Keto Lemon Ricotta Cake
The Perfect Keto Tea Cake
Why am I making a Keto Lemon Ricotta Cake? Because life gave me lemons. Well actually my father in law did. Lemons are quite an exotic ingredient in India and are imported and cost a lot. We use limes in all our cooking and desserts here normally. Anyway, my wife loves lemons and she asked her dad to bring 4 of them for her when he went abroad. My father in law, being the generous soul that he is, got us 24 lemons. I also purchased some ricotta cheese for an experimental Keto recipe that never saw the light of day. Long story short, I had ingredients, I made dessert.
This recipe has never been tested prior to this video. I am literally making this for the first time and till I actually tasted the cake I thought I might have blown it. Anyway enough jibber jabber, enjoy the video.
The Recipe Sequence
If you saw the video, you will notice the batter looks like it’s straight out of a horror movie. Something similar happened when I made my Keto lemon & poppy seed muffins. This is quite common and it’s normal. The dairy kind of ‘splits’ but it all comes together when baked. Since my cake tasted absolutely fine I think what I did was ok. However I have edited the sequence of things in the written recipe below. My suggestion is to add the eggs first to the butter and beat them and then add the ricotta. If you do try this please let me know if your batter looked any different.
The Deception of Lemons
The garnish of fresh lemons on top was all for show. It serves no purpose other than decorative. I just took photographs of the cake and then I took them off and set them aside to use in a chicken dish in the future. These are just some of the things we do to try and get good photos of the food. The almonds of course get eaten along with the cake. They do add a nice crunch.
Nutrition Info (Per serving)
- Calories: 194
- Net Carbs: 2g
- Carbs: 3g
- Fat: 18g
- Protein: 6g
- Fiber: 1g
This recipe makes 8 servings. Cut the cake into 8 equal pieces, 1 piece = 1 serving. Get this recipe on myfitnesspal.
Keto Lemon Ricotta Cake
Ingredients
- 150 grams Ricotta Cheese
- 100 grams Almond Flour I recommend this one
- 100 grams Sukrin Gold (or low carb sweetener of choice) I use this one
- 80 grams Butter I recommend this one
- 1 Tsp Vanilla Extract I recommend this one
- 1 Tsp Baking Powder I recommend this one
- 3 Eggs
- 1 Lemon Zested and Juice
Instructions
- In a large bowl cream together the butter, sweetener and vanilla extract. If you are using a granulated sweetener make sure you powder it in a blender before using.
- Once they are well mixed add in the eggs one at a time and beat well till nice and frothy.
- Then add in the Ricotta cheese, lemon zest and juice of the lemon and continue whisking.
- Mix the almond flour and baking powder in a bowl and mix to make sure there are no lumps. Then add in to the wet ingredient bowl in 2 batches and keep whisking.
- Brush your 7" cake tin with butter and line it with some parchment paper on the bottom.
- Pour in the cake batter, level it out and then pop it into your oven at 160C. Please make sure that you pre-heated your oven.
- Cook for about 50 minutes or till fully cooked through.
- Allow it to cool before removing from the cake tin. Garnish with almond slivers.
- Slice it and serve.
This cake sounds really good, I am tired of chocolate with so much of it for Christmas. My favorite cake is red velvet. My Grandmother always made it for my birthday. She’s been gone for many years, but I loved that she taught me to cook and I loved that cake. Thank you for your delicious food and keep the jibber jabber!
Sahil, I made this today and I think it’s the best keto cake I’ve ever made! So light and fluffy, delicious. It would be nice with a bit of greek yoghurt on the side, I think.
As suggested, I added the eggs first.
Here’s what the mixture looked like creamed, before adding eggs: https://photos.app.goo.gl/JBW92gXRD7SdV3GA6
Here’s what the mixture looked like after the eggs were added: https://photos.app.goo.gl/WMv3ybT2rvUXhhSZ6
And here’s what the mixture looked like with the dry ingredients added: https://photos.app.goo.gl/rs8eRVmabdob8svX6
So glad to hear that and thank you sharing the results of the alternative method to mine. Glad to see it worked better.
Hi Sahil, I tried this recipe with pretty decent result. It’s a great lemon cake. I followed your suggestion of beating eggs first, but, to be honest, the consistency of the batter wasn’t any better than what I could see from your video. It was slightly less chunky for sure, but not very smooth like normal cake batter. I think that’s the way it is.
But none of that matters because end result is fantastic! I topped the cake with mascarpone and it was yum!
hehe glad to hear that 🙂
I doubled the recipe and put it in a 9×13 inch pan. The only thing that bothered me was the temperature converted to 320 degrees farenheight and if I had baked it any higher the edges would have been blacker and the center would not have been cooked. This is a very moist cake. I’m tempted next time to bake it at 300 degrees farenheight and see what happens.
The best thing I found FOR ME was to omit the nuts and lemons on top and make a cream cheese frosting with confectioners Swerve and lemon juice beaten in. I actually dab the frosting on just before serving. That way I can re-heat each serving and enjoy the frosting too.
Thank you for such a great recipe!
Great recipe! I’m just curious to know how did you get 3gr net carbs per serving? I added all the ingredients to my keto app and it came to 17gr net carbs per serving. Because the sugar replacement is about 100gr carbs per 100 grams!, a total of 254 calories.
