Cannoli Cream Cake

Part of my Fourth of July weekend celebrations involved an extra special occasion – my mother’s birthday!

The night before, I prepared Boozy Baked French Toast with crème de cassis, and it was all ready for breakfast the next morning.

This recipe is so easy and tastes even better than regular French toast. Preparing it the night before means you don’t have to do it in the morning before you’ve had coffee, and baking it in the oven means it’s perfectly cooked throughout and you don’t have to stash each piece of French toast in the oven to keep them warm while you make enough for everyone.

Plus, it incorporates the liqueur of your choice. What more could you want?

For her birthday, my mother really wanted cannoli cake. There’s a little bakery in Brooklyn where we’ve bought all our special occasion cakes – from my parents’ wedding cake to my college graduation cake – but this year she wasn’t able to get the cake in Brooklyn before heading out to Long Island for the weekend.

Always the helpful culinary daughter, I offered to attempt to make her one myself!

Spoiler alert: it was a huge success.

(Despite icing that very disappointingly melted when I wrote “Happy Birthday on the cake.”)

For the cake itself, I used Martha Stewart’s almond sponge cake recipe, with almond flour rather than toasting and grinding whole almonds. I thought it was a little too dense for the layer cake and will probably experiment with a different sponge cake recipe the next time I make it.

But the real star of this story is the cannoli cream.

The cannoli cream was so simple that I almost didn’t trust it. I tweaked instructions for cannoli cream from Eataly NY’s pastry chef (from a dessert class I went to when worked there), and it was heavenly.

It was two 15-oz containers of part skim ricotta cheese, strained (through cheesecloth in a strainer with a dish weighing it down for several hours), then mixed with 3/4 cup sugar and left to sit in the fridge overnight.

The next morning I stirred it up, and frosted the cake. (There was enough to frost a two-layer 8-inch cake with a generous layer of cream in the middle.)

That simple. That delicious.

We ended up covering the top with mini chocolate chips after the writing blurred together – even more chocolate!