SHF#10: Honeyed Oranges with Baked Sweet Ricotta

"Honey honey, how you thrill me, ah-hah, honey honey
Honey honey, nearly kill me, ah-hah, honey honey
I’d heard about you before
I wanted to know some more
And now I know what they mean, you’re a love machine
Oh, you make me dizzy"
[lyrics from ABBA's Honey Honey]

For this month's edition of Sugar High Friday, Nicki from Baking Sheet, our lovely hostess, has chosen HONEY as the theme. Honey being the ubiquitous ingredient that it is, appearing here and there and just about everywhere in any kind of dessert, Nicki was absolutely right when she said that it would be a challenge to narrow down a personal choice dessert.

Having thought long and hard (maybe half an hour in the supermarket this evening wasn't really that long or hard), I decided to go with Bill Granger's Baked Sweet Ricotta, although to be fair to this month's theme, the baked ricotta does not have any honey within BUT fortunately is served with lashings of honey poured as a topping (phew, theme-saving grace). The recipe from Bill's Food is originally paired with honeyed figs, which basically uses halved figs and a drizzling of honey as topping. Since it is quite uncommon to find figs on my tropical island habitat, I have replaced the figs with orange slices topped with orange zest and drizzled with honey. To make the baked sweet ricotta (recipe adapted for 2 servings - just nice for hubby and me, well, actually all for me since hubby is not a great cheese fan) :

• preheat the oven to 180C
• put a tub of ricotta cheese (250g), 1 egg, 20g soft brown sugar and 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract in a bowl and mix well
• grease 2 oven-proof cups and pour and divide mixture into cups
• bake for 25 minutes or until the ricotta cheese is puffed and light golden.
• leave to rest for a few minutes before turning out to serve.
• To serve: well, I suppose anything goes with the only requirement for this theme being lashings of honey poured over!
  

With its lightly firm custard-like texture (probably due to the combination of egg and cheese), the baked ricotta is one of the few cheeses that pairs really well with honey. Another photograph of baked ricotta, but this time artistically edited - getting a kick from altering some of my photos which don't pass muster in their original form!

Talking about lashings of honey, I love the stuff when poured into a cut half of a grapefruit (especially the ruby red type). Scooping the pulp of the grapefruit with a teaspoon, and tasting the tartness of the grapefruit melded with the honey is a great pick-me-up in the morning.