Raspberry ricotta mini cupcakes

For our 4th of July croquet&fireworks picnic, it's red and white desserts--how patriotic or something. At least they're bite-size instead of americanly huge. Based on this, makes 4 dozen.

1 stick salted butter, melted in a small bowl
3/4 c ricotta
2 eggs
1 t vanilla
2/3 c sugar
1 T minced lemon peel leftover from limoncello (or lemon zest)
2 c flour
2 t baking powder
1/4 t baking soda
1 t cardamom
48 unsweetened frozen raspberries

Preheat the oven to 400F and butter the mini cupcake pan. In the bowl in which you melted the butter, stir in the ricotta until smooth, then stir in the eggs and vanilla until smooth. In a larger bowl, toss the sugar and lemon peel together. Whisk the dry ingredients (flour through cardamom) into the sugar. Plop in the ricotta mixture and stir with a spatula until combined; this will be much thicker than a batter, almost rubbery, but it baked up just fine so don't worry. Drop a soup-spoon-ful of batter into each mini cupcake mold. Push a frozen raspberry into the top of each cupcake, pointy end up and hollow end down (which is much easier with firm frozen raspberries than with soft fresh ones). Bake for 12 minutes until lightly golden on top and dark golden on the bottom, and transfer to a cooling rack to cool.