Let me start off by saying I know Megan asked us to be as creative as possible with our recipes. I hope mine (especially being the inaugural entry that it is!) lives up to hers and all of your expectations… but I will forewarn that it shouldn’t be a terribly difficult or time-consuming endeavor. Perhaps that’s a good thing. We can look at this like a LBTC ice breaker :-)
I might have gone for something more difficult or something involving more sophisticated baking techniques if the recipe that I did end up selecting – Lemon and Honey Ricotta Cake – hadn’t sounded so personally appealing. One of my favorite summer activities is dinner in the North End, followed by the obligatory dessert and coffee. I don’t want to start a LBTC civil war, but I’m going to be completely upfront about this – it’s Modern Pastry for me. Maybe it has something to do with wanting to avoid the huge swarming crowd of tourists loitering around Mike’s. Or maybe it’s the kind of thing where you feel an allegiance to a place for no good reason. Either way, I LOVE their ricotta pie! Very sweet, but it’s got a great texture that is lighter than a cheesecake but denser than a flour cake. So when I saw this recipe that throws a twist – lemon and honey – into the mix, I knew I had to try it.
The recipe can be found in Baking: A Commonsense Guide, which I recently found at Borders and purchased because of the huge volume of recipes (there has got to be hundreds in here), the variety of them (runs the gamut from sweets to savory), and the instructive tips offered for everything. Oh, and did I mention pictures? Having a picture of each recipe is pretty much a requirement of mine, because just having a sense of what the end result is supposed to look like is so helpful to the baking process.
Anyhow, the recipe follows just below. If you’d like to see the cookbook picture, let me know and I will try to scan it. Note that the cake calls for poached fruit to be served as a garnish. I plan make the recipe as is (for the purpose of evaluating the recipe verbatim), but it might be fun if other people want to get experimental and try the cake with other accompaniments (maybe other fruit garnishes, cookies/biscuits, or whatever!). I may also try to see if I can get a locally-made ricotta to mix things up.
Hope this is a fun recipe for everyone! I will probably make this in the next couple of weeks and post soon thereafter. Stay tuned…
Lemon and Honey Ricotta Cake
(Serves 10-12) whew! hope you’re all planning a get-together with 9-10 of your friends :-)
4 cups ricotta cheese
½ cup honey
1 ½ teaspoon natural vanilla extract
¼ cup lemon juice
zest of 2 lemons, finely grated
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
4 eggs, lightly beaten
¼ cup all-purpose flour
poached nectarines or peaches, to serve
1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Lightly grease and flour an 18 cm (7 in) spring-form cake tin.
2. Drain the ricotta if necessary, the process in a food processor until smooth. Add the honey, vanilla, lemon juice, zest, cinnamon, and eggs and process until well combined. Add the flour and pulse until just combined and the mixture is smooth.
3. Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin and bake for 1 hour, or until golden and still slightly soft in the middle.
4. Turn the oven off, open the door slightly, and cool the cake in the oven. Put in the refrigerator to chill, then remove from the tin. Serve at room temperature with poached fruit (or other fun and creative garnish!), if desired.
--Gail
