Italian Ricotta Cheese Cookies

5 from 2 votes

Bake these tender, cake-like Italian ricotta cheese cookies without eggs and decorate it with your choice of icing and sprinkles and make any event a special event.

Prep Time20

Cook Time16

Total Time36

Method: Baking

Course: Cookies

Servings: 80 Cookies

Ingredients

Part 1:

2 cups white sugar
1 cup butter, softened
2 cups (15 ounces) ricotta cheese
1 and ½ teaspoons vanilla extract
½ teaspoon almond extract
2 teaspoons Ener-G egg replacer + 4 tablespoons water (for 2 eggs)

Part 2:

4 cups all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt

For Decorating:

1-2 cups powdered sugar or as needed
2-4 tablespoons milk, plus more if needed
As Needed Sprinkles of your choice

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350F/180C. Lightly grease cookie sheet/s with non-stick cooking spray or use the butter wrapper.
In a large bowl sift together the dry ingredients mentioned in Part 2 and set aside.
In a small cup whisk together the EnerG egg replacer and water and keep it ready.
In another large bowl beat together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
Add ricotta, vanilla, and the egg replacer mixture and beat on medium speed until combined. Scrape down the bowl.
Add the flour mixture to the creamed mixture and combine well.
Using a tablespoon, scoop out the dough and drop it onto the prepared baking sheets, 2-3 cms apart. Lightly flatten the dough. These cookies don't spread very much so little gap should be fine.
Bake in preheated oven until cookies are very lightly golden, about 13-16 minutes. The cookies stay white, so it is not easy to judge if it is fully done or not. I test baked 3 cookies for 14 minutes and felt it needed more time and so baked the rest of the cookies for 16 minutes.
Transfer the baking sheet to a wire cooling rack for it to cool down. After a while using a spatula remove the cookies from the sheet and place it back on the rack to cool completely before storing it in airtight container or frosting.

For the icing:

In a small bowl, whisk together the powdered sugar and milk until smooth.
Keep adding the milk in very small increments because the icing tends to get watery very quickly. Such type of icing will be runny and will not stay on the cookies and will keep oozing. So if the mixture is too thin, add more sugar and add milk if it's too thick.
If you want to add color to your icing mix you can add in that too. Once the cookies are cool enough and the icing is ready, spread little icing over each cookie, then top with sprinkles while the icing is still wet.
Allow the icing to dry completely before storing cookies in an airtight container.

Notes

As I have mentioned in the post, this ricotta cheese cookie recipe makes a huge batch. So I did not bake all of it right away. I just baked half the cookies initially. The rest of the dough, I scooped the dough and placed it on the cookie sheet and put it in the freezer for about 30 minutes. It had nicely firmed up. Then stored those cookies in a ziplock bag and put it back in the freezer again.
About 2 weeks later I had to go to a baby shower. So baked these cookies and used a pink color icing and decorated with pink and white sprinkles. You don't have to thaw the cookies before baking. Just removed the frozen unbaked cookies from the freezer, place it on the baking sheet and bake it for additional 2-3 minutes probably. Or as always test bake 2-3 cookies initially, see how it turns out and decide accordingly.
You can try cutting back the recipe by half if you don't want to bake a huge batch but my suggestion will be to make the dough and freeze it for later. I bet you will regret not making an extra batch of these soft ricotta cheese cookies once you taste it.

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