Almost two years ago now, while travelling around southern Italy for a few weeks, we happened upon a small café in the town square of Catania, Sicily, with a counter stacked high with sweet treats. Choosing to forgo the famous cannoli, I bought the biggest doughnut I could find, and with my limited Italian didn’t realise until I bit into it that it was filled with this sweet, fragrant orange ricotta crème. Heaven! It’s been in the back of my mind to recreate this experience ever since.
My interpretation are palm-sized and generously filled. Light and fluffy, and sweetly scented, they require a little patience to create (two rounds of proofing), but are really rather simple to make. I made use of the very efficient stand mixers we have here in the cooking lab, but you could equally knead the dough by hand.