How Ricotta Whipped Cream Rescued Valentine's Day

This post is short on recipe, but long on story.

For Shrove Tuesday, I made those incredible Browned Butter Ricotta Pancakes which served two purposes. Yes, they were crazy delicious and it was the first time I had ever made such a thing and that is all good. 
Whatever.

Most importantly, it used up half of the container of ricotta that was sitting in my fridge, silently judging me every time I opened the door for buying something that I never use and would most likely end up throwing out 2 months after the expiration date. THAT was a major accomplishment for a procrastinator like myself. Nice work Carole.

The only problem that remained was the lingering ricotta in the container. It's far too soon to make the pancakes again and it's just sitting in there, making me feel guilty before I have even thrown it out.

Cut to yesterday - our tiny school's annual bakesale to raise money for Free the Children and I volunteered to make the raffle cake. I made this chocolate truffle truffle cake and it is the bomb people. The Kid bought 9 raffle tickets to put in the jar in an attempt to win it back and made me put MY three tickets in the jar for my own cake and you know what? I did it.

Last year, he won the cake and it was an equally delicious chocolate cake made by a staff member. She and I stood looking at the cake and I said "I actually don't really want to win it because we will never eat it. It's so rich that I can only eat a small slice, Shack isn't home and we will end up throwing half of it out or trying to give slices of cakes to passers by in front of the house and I don't really want to do either of those  things to be honest."

She felt the same and so we struck a deal. If either of us won the cake, we would split it! And much to my delight, she won the cake. Sure enough, The Kid came home with half the cake in a tupperware container. It was all smashed up and destroyed, of course, because it hadn't occurred to him that cake shouldn't be shoved into a back back on it's side in tupperware and bounced around all afternoon. Regardless of it's ghetto appearance, the taste was unaltered so I thought that the two of us would just take turns scraping it out with spoons over the weekend. 

As luck would have it, Shack sent a text a while later telling me he was finally DONE DONE DONE. He was coming back home from cold northern lands the next day, which also happened to be Valentine's Day. I couldn't just hand the guy a spoon and yell "dig in!" after being away for over a week, toiling and freezing his ass off in the frozen tundra in order to provide The Kid and I the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed. I was going to have to rescue this smashed up truffle cake and turn into into a proper Valentine's Day dessert if it was the last thing I did. I have made marscapone whipped cream so there is no reason why I couldn't make ricotta whipped cream and so I did, we had a lovely dessert and peace was restored in the valley.


The end of the story is a happy one. I have my family together for Valentine's Day after all, we got half of our cake back after sacrificing it to charity AND I used up the last of the ricotta and didn't have to throw out one drop.


RIcotta Whipped Cream
1 cup whipping cream
1/4 cup ricotta
2 tbls powdered sugar
1/4 tsp vanilla


Mix the ricotta, powdered sugar and vanilla together in a small bowl.
whip the heavy cream with a handmixer or in the bowl of your stand mixer until soft peaks form. Add the ricotta mixture and continue to whip until smooth and fluffy.
That's it.