I don’t count the sugar alcohols as those aren’t processed. So this is Net carbs.
Thank you for the answer 🙂 it came out so good I’m doigng it again!
My cake came out super flat and greasy. I followed the recipe exactly and I’m an experienced baker. I’m going to add more flour next time and more baking powder and a bit less sweetener. The taste was very lemony and good. If anyone has and ideas, I would appreciate the feedback
Hi
I made this with a bit more baking powder and it was a bit oily. It tastes great though. My changes next time is to increase almond flour to 110g, 2 tablespoons of coconut flour 14g, baking powder 1.5g, baking soda 1 tsp. The rest the same. Good luck
I am having trouble following the measurements on either one — US Imperial or Metric — i.e., 3.53 oz. of almond flour???? How many cups is this ?? HELP !“
Ruth, please please please just buy a kitchen scale. Cups are really inaccurate and a scale is very inexpensive and it’s a friend in the kitchen for life.
You are hilarious! I thought at first your were saying your wife was a “lemon”. I like your style, and I really appreciate the beautiful photos. I will let you know what I think as soon as I try this cake recipe. Thank you for sharing.
For this specific recipe, what can we replace eggs with?
Nothing. None of my baking/dessert/bread recipes have egg substitutes. They will not work without eggs.
This was an absolute hit! I usually suck at baking , but I followed your revised steps and the cake came out so good! Next maybe a Keto lemon frosting recipe?
Sure thing 😀
This recipe is so delicious!!!! Didn’t have a cake pan so I made 8 cupcakes instead. I still baked them for 50 minutes and they came out amazing! Perfect. Thanks so much. This makes keto so much better!!
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I just happened to come upon your site looking for cauliflower pizza dough and I am so excited. New to Keto, however I traveled to Italy in 2010 and the hostess where we stayed made my mom and I a Lemon Ricotta Cake and I have been looking for a similar recipe ever since! Very nice site and fabulous simple recipes that I will start using today! Thanks again!Washington State USA
Greetings from Southern California!
I just wanted to thank you for this great recipe! I was not even going to try making it because every other keto cake recipe has (at best) left me wanting. This cake goes straight to the winners circle! It was your taste testing on the video that convinced me to give it a try. I changed things up ever so slightly to keto-ize an old SAD Strawberry Lemonade Cake recipe. I turned them into cupcakes and submerged 1/2 a strawberry in the batter. Then I used just the cream cheese, mascarpone cheese, lemon juice and berry puree (strawberry in this case) from your Berry Cheesecake recipe as frosting. In the frosting I also put the lemon pulp (pith removed). The result is 6.6 g carbs – 2.1 g fiber = 4.5 g net carbs per cupcake. A delight for the mouth. I think you would give this a proper Indian head nod. Enough jibber babber–time to cook more of your recipes.
If you were going to make these into muffin instead how would you change the baking time and temp?
Same temp, same time I’d just keep checking it more often and follow my intuition.
Hi Sahil,
Your recipes are bang on buddy!
I live in japan hence a lot of products aren’t readily available.
Please can you advice the amount required of stevia drops (incase of sukrin gold) and cream cheese (incase of ricotta) for this recipe. Thank you so much!
hey so the best way is to add and then keep tasting the batter for sweetness which is how I do it because everyone is using a different sweetener and the sweetness seems to vary.
I don’t really like ricotta, can I use cream cheese?
Sure. should work in theory.
suggestion: for better lemon taste is to soak the zest in its juice for hours an then taste it (not all lemons taste the same) add store juice an sugar(any sweetner tt) even salt all in very small amounts till its good but even if not as strong of a lemon taste as you want then cook an reduce reduce reduce. well worth it. use the theory with pulp an juice with zest for icing.
qu :: do you have any suggestion for a good paleo/keito/carniviour idea for a frosting ???
I would just do butter cream which is just butter, sweetener and vanilla or any flavouring you like.
Hi. Thanks for the videos! If anybody wants a more homogeneous texture (like wheat flour cake) just use a blender! Put everything in and blend the batter until smooth and a bit aerated – for maybe one minute. It works like a charm. I omitted all the butter and used 1 T. Olive Oil and used lime instead of lemon – hey, it’s what I had – and make 8 cupcakes. I oiled the cupcake papers before filling them nearly full with batter.
Just use the foil liners. Much easier than oiling paper or the tin itself.
OMG it is devine! Have it with whipped cream .
I mad it with Almond Four not ground almonds. Soo much a lighter in texture and not as dense. Whichever almond mix you use it will be awesome.
Wow! This an incredibly tasty cake! I do need to buy a smaller springform pan since mine is closer to 9″. I will double the recipe in the meantime, but I have a suggestion based on a cake that my mother used to make with semolina, eggs, and chopped raw cashews plus a few other secret ingredients!
Next time I will ad some chopped almonds for texture! I may beat the egg whites and fold those in a the end.
I want to thank you because my mom loved lemons and this reminds me of her… she never told me that lemons were hard to find in India, but since we have a lemon tree outside of our kitchen in Goa, I may try using lime one day! Cheers!
how can I replace cheese?
Sheila it’s a ricotta cake, that is the main ingredient. It’s like asking how to make omelet without egg. There are some other cake and muffin recipes on the website, I suggest making those if you don’t have or want to use ricotta cheese.