ricotta cake with mashed berries

This cake is so simple and easy. You can use it again and again. It’ll go fine always … & anytime of the year. Depending on the seasons you can add some fresh fruit or some mixed-berry-sauce or some chocolate sauce or whatever to create your own special cake event.

One approach is flavoring the cake with lemon or orange flavour & adding fresh fruit e. g. fresh berries. Okay – you won’t have fresh berries all over the year, but there is the frozen solution which might do it as well.

… & there is jam: you may also use some berry jam combined w/ some fresh or frozen berries. Let’s see how it works in this post.

However, at first the cake …

What do we need?

Not much:

• ricotta
• eggs
• sugar
• lemon zest
• limoncello.

You see I go for a lemon flavoured cake.

Let’s grab a springform, oil resp. butter it & add some fine breadcrumbs.

(…& don’t forget to preheat the oven to 150° C w/ fan!)

Grate the lemon zest & add it to the sugar. Mix the eggs w/ the sugar w/ help of a handheld electric mixer until very, very fluffy. Then just add the ricotta & mix w/ an egg whip until smooth. Don’t forget to add the limoncello …

Pour the mess in the prepared springform & put it into the oven for about 1 h 10 min.

Voilà: our ricotta cheesecake for all seasons!

Let’s now start w/ the sauce – I had assembled:

• fresh blueberries
• fresh red currants
• strawberry-raspberry-jam (my own reserve!)
• morello jam (store-bought)
• some limoncello.

 We don’t need any sugar because of the jam…

Just clean & trim the fresh berries. Mix everything & use a blender to mash the berries. Drain the mess through a sieve to eliminate all the tiny pits …

Pls note:
I didn’t use additional sugar nor any thickening agent for the berry sauce … & I didn’t cook the sauce.

• Concerning the sugar: the jam was sweet enough, but when using no jam you’ll have to add some sugar – how much depending on your taste.
• Concerning the thickening agent: the mashed fruit was rather viscous – no need for any further thickening. If you use more fresh fruit think about the liquid … & add some corn starch or whatever …
• Concerning cooking: if using fresh fruit … (I use to cook a berry sauce when starting w/ frozen berries, adding sugar & using a thickening agent!)

Coming back to the ricotta cheesecake … the challenge:
The cheesecake is very soft & smooth – it requires to do any handling w/ lots of care!

• When removing the edge of the springform use a knife to free the cake wherever it likes to stick to the edge.
• Before transferring the cake to the final plate wait until the cake is completely cooled down. Let it slide slowly from the springform bottom onto the plate – use a long knife (or something equivalent …) to help the cake sliding by carefully freeing the cake when stickling to the bottom.

I tried to use baking parchment, but it didn’t work any better. On the contrary: although the transfer to the final plate was easy it wasn’t easy at all to remove the baking parchment which liked to wrinkle, to stick, to … Therefore I think the butter-breadcrumb method is better.

(Once again…)
Voilà: here are ricotta cheesecake & sauce!

Enjoy!