Ricotta cheese is such a great muffin ingredient. Not only does it add protein, it gives muffins a little extra mass, making them more substantial. Honestly, I don’t know why I don’t make ricotta muffins more often, so I’m going to change my ways starting with these Ricotta Rum Chocolate Chip Muffins.
I like the alliterative “Ricotta Rum”, but if you swap out the rum for a little vanilla and are generous with the orange zest, you can call these Ricotta Orange Chocolate Chip Muffins. The batter is thick so you can pile it in the cups and get fairly high crowns with crispy edges. Since the batter is piled high, a standard size muffin will weigh in at about 3 1/2 to 4 oz. That’s a nice size for a bakery style muffin, but if you want a more modest serving you can make these as mini muffins, which are still pretty substantial.
If you try the muffins or come up with a neat variation, let me know! I plan on making these again as muffin tops, so I’ll update you when my new muffin top pan arrives in the mail.
Update: Made another batch today using homemade ricotta and noticed that the dough was dryer than usual. If your dough is dryer due to dryer ricotta, just add a little milk to soften. Dough consistency is about like this — definitely thicker than your usual muffin batter!
And here’s another muffin. I used chocolate chunks for this one and skipped the muffin paper.
- 2/3 cup chocolate chips
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour (200 grams)
- 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 cup sugar (100 grams)
- 5 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened (70 grams)
- 1 tablespoon vegetable oil (14 grams)
- 1 large egg (50 grams)
- 2-3 teaspoons orange zest
- 4 teaspoons of dark rum
- 3/4 ricotta cheese (6 oz), part skim or whole
- 1-4 tablespoons milk if needed (will depend on ricotta)
- Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Line eight standard size muffin or 12-13 miniature (2 inch size) cups with paper liners.
- Toss the chocolate chips with 1 teaspoon of the flour and set aside. Put the remaining flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a bowl and whisk for 15 seconds.
- In a mixing bowl, beat the butter, oil and sugar with an electric mixer. Add egg and stir until blended, then beat with the mixer until light and fluffy, scraping the bowl. Beat in the orange zest, rum and ricotta cheese.
- With a heavy duty scraper, stir in the flour mixture. If batter seems dry (more like cookie dough than muffin dough) add milk 1 tablespoon at a time until the batter is about the consistency of ricotta or drop biscuit batter.
- Pile the muffin batter into muffin cups. It should be pretty thick..
- Put the muffins in the hot (400 degree) oven, then immediately reduce temperature to 375 degrees F. Bake for 20 minutes or until a meat thermometer inserted in a muffin registers 205 F. If making the smaller size 2 inch muffins, preheat to 375 and bake at 375 for 20 minutes.
I used the Cooking Light recipe for the ricotta, and while it was tasty ricotta, it didn’t add a lot of moisture to the dough. I’ll post a new photo of a muffin made with the homemade ricotta.
That is really interesting. It makes sense that homemade texture will vary a lot.
Interestingly, I made a batch this morning using homemade ricotta. The ricotta was pretty dry and didn’t add as much moisture to the dough as the packaged type, therefore I had to add a little milk.
Cool! Good luck! Walmart used to carry it in their fabric section for cheaper than the pre-bagged stuff.
Sonya, thanks for the tip! Cooking Light also has a buttermilk based ricotta as well.
Also, I found the Delancey one with a quick Google search, so no need to copy and paste. Thanks, though! I’ve gotta go find some cheesecloth.
What a pretty picture and a cool idea! BTW, my favorite ricotta (I’ve tried Cook’s Illustrated and a few other recipes) comes from Delancey, where she uses buttermilk to make it, which I thought was even more flavorful. T than just using lemon juice and vinegar with whole milk. That wouldn’t matter in baked goods, but I thought you might be interested. I can copy & paste the instructions if you’re interested. No worries if you don’t care! Maybe Ina’s is better! Enjoy your new muffin top pan, too!
These sound so good!
I haven’t made any in a while, but I keep meaning to! I think I’ll make Ina Garten’s today if I can remember to buy some cheesecloth.
Did you make your own ricotta cheese?