Chocolate Ricotta Cake with Pistachio Cream Cheese Frosting
this frosting is totally nuts
Nothing says summer like a fudgy chocolate cake topped with rich pistachio cream cheese frosting. Ok, I know it is not chocolate cake season, but sometimes the heart wants what it wants and this week my heart wanted chocolate and frosting.
I have a lot of gorgeous fruit desserts lined up for you for the next few months. Including some fun sour cherry recipes. Are sour cherries available where you live? I know they are sort of a niche ingredient, but I picked about 15 lbs of them a few days ago and they are all I want to cook with. Paid subscribers, I’ll let you in on my source for pick-your-own cherries ($4.49/lb!) less than 90 minutes from NYC at the bottom of this post.
But back to the cake at hand. This cake is enriched with ricotta and lots of Dutch process cocoa which makes it deeply chocolatey and fudgy. Almost brownie territory…The frosting is a personal revelation. I don’t know why but it hadn’t occurred to me until this very moment to finely grind nuts to add to frosting. Sure, I’ve thrown a spoonful of Skippy into some buttercream, but this is something entirely different.
I threw an entire 6 ounce/170 gram bag of pistachios into my food processor and ground them as finely as I could. Then, since the food processor was already dirty, I decided to make the frosting in there too. So in went the sugar, butter, salt, and cream cheese. The result was everything you love about a light and fluffy cream cheese frosting with the bonus addition of a ton of toasty pistachio flavor.
If you don’t have a food processor or your food processor isn’t big enough for this job you can finely chop the pistachios then make the rest of the frosting in a stand mixer or with a hand mixer. Cream the butter and sugar together first, then add the pistachios, and the cream cheese last.
The color netted out more yellow than green and you could add some green food coloring to tint it if you like. I left it as-is and topped the swoops of creamy pistachio frosting with more chopped pistachios and a bit of flaky salt because salt makes everything taste good (according to
)Thanks Instacart and Guittard for sending me a lovely care package of pistachio and chocolate goodies that inspired this recipe. Not sponsored, but the product was gifted.