This week’s Blogger Secret Ingredient: dried fruit.
I spent all week brainstorming what I would make.
Even though I had dried fruit in the apartment, I decided that I wanted to use cherries. I made a special trip out to Trader Joe’s. (Okay, I’ll admit, I’ll take any excuse to go to Trader Joe’s and/or Whole Foods.)
While cooking up my BSI submission, I debated going as a mummy for Halloween:
Aka, I burned myself and Dan went a little overboard with the gauze. All the cushioning felt better, though.
It was a very stupid mistake, and I prefer to not go into the details. Let’s just say I do not recommend testing your “mummy skills” while baking this…
Luckily, this morning my fingers felt good enough to go down to this:
But you aren’t reading this to learn about how I burnt myself, now are you?
I hope you’re reading this post to see this:
Dessert Lasagna
Ingredients
- 3/4 of a package of lasagna noodles, cooked
- 1 T butter
- 1 c. chopped walnuts
- 1 T. brown sugar
- 1 1/2 c. dried cherries
- 2 c. ricotta cheese
- 2 c. granulated sugar
- 1 tsp. lemon juice
- 3/4 c. powdered sugar
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
- Combine the ricotta, granulated sugar, and lemon juice in a medium bowl. Beat until smooth.
- Melt the butter. Combine with the nuts and brown sugar. Toast in 350 degree oven for 5 minutes.
- In a 9×9 pan coated with non-stick spray, create 1 layer of lasagna noodles.
- Smooth over a layer of the ricotta mixture, followed by cherries and nuts.
- Create another layer of noodles in the direction perpendicular to the last layer. Again, spread the ricotta mixture, cherries, and nuts over the new layer of noodles. Repeat until ricotta mixture is used up.
- Sprinkle top layer with powdered sugar. Cover with foil, and bake for 45 minutes. Remove the foil and bake for an additional 10 minutes, until noodles are soft and the ricotta mixture is bubbly.
Mmm… sweet dessert lasagna.
Other dried fruits would work too, but I prefer cherries.
Next time, I might add a plain noodle layer to the top, and top it with a sweet wine sauce. Mostly because I want to try making a sweet wine sauce. The lasagna is pretty stellar as is, too.
I was originally going to use cream cheese instead of ricotta, but I was worried that it would be too sweet. The ricotta definitely worked out well.
Enjoy!
And don’t experiment with being a mummy in the process. 
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
This looks delicious! Julie – this is so creative, I could never come up with something like this.
Sounds good! Like a kugel!
This looks great, Julie.
Thanks for submitting it!
Ha, after reading your blog, I don’t believe that you aren’t this creative.
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