Chocolate Ricotta Cupcakes

I had some ricotta cheese leftover from making my crock-pot lasagna, so I searched around for a good recipe using ricotta. I found this one, tweaked it a bit, and made delicious cupcakes using ingredients I already had in my pantry and leftover cream cheese buttercream from when I made the strawberry coconut cake!

The texture of these is just lovely... they're like halfway between cheesecake and regular cake. Very moist!

Recipe adapted from here.

Ingredients:
1 cup ricotta cheese
2 eggs
1 1/3 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla
4 tbsp unsalted butter, melted and cooled
2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2/3 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 cups semisweet chocolate chips

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350. Line muffin tins with cupcake liners (about 16 if you want them to be puffy and large, or 24 if you want them flatter and in smaller portions like mine).
2. Mix the ricotta cheese, then beat in the eggs. Add the milk, vanilla, and butter. Mix well.
3. Whisk together the dry ingredients (not including the chocolate chips) in a separate bowl.
4. Gradually add the dry ingredient mixture to the ricotta cheese mixture, and mix to combine. Don't overmix!
5. Fold in the chocolate chips.
6. Spoon batter into cupcake liners (they won't puff up as much as regular cakey cupcakes, so don't worry too much about overfilling).
7. Bake about 20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
8. Cool on wire racks.
9. (optional) Top with Cream Cheese Buttercream frosting.

See how they get little bubbles kinda like cheesecake?

Mmm, cream cheese buttercream!

Moist cake with gooey chocolate chips! Yummm!

Enjoy!