Marbled ricotta cake

Reading Rachel Cooke's column in the Observer Food Monthly, I kept nodding my head in agreement. She writes about the food in lockdown, that in a world where we have been deprived of so much that we love - friends, art, restaurants - every meal is a treat. In such times, pleasure really is vital. And a cake is definitely one of life's pleasures.

Last Sunday many people celebrated the Father's Day, and I wanted to bake something special to treat my boys and their Dad.
I was mixing the cake batter and thinking of my late Dad. How I wish he lived long enough to meet my children. He's being gone these last twenty years. I lived with my parents until I was in my mid-twenties. I often baked then, but my cakes were quite basic. We didn't have the same variety of ingredients as you can get now in Russia. I often think how much I would have enjoyed cooking a good meal for him now.

Ricotta cake is one of the cakes I bake quite often, with slightly different variations. The original recipe was given to me by my husband's aunt Giuseppina. Her recipe, adapted for the competition sponsored by Grana Padano, helped me win the first prize a few years ago.
I play around with different added ingredients, keeping the main ratio of eggs/sugar/ricotta/flour and butter the same.
Ricotta cake is very tasty as it is, but I fancied slightly jazzing it up for the occasion, plus I wanted to see if it would work as a marbled cake. It worked well. The cake barely lasted two days.

Marbled ricotta cake
Ingredients:
3 medium eggs
160g caster sugar
200g ricotta
300g plain flour
1tsp baking powder
100g butter, melted
1tsp vanilla essence
4tbsp orange juice
2 tbsp chocolate spread + 1 heaped tsp of cocoa powder
2tbsp Biscoff spread (optional)
+
icing sugar and freshly squeezed orange juice for the icing

Beat the eggs with the ricotta and sugar, sift in the flour and baking powder and mix well. Melt the butter, let it cool slightly and add to the batter together with the orange juice and vanilla.
Divide the cake batter into two bowls. Add 2tbsp of chocolate spread and cocoa powder to one, and 2tbsp of Biscoff spread to the other one.
The cake batter is rather thick. Spoon it into the oiled bundt tin, alternating spoonfuls of different batter.
Place the tin in the oven preheated to 180C. Bake for about 45+ minutes. Check if the wooden toothpick comes clean, then the cake is ready.

You can simply dust it with the icing sugar, or make a runny icing with icing sugar and orange juice.

Eat warm or cold, with tea or coffee.

Ricotta cake with marmalade

We woke up yesterday morning to a strangely nippy house. When I went down to the kitchen, I realised our boiler was flashing the F28 code, which means it's broken. 

Trying to get to the British Gas customer service is a feat in itself, everything is annoyingly automated, and you cannot get to talk to a real person. The earliest we could book for someone to come and look at the boiler was Tuesday. 

My husband kept calling, and finally managed to get hold of someone. They promised to come today.

Well, it's almost 5pm, and no sight of any engineer. And now that my husband called them again to ask what time the engineer might be coming, apparently they didn't book us in at all.
And the house in the meantime is getting colder and colder. I know that people live in igloos and all that, but it's a pain not to have the heating or hot water. The floor is church-cold on the ground floor, I can feel my feet turning into icicles, and that's me earing two pairs of socks and slippers.

I've been having endless cups of tea and coffee to keep myself warm, ironing (did a lot of ironing today), and baking too.

Yesterday's bake was a variation of the ricotta cake recipe given to me by my husband's aunt Giuseppina. It's a classic Italian cake, which is very tasty.

I had a jar of Duerr's Half Sugar Seville Orange marmalade from the latest Degustabox. My guys prefer jams to marmalade, and I don't eat it that often either. I decided to use some of the marmalade in the ricotta cake, and it worked really well.

Ricotta cake with marmalade
Ingredients:
zest of 1 lemon
3 medium eggs
180g caster sugar
3tbsp marmalade (+ 2tbsp for drizzle) (optional)
200g ricotta
300g self-raising flour
1tsp baking powder
50g Italian mixed peel (optional)
2tbsp lemon juice

Zest an orange in a medium sized mixing bowl. Beat in the eggs with caster sugar and marmalade. Add the ricotta, sift in the flour and baking powder. Leave about 1tbsp of flour, and dust it over the peel, then add the peel to the cake batter.
The cake batter is quite thick. Spoon it into a well-oiled bundt cake tin. Place the tin in the oven preheated to 180C. Bake for about 45 minutes. Check readiness with a wooden toothpick.
Once the cake is cooked, take it out of the tin. Mix 2tbsp marmalade with 2tbps lemon juice and spread over the cake.
Eat warm, or cold. It tastes good, with a cup of tea or coffee.

