went into battle. Or the name
may have come from the skullcap priests wear to cover their zuccas. Both
sound reasonable to me, and definitely very Italian.
But moving past the
origin of the name, here is the zuccotto recipe I chose. It’s a
compilation of many recipes I found on the internet.
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| You Can Decorate Your Zuccotto Any Way You Want |
Zuccotto
Dome: Line a bowl
(approx. 9-inches wide by 4-1/2 -inches deep) with plastic wrap. Allow several
inches of the wrap to hang over the sides of the bowl to facilitate unmolding
the cake.
Lightly brush each of
the ladyfingers (or spongecake) with liqueur (I used rum) as you add them to
the bowl, place them sugared side outwards. Fill the bottom and any gaps with
liqueur-soaked trimmings so that the lining is completely solid. The tops of
the ladyfingers should be even with the rim of the bowl. Chill for 30 minutes.
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| Lining the Bowl With Ladyfingers |
Filling: I used
whipped cream for the filling as it seemed the easiest. I whipped one pint of
cream with some powdered sugar and vanilla and divided it into two bowls. In
one bowl I added candied citron and bits of shaved chocolate. In the second
bowl of whipped cream I added cocoa powder (bitter) and chopped pistachios. It
looked really disgusting.
I put the whipped cream
with citron and chocolate bits in the ladyfinger lined bowl first, then I put
the chocolate whipped cream on top of it. I closed the plastic wrap around the
entire cake, put it in the freezer and crossed my fingers.
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| Lining the Bowl with Sponge Cake |
Three hours later I
took it out of the freezer and unmolded it on a serving dish. The minute I did
I knew I was in trouble. The cake part, because it had been soaked in rum, was
still mushy. It makes sense: alcohol does not freeze. I let the cake sit out
for about half an hour, which technically would have made it a semi-freddo
if I had added marscapone, and then, because I was dying of curiosity, I
cut a wedge and put it on a plate.
It looked okay but the
first bite of the cookie cover confirmed my worst fear. The taste of alcohol
was overpowering. I should have brushed the ladyfingers with rum, not soaked
them. Then I tasted the filling. That actually tasted better than I expected
and when I put the two together, the rummy cake and the filling, it wasn’t bad.
It wasn’t great, but….it wasn’t really really bad either.
I don’t know if I’ll
make it again, but if I do I think I’ll try the sponge cake instead of the
ladyfingers, and most certainly I will use a lot less rum. If any of you have
ever made zuccotto, your suggestions to better zuccotto making
would be greatly appreciated.
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