Amanda chose this week’s Project Pastry Queen challenge, Strawberry Ricotta Cake. A trifle of angel food cake and a sweet ricotta filling, covered in whipped frosting and sliced strawberries.
I have no idea how I’ve skipped over this recipe the countless times I’ve flipped through the book… but I heard angels singing the second I realized what it was.
Almost 4 years ago (I actually know the exact date, July 14, 2007, because Gmail never forgets anything), I polished off two helpings of the best strawberry-angel food cake dessert that I’ve ever eaten, courtesy of our friends Brooke & Scott. They showed up with a heavenly trifle made with angel food cake, cream cheese, whipped cream, and Scott’s Strawberry Sauce. It’s the sauce that made the dessert so awesome. So I couldn’t make Strawberry Ricotta Cake without trying to recreate the sauce.
I made a few changes to The Pastry Queen’s recipe:
– I only used 1 15oz container of ricotta in the filling
– I added 8oz cream cheese to the filling
– I put a layer of Scott’s Strawberry Sauce (recipe below) down before each addition of The Pastry Queen’s filling.
The angel food cake part of the recipe is awesome. And that’s coming from someone whose favorite part of angel food cake is whatever you put on top of it 🙂 The citrus really brings an otherwise boring (and usually too dry) dessert alive.
A couple of issues/recommendations:
– The assembled cake felt… loose. Unstable. I actually put it in the freezer for an hour after assembling (but pre-frosting) thinking that would help things along. I feel like this could be solved by either (1) making it the night before and letting the cake absorb more of the liquid from the filling or (2) reduce the ricotta in the filling even more (I’d already reduced 4 cups down to 3). Heck, maybe even more powdered sugar in the filling would have helped.
– Make sure you buy too many strawberries because it took more than recommended to cover the outside of the cake.
– I doubled the powdered sugar in the frosting and whipped it passed the recommended soft peaks.
– Make Scott’s Strawberry Sauce. Really. It’s completely worth it.
Scott's Strawberry Sauce
Brown sugar and banana rum add layers of flavor to an ordinary strawberry sauce.
Ingredients
- 2 Tbsp butter
- 2 Tbsp brown sugar, packed
- 1/4 cup banana rum (I used half rum, half creme de banana)
- 1lb strawberries, hulled and quartered
- pinch of salt
Instructions
- Heat butter in a medium sauce pan over medium heat.
- Stir in brown sugar until dissolved.
- Take pan off the cooktop, add liquor, and return to the burner.
- Add strawberries and a pinch of salt and cook, stirring occasionally and squashing any large strawberry chunks with a spoon.
- Cook until almost all of the liquid has evaporated and turn off the heat.
- Use warm, cold, and store any leftovers in the fridge for up to a week.
Notes
Yields: ~1 1/4 cups
Estimated time: 30 minutes