My late Christmas present to you
My mother and my grandmother collected recipes. Mom wrote them on three-by-five cards and Granny wrote them in a small faux leather-covered notebook. That notebook sits to the left of my computer. I open it from time to time to see her very English handwriting and the newspaper clippings that she glued to the pages of the book, probably with flour and water paste.
I collect recipes. There is a small glass-fronted cabinet in my kitchen that is dedicated to cookbooks and an ever-growing stack of printed recipes that I’ve found on the Internet. To be truthful, I will probably never make 99% of these. They are more wishful aspirations than anything I will have the inclination to actually make. Why? I guess I am too lazy to reorganize my thinking and action to take on new recipes. I am an example of the power of inertia. You know, Newton’s first law of motion? (That is my homage to my pitiful knowledge of physics.) OK, I had to look that one up. I wasn’t sure whether it was Newton’s first or second law.
But, every now and then, one of these online recipes taps into that part of my consciousness that says, “Hey, this looks like it will be easy.” And the easy part is just the ticket to overcome the recipe inertia.
I share with you today one of these recipes:
Now, before I print the ingredients, etc. I have to tell you that this is a dense cake. It says, “I am cake” in a very assertive way. It is also almost infinitely mutable.
So, here is the recipe:
Italian Christmas Cookie Cake
Ingredients:
1 15oz. container of ricotta cheese, strained of excess liquid
4 eggs
1 tsp. almond extract
¾ cup heavy cream (I use evaporated milk)
½ cup olive oil
1 box of yellow cake mix
Steps:
Heat oven to 325 degrees and spray a nine-inch springform pan. Use a paddle attachment on your mixer to beat together the ricotta, the eggs and the almond extract. Combine the cream and olive oil in another bowl. Add cake mix to the ricotta mixture in small amounts, alternating with the cream and olive oil. Mix until smooth and pour into prepared pan. Bake for an hour, or until a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean. Allow cake to cool completely in pan before removal.
Frost with a simple powdered sugar mixture: 4 cups powdered sugar plus 3-4 Tablespoons of milk and 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract. Add sprinkles.
Easy.
People are impressed.
But here is where it gets interesting:
What can you change? You can change the flavoring extracts. You can change the color and flavoring of the cake or the frosting by using powdered Jello. You can change the type of cake by changing the flavor of the cake mix. Chocolate works as well. Think of a chocolate cake with rum or raspberry flavoring. You can bake it in layers, you just have to watch these to see how long your oven takes to finish baking them.
The simple confectioners’ sugar and milk frosting is much lighter than a buttercream, but you could make a buttercream frosting, too. How would a luscious ganache change this cake? Oh, my! A chocolate ricotta cake with a ganache frosting? Fabulous.
And I have, from time to time, made a syrup to pour over the warm cake. Once, when I was in a lemon cake mode, I added lemon zest to the cake mix instead of an extract and made a thin syrup of limoncello to pour over the cake after I had poked holes in it with a thin skewer. It was lemon writ large. So good! I’ll bet that lemon Jello would work as well. Or raspberry Jello … multiple opportunities. (Just a note … frost this injected cake too. It will look better.)
So, I give you this treasure of a recipe as a late Christmas present, or, if you wish, something to celebrate this new and much better year to come. Fingers crossed.
Happy New Year. Stay safe.