If you're not a fan of peel, swap it for raisins or pine nuts. A few years ago, I baked this cake with the addition of a savoury note from Grana Padano.

The MamaBake Book by M.Shearer & K.Swan + Pumpkin & Ricotta Cannelloni

I am a busy Mum, and there are days when I'm feeling totally exhausted and overwhelmed by the dietary demands and wishes of my family. And yes, there are moments when I feel like throwing a tantrum and refusing to cook. Sounds familiar?
I was very curious to discover a new cook book which evangelizes weekly meal plans and batch cooking.
The MamaBake Book (HarperCollins, published 22 February 2018, £12.99) professes to be no ordinary cookbook. It claims to revolutionise the way we prepare family meals - "once you try the MamaBake way you will never look back!"

I'm mistrustful by nature when any big claims are made, but I'm also open to new ideas and happy to be converted.

MamaBake movement and cook book are the brainchild of two mothers - Michelle Shearer and Karen Swan. It was Michelle who founded their community in 2010, with the grassroots cooking club and a meeting place for young mums who would cook meals in batches, then share and swap their prepared meals to take back home a week's worth of food enough to feed a family.
This big batch cooking granted them free time during the week.

I had to smile, when I read about "mothers united in their passion to free up women from the unending pressures of domestic burden through the power of The Sisterhood".
It reads like a revolutionary pamphlet, rather idealistic.

Take me: I love cooking, and wouldn't dream of not cooking for a whole week. Yes, it is a burden at times, and I do moan about it, but half-heartedly, as basically I love cooking. In my situation it would be impossible for other mothers to cater to my family's special situation with an autistic child who would most likely not eat any of the foods cooked by someone else. But I digress...

I was intrigued as to how this book teaches you to plan meals a week in advance, make shopping lists and batch cook.
If you discard the grandiose statements about The Sisterhood and domestic burden, it is actually a clever guide on how to be more organised and adapt your cooking to make life easier.

Many things mentioned in the book make a lot of sense, like labelling containers or zip lock bags which go in the freezer. Guilty as charged: how many times I took out the container out of the freezer without a clue as to what's inside and how long it was stored there.

The MamaBake Book features many inspired once-a-week cooking plans and big batch recipes. There are over 200 recipes to choose from.
The book would better suit a non-vegetarin/vegan family. There is a Meat-free week menu and the vegan slow cooker menu, but I would say the majority of recipes are for meat-eaters.
Some weeks' menus include meat on an almost daily basis.

The book conveniently offers shopping lists which include everything you will need to cook meals for a week. The once-a-week plans include seven different recipes with step-by-step of prep and cooking.

It is an inspiring concept. And while I don't think I'm ready yet to do a week's worth of meals in one go, I might just try to batch-cook more often and freeze (and label!!!) the meals.

I would have liked to see illustrations of at least some of the recipes. For me photos and/or illustrations are the main magnet to cook books. The MamaBake book is free from illustrations.

There were quite a few of recipes I have bookmarked, for example, Vegetable & bean pie with polenta crust, Greek honey biscuits, potato pizzas, pumpkin falafel & flatbreads and more.

One of the recipes I have tried already - and which we loved - is Pumpkin & Ricotta Cannelloni.

Pumpkin & Ricotta Cannelloni (recipe reproduced with kind permission from HarperCollins)
Ingredients:
1/2 butternut pumpkin (butternut squash in the UK), peeled, seeds removed and cut into chunks
1tbsp oil
2 x 400g tins whole peeled tomatoes
1 bunch basil, leaves finely chopped
250g ricotta
150g mozzarella (plus extra for sprinkling)
1egg, lightly beaten
2 handfuls baby spinach shredded
375g fresh pasta sheets (I used a pack of 250g lasagne sheets)
100g parmesan, grated

Method:
1. Preheat the oven to 180C. Lightly grease a ceramic baking dish.
2.Drizzle the pumpkin with the oil and roast in the dish until tender, about 45 minutes. Transfer to a bowl and mash. Set aside to cool.
3. To make the sauce, place a medium-sized saucepan over high heat and add the tinned tomatoes and half the basil leaves. Season, to taste. Bring to the boil then reduce to a simmer and cook until reduced by one-third, about 10-15 minutes. Remove from the heat.
4. In a large bowl, mix the ricotta, mozzarella, egg, spinach and mashed pumpkin. Season with salt and pepper, to taste.
5. Lay out the pasta sheets and place 2tbsp of the pumpkin mixture in the base of each sheet and roll up into a tube. Lay each cannelloni in the baking dish. Top with the prepared sauce and grated parmesan.
6. Bake for 30 minutes, then cover with foil and bake for further 15 minutes.

