Tag Archives: lemon zest

Bread, Dessert

Heavenly Lemon Ricotta Muffins

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I was going to make my Lemon Blueberry Ricotta Cake for the department get-together, but my husband didn’t like the look of the blueberries I picked up, so I whipped up my Sparkling Molasses Ginger Cookies. That left me with lemons and ricotta. So I merged the following two recipes into one that resulted in a muffin with a fluffy texture and a rich lemony taste:

Giada’s Lemon Ricotta Muffins

Lemon Ricotta Muffins Full of Sunshine

Heavenly Lemon Ricotta Muffins

  • Servings: 12 muffins
  • Difficulty: easy
  • Print

Preheat oven to 350°; line a muffin pan with paper liners.

1 cup sugar

1 stick (1/2 cup) butter, room temperature

lemon zest from 3 lemons

juice of 1 lemon (about 2 tablespoons)

1 cup whole milk ricotta cheese

1 large egg

2 cups all purpose flour

2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup almond milk (or cow’s milk or water)

decorating sugar

  1. Beat sugar and butter together until light and fluffy.
  2. Add zest, lemon juice, and ricotta and beat until combined.
  3. Beat in egg.
  4. Add dry ingredients and beat at low speed until combined.
  5. Slowly pour in milk until batter thins but still remains a thick batter. I used the entire 1/3 cup of milk.
  6. Scoop batter into liners in muffin pan. Sprinkle with decorating sugar.
  7. Bake for 18 minutes. Cool in pan on rack for at least 15 minutes before removing to completely cool. Did you ever try to pick a hot muffin out of the tin and pull the top right off? Better to wait.

Cakes, Cheese, Dessert, Fruit

Lemon Blueberry Ricotta Cake

2 Comments

While taking a break from those buttermilk bars, I was looking at that container of ricotta I had in the fridge, but not really in the mood for a heavy lasagna, or even a light lasagna, after those stuffed peppers and last weeks pulled pork enchiladas. Even a ricotta cheesecake seemed too heavy. There are many ricotta cake recipes out there and some take way too many ingredients, like Martha Stewart’s that takes 3 lbs of ricotta, arborio rice and 6 eggs! I must try it, but today I’m just looking for a small, lighter, fruity cake that would be good with a cup of tea. This Italian ricotta cake looks good, except for the Sambuca, but I decided on this cake with raspberries and used lemon zest and blueberries instead of raspberries, lots of blueberries.

This is a beautiful cake, dense and moist like a coffee cake. I recommend using a springform pan to make it easy to unmold. I put a sheet of foil under my pan in the oven in case it leaked, but it did not. The batter is very, very thick.

Folding in frozen berries
Baked in springform
Moist and rich

Lemon Blueberry Ricotta Cake

  • Servings: 6-8
  • Difficulty: easy
  • Print

Adapted from “Raspberry-Ricotta Cake” at Epicurious: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/raspberry-ricotta-cake-51264060

Preheat oven to 350°; line the bottom of a 9″ springform pan with parchment paper, and spray the paper and pan with non-stick vegetable shortening spray. If you’re worried about the seal on your pan, you can cover the bottom with foil, but this thick batter should not leak out.

Mix dry ingredients in a large bowl:

  • 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
  • zest of one lemon, grated

(I like to mix the zest with the dry ingredients so the flour coats each bit and it distributes better in the final batter.)

  • 3 large eggs
  • 1 1/2 cups whole milk ricotta
  • 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1 stick butter, melted
  • 1 3/4 cups frozen wild blueberries
  1. Mix the eggs, ricotta, and vanilla in a second bowl. Stir this mixture into the dry ingredients without over-mixing. I used a hand mixer for this step, as the batter is very thick.
  2. Mix in the melted butter until incorporated.
  3. Fold in 1 1/2 cups blueberries to distribute. The berries will start to bleed a little on folding and that’s okay, but you don’t want to over-mix the batter and break all the berries.
  4. Pour and spread batter in pan—did I say it is very thick? It almost looked like polenta, what with the small grains of the ricotta.
  5. Sprinkle the remaining blueberries over the top, pressing them in a bit.
  6. Bake for 50-60 minutes. Mine took the full 60 minutes, but my springform pan is a heavy pan. Cool on a rack for about 30 minutes, then remove the outer ring and continue to cool.