I created this cake around Easter/Passover from my Everyday Dorie column for The Washington Post, but here’s the best part about the cake: It’s good anytime!

While you might think Easter’s all about colored eggs and chocolate, lamb, bunnies and baskets full of sweet things, I think it’s about cheesecake.

I have no idea when the association came to me and why it stuck. But really, does anyone need a reason for cheesecake? And certainly, no one needs an excuse to make one. All you need is a foolproof recipe.

Having grown up in New York, I’ve been making it the same way for years: really tall, really rich and creamy. Then, a couple of weeks ago, perhaps in the season’s spirit of renewal, I tinkered with my original recipe, one made with cream cheese and sour cream. What began on a whim finished as a quest. I was searching for a cheesecake that would be as impressive and as satisfying as my standby, but I wanted a different texture: something a little lighter, a little less dense, and with more spring, sponge and fluff.

I got all that by adding ricotta to the mix, specifically by swapping some of the cream cheese for a lot of ricotta. Mixing the two cheeses gave the cake the richness and creaminess that are the hallmarks of the genre plus the lightness I was looking for. I also added grated lemon and orange zest and a full tablespoon of vanilla extract, ingredients that round the flavor of eggs and make anything rich seem magically less so. Those additions might explain why my more moderate friends around the table cut thin slices and then went back for seconds. Like many seducers, the cake is not what it seems.

Takeaway tips

Making cheesecake is for the patient. It needs a long bake, a long cool and a long chill; making cheesecake with ricotta is for the very patient, because the ricotta must drain before you use it. If you’ve never drained ricotta before, you’ll be surprised at the amount of liquid it gives up — liquid that, if it weren’t removed, would spoil the texture of your cake.

In the ideal cheesecake world, you’d wrap the ricotta in cheesecloth, make a kind of hobo sack and let it hang overnight, its weight providing the pressure needed to push the liquid out. I don’t have a ricotta-hanging hook in my kitchen, so I do what you’ll probably do: Wrap the cheese, put it in a strainer, set the strainer over a bowl and then weight the cheese down with a heavy can of something. (Last week I used a jar of half-sour pickles.)

Don’t skip that step.

Because I’m a checks-and-balances kind of baker, I’ve added cornstarch to the batter. It’s there as an in-the-background sopper-upper, slurping up and absorbing any excess moisture from the ricotta and helping to ensure the cake has a gorgeous texture.

So here’s what you should know

You’ll need a 9- or 10-inch springform pan for this batter, which will firm up and almost always rise above the rim of the pan, then settle down.

Beat, beat and then beat some more. By the time you pour the batter into the pan, the cream cheese and ricotta should have gone from solid to something resembling liquid satin. This is a great job for a stand mixer, although you can make it with a handheld mixer. (I learned to make cheesecake with a spoon and elbow grease and have never made it that way again.)

The cake bakes slowly in a water bath called a bain-marie; it’s a roasting pan filled with hot water. This is the gentlest way of baking such a big cake made with such delicate ingredients. Once the cake is baked, it has to hang out in the turned-off oven for another hour. This is a must: Cheesecakes don’t like sudden shifts in temperature.

And then it has to hang some more. The cake needs to come to room temperature before it’s chilled. You could serve it at room temperature, but cheesecake is better chilled; overnight is best. That it can be frozen only makes us love it more.

I typically serve cheesecake plain. Call me silly, but I love the simplicity of its looks. But hey, it’s a holiday, so think about crowning it with berries. Or, if you’d like, serving it with a sauce: berry, chocolate or caramel.

This cake could work for Passover next month, too: Just use kosher-for-Passover potato starch instead of cornstarch in the batter and matzo meal instead of graham crackers or bread crumbs for lining the pan; this cheesecake doesn’t really have a crust. And any time of year, you can make it gluten-free by choosing a different crumb.

Photograph by Deb Lindsey. This story appeared in my Everyday Dorie column in The Washington Post.