Ricotta Cheese Tart with Chocolate Drops: the simple recipe to prepare

The ricotta cheese tart is a simple and delicious sweet made with a shortcrust pastry base and a creamy filling of ricotta cheese enriched with chocolate drops. It is a traditional homemade sweet that you can prepare as a snack or for breakfast, and I assure everybody will really love it. If you want a rich filling you can use sheep ricotta cheese, otherwise you can use goat or cow ricotta cheese. The chocolate drops make the ricotta cream filling more delicious but, if you wish, the tart can also be completely covered with chocolate.

How to make Ricotta Cheese Tart

Prepare the shortcrust pastry by pouring into a bowl flour, eggs, sugar, vanilla flavouring, the softened and chopped butter. Knead until you have a smooth dough (1) that must be put at rest in the fridge, wrapped in transparent film, for about 1 hour. In the meantime, prepare the ricotta cheese cream, blending with a whisk in a bowl the ricotta cheese, egg, sugar (2) and then add also the chocolate drops (3).

Stretch the dough on a floured surface and keep it some to decorate the tart. Then butter a baking tray and cover it with the shortcrust pastry (4) creating the base of the tart. Then, pour the ricotta and chocolate cream (5). After, create the strips for the decoration helping yourself with a cutter wheel (6).

Fold the edges of the tart and finish to garnish with the strips, first aligning them vertically and then horizontally to create the classic braided pattern (7). Bake in a convection oven at 180 C for 40 minutes (8). Before cutting and serving it, bring the tart to room temperature (9).

Tips

Instead of the chocolate drops, you can use the same amount of raisins, or you can roughly chop the amaretto biscuits and add them to the ricotta cream.

You can also garnish your tart with different patterns, for example by creating little hearts with the shortcrust pastry.

For a richer result, you can halve the amount of the ricotta cheese and add 250 grams of mascarpone cheese.

Variants

Ricotta cheese and Marmalade Tart
The ricotta cheese tart is often prepared with a bit of jam on the base or on the surface. Sprinkle the dough base with a half jar of jam, you can choose a blueberries jam or a cherry jam, which exalts the creaminess of ricotta cheese, as they are not too sugary jams, like the apricots one, which is not recommended in this case.

Ricotta and Pears Tart
The ricotta and pears tart is a really delicious and refined variant, a soft tart with pears cut into pieces and added to the ricotta cream. Once you cut 2/3 pears in pieces, I suggest you soften them in a pot by making them caramel for a few minutes with a drop of rum. Then, cool them down and add them to the ricotta cream.