I have to admit: we’ve been in a breakfast rut of sorts. Pre-quarantine life, my husband and I used to treat ourselves each weekend to a trip to a local diner. We’d enjoy huge breakfasts of giant stacks of pancakes, waffles topped with bright strawberries & whipped cream, crispy bacon, corned beef hash, runny eggs… Ugh, I can’t even go on. I miss diners so much! That must be the Jersey girl in me.

Now that we’ve been doing breakfast at home, I got into a sort of routine with our breakfast menu. Fried eggs, scrambled eggs, an occasional omelette, toast… some weekends I’ll whip up some pancakes and fry up some bacon. All very typical and easy. So when I saw one of my favorite recipe bloggers, Half Baked Harvest, post a whole Instagram story making a Dutch baby, I was glued and had to try it.

I had never seen a Dutch baby straight out of the oven before, and it was quite the sight! Now, if you don’t know what a Dutch baby is, it’s similar to a pancake but way more fun. The pancake batter is made of the usual ingredients: flour, milk, eggs, and melted butter (well, maybe that’s not typical as pancakes usually call for oil rather than butter). But the fun and exciting part is all in the cooking process! This breakfast treat starts on the stove, but is quickly transferred to the oven where it produces a beautiful rise. I definitely geeked out over this part, and if it wasn’t for the other steps needed to prepare the toppings, I would’ve posted up right in front of the oven to just watch this Dutch baby balloon up in the oven.

Keep reading and scrolling below to see what I mean!

I stayed pretty close to the original recipe here, including the lemon strawberry and ricotta cream topping. I’ve been loving strawberries this season, and had a huge tub of ricotta in the fridge, so decided to just try out the whole thing.

Going through the whole process, I’m so glad I took the time to prep and measure all of my ingredients before I started. Much of the process for the actual Dutch baby moves pretty quickly, so you’ll want to have your strawberries sliced, lemon zested, etc. all before you really get into it.

So, first thing’s first… pre-heat the oven to 450F and slice your strawberries.

Then, zest a whole lemon and mix it with granulated sugar to make lemon sugar.

Once you’ve got your lemon sugar, take about a third of the sliced strawberries and set them aside. Mix about two tablespoons of the lemon sugar with the other two-thirds of sliced strawberries. Let them sit and soak in that lemon sugar flavoring. The lemon sugar strawberries will be your topping.

Once you’ve got your strawberries and lemon sugar prepped, make the batter. While you’re making the batter, I recommend starting to heat up your skillet. You’ll need it to be hot, hot, hot!

Mix your batter ingredients until the batter is smooth and you don’t have any large clumps. When the batter is near-ready, throw two tablespoons of butter on the hot skillet and brown it. Once the butter is browned, pour your batter into the skillet. Quickly grab your fresh strawberries (the one-third that you didn’t mix with the lemon sugar), and lay them across the wet batter. Then pop the skillet into the oven for about 15 minutes, and watch the magic. Be sure not to open up the oven during the first 15 minutes or else your beautiful Dutch baby balloon may deflate and you won’t get the wonderful rise.

Here’s a badly lit picture inside my oven of when I initially opened the door. You can see the full rise (as well as all of the burnt mess inside my oven, so please don’t judge me!).

Forcing myself away from the oven window while it was rising, I made the ricotta cream. This was actually very easy, so I was still had time to get back to the oven window and watch the Dutch baby bubble up. If it’s not coming across in my writing, I was really very excited about the rise. I think I was a little nervous I wouldn’t get this one right and it wouldn’t rise, so I was very relieved and excited that it actually did!

To make the ricotta cream, you’ll want to use cold ricotta straight from the fridge. This will help it to keep that creamy consistency. I did not do this. I took my ricotta out while I was making the batter and it got to room temperature by the time I was ready to make the cream, resulting in a pretty runny mixture. Being almost seven months pregnant, I get pretty fearful of that dreaded pregnancy brain and was trying very hard not to forget to make the ricotta cream in the first place.

Oh well… you live & you learn, and that’s the whole point of this blog for me anyway. I am a beginner baker after all, and I learned a good lesson about temperature and the effects on whipped cream.

Anyway, making the ricotta cream is very easy with a food processor. Just throw the ricotta into the food processor, turn it on high for a couple minutes, and you’ve got your cream. Then add in powdered sugar and vanilla to give it a sweet cream flavor.

Once your cream is made, your Dutch baby should be just about ready to take out of the oven. Open the door. Marvel at the beauty. Then quickly top with the lemon sugar strawberries and ricotta cream. Et voilà!