Serve with a fresh green salad.

Allow to cool completely before chilling or freezing. The cannelloni will keep for 1 week in the fridge or 2 months in the freezer.
If cooking from frozen, defrost overnight in the fridge. Cover with foil and bake in a 180C oven for 30 minutes until thoroughly reheated.

Disclosure: I received the MamaBake Book for the purposes of reviewing. All opinions are my own.

Limoncello ricotta cheesecake

What have you been doing this long Easter weekend? We had friends over for the Easter lunch, and enjoyed good company and good food. And whenever I had a chance during these four days, I was escaping to the kitchen to listen to the Classic FM's Hall of Fame. Last year we were in Italy for Easter, and I missed it.

For Easter lunch with friends I baked a limoncello and lemon ricotta cheesecake, and my sons helped to decorate it with  Milky Bar and Smarties Mini Eggs.
It's the first time I made a cake with gluten free digestive biscuits (one of our friends is a coeliac), but they worked perfectly well as a base for a cheesecake.

Limoncello Ricotta Cheesecake
Ingredients:
150g digestive biscuits (I used gluten free digestives)
60g butter, melted
120g caster sugar
zest of 1 lemon
4 medium eggs
50ml limoncello
250g ricotta
280g cream cheese (Philapdelphia Original full fat)
Mini eggs for decoration, dipped in melted white chocolate

First you need to bash the digestives in a plastic bag with a rolling pin. Combine the biscuit crumbs with melted butter, and press at the bottom of the spring cake tin, lined with parchment paper and lightly oiled.
In a deep mixing bowl beat together sugar, lemon zest and eggs. Add the limoncello, ricotta and cream cheese. The cheese mix will be quite liquid. Pour the cheese mix over the crumb base.
Bake in the oven preheated to 180 C for about 50 minutes.
Let the cake cool completely before placing in the fridge to set, for a couple of hours or overnight.

Decorate the cake, when it's cold. Dip the mini eggs into a melted white chocolate and set around the top of the cake.

I used a mix of ricotta and cream cheese, but it could be swapped for just two tubs of ricotta or two tubs of Philadelphia.

Milkybar and Smarties Mini Eggs were one of the seasonal products in the latest Degustabox. It's a sharing bag of milk and white chocolate eggs in a sugar shell. A serving of 5 mini eggs contains 85kcal and 10.8g of sugar. They look pretty and colourful, and were a perfect Easter decoration.
No wonder, my guys went wild with decoration. I thought they would add just a few mini eggs in the middle, but they had the other ideas.

We always end up with more limoncello than we manage to drink, and I told my husband he should stop bringing it from his trips to Italy.
Adding this recipe to #KitchenClearout linky at Cheryl's Madhouse Family Reviews blog. I will be glad to see the end of that limoncello bottle, and will need to come up with more recipes to finish it off.

Ricotta cheesecake (torta di ricotta)

Every time we go to Italy, I return home, inspired by Italian recipes. An Italian cheesecake - torta di ricotta - is a lovely dessert. It is not as rich as, for example, New York cheesecake, because it doesn't have the crushed biscuit base and uses less sugar.
I haven't baked a cheesecake for ages, and wanted to cook it ever since we came back from our trip.

Ricotta cheesecake (serves 6-8)
Ingredients:
zest of 1 lemon
150g caster sugar
75g softened butter
450g ricotta cheese (almost 2 tubs)
2 medium eggs
1tsp baking powder
1tsp vanilla essence
3tbsp cornflour
75g sultanas
icing sugar, to sprinkle on the top

Depending on which sultanas you're using, you might want to soak them in hot water for quarter of an hour, if they look too dry. I still have some of sultanas left from before Christmas, when I bought a big bag to make mincemeat. They are quite plump, so I didn't think they need soaking.

Grate the lemon zest into a deep mixing bowl, add the caster sugar, softened butter and mix well. Beat in the eggs, one at a time. Add the ricotta, baking powder, vanilla and cornflour. Finally add the sultanas and mix well.

Pour the cake mix into an oiled spring cake tin, place the tin into the oven preheated to 180C. Bake the cake for an hour. When you take the tin out, the cake might still look wobbly, but it should be cooked. Let it cool for 15 minutes before taking the cake out of the tin.

Sprinkle with icing sugar before serving.

Since I managed to use some of the sultanas (not finished yet the bag), I'm adding this recipe to #KitchenClearout linky run by Cheryl from Madhouse Family Reviews.