Strawberry Cheesecake

Gaby had been sending me pictures of the strawberry cheesecakes she made lately for various occasions, making my mouth water, so in the end I asked her for the recipe and made a strawberry cheesecake myself. Mine is a lighter version of the original and it was a great success with husband and son, so I'm writing down the recipe, as I improvised it yesterday:

INGREDIENTS:

For the biscuit layer 

• 150 g biscuits
• 75 g melted butter 

For the cheese cream layer 

• 100 g cheese cream
• 400 g sour cream
• 50 g milk 
• 120 g sugar
• 2 eggs
• a pinch of salt

For the strawberry layer 

• 500 g strawberries
• 1 pack red cake glaze
• 30 g sugar
• 200 g water 

PREPARATION:

Grind the biscuits, stir in the melted butter and transfer the biscuit mixture into a cake form. Compact the biscuit layer with the bottom of a glass and leave to cool in the fridge for a few minutes.

Meanwhile prepare the batter for the cheese cream layer. Pour it over the biscuit layer and place the cake form in a preheated oven and bake at 175C for one hour. After the cake is baked, leave it to cool completely for a couple of  hours. 

Cut the strawberries into slices and arrange them tile-like on top of the cake. Prepare the cake glaze - mix the powder glaze with the sugar, add the water and cook on the hot plate until it thickens. Leave it to rest for one minute, then spread it on top of the strawberries with the help of a silicon brush. 

Leave the cake to cool in the fridge for a couple of hours or overnight. Serve with coffee and enjoy!

Sugarless Apple Muffins

Last year, on a whim, I decided to stop eating sugar. I love sweets and although I am certainly not overweight and have no health problems, related to sugar consumption, I thought it would be a beneficial experiment health-wise and I was also curious if I could do it. Initially it was only for a day, then a week and now it has been more than six months. 

I'm not religious about not eating sugar and my restrictions apply only to processed sugar, by which I mean that I eat a lot of fruits and dried fruits; it's not a carbohydrate restricting diet, just an abstinence from packed sugar as much as possible.

Even before summer last year, I rarely ate store-bought sweets, my morning coffee was accompanied mostly by home-made desserts. Lately I've been experimenting with my own recipes, replacing sugar with dried fruits. I should mention, that I am not a proponent of artificial sweeteners and I believe in reducing the craving and need for sweet taste by reducing the consumption of sweet taste. I can confirm, that my receptors for sweet have actually changed during these months and I can taste sweetness much more acutely.

I came up with these apple muffins last week and this is my second batch, husband polished most of the first one himself, and he hasn't been on my sugar-free regime, so it should be a testament, that they are delicious enough :)

Ingredients:

• 1 egg
• 40 g sunflower oil
• 100 g yogurt / sour cream
• 150 g / average apple chopped
• 100 g dried fruits (25 g of each raisins, cranberries, dates, plums)
• 120 g flour
• 5 g baking powder
• pinch of salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, clove

Preparation:

Beat slightly the egg, add the yogurt and vegetable oil, mix. Add the dried fruits (cut the dates and plums into small pieces) and the apple, chopped into small pieces. Finally mix in the flour with baking powder, pinch of salt and spices.

Distribute the batter into 12 muffin forms and bake in a preheated oven at 180 C for approx. 25 min. Serve with hot coffee or tea.

Blueberry Crumble

This summer we got into the habit of picking a few handfuls of wild berries from the places we hike and then I would make some dessert or two with them. One of our favourites turned out to be the berry crumble, and the best of them all - blueberry crumble. Probably because blueberries are kind of neutral in taste, not too sweet and not too sour, but they make for the perfect filling.

This is the latest crumble that we cut this morning for the morning coffee. We picked the blueberries on Osogovo mountain, but as it turned out we had gathered only 100 g, I added 100 g of frozen cranberries I had in the freezer. And yup, that's my breakfast just before I opened my Duolingo for the morning portion of lessons:)

The recipe I came up with is a compilation from here and there, fine-tuned to my kitchen and taste:

For the crust:

• 90 g butter, soft, but not melted
• 50 g sugar
• 1 egg
• 250 g flour
• 5 g baking powder
• pinch of salt
  

For the filling:

• 200 g blueberries (100 g blueberries and 100 g cranberries)
• 120 g sugar
• 15 g corn starch
  

Preparation:

Mix the soft butter with the sugar. No need to beat them to a cream, though one could, I suppose, but thorough mixing with a fork seems enough for me. Then add the egg and incorporate it into the batter. Add the flour with the salt and the baking powder, until your mixture turns into big crumbs.

Prepare the filling, adding the sugar to the berries. Then add the corn starch, it will help thicken the filling, while baking.

Place 2/3 of the crumbs into the baking dish and flatten them, covering the bottom and partially the wall of the dish. Spread the filling on top. Sprinkle with the remaining 1/3 of the butter crumbs.

Place in a preheated oven at 180C and bake for approx. 20 min, until the peaks of the crust become light brown. Leave to cool completely and serve with coffee. I know that some people like crumbles with vanilla ice or vanilla sauce, but I've tried it and to me the additional sweetener kills the taste of the berries, so I prefer to serve it au naturel. Enjoy!

Tyrolean Tart

Husband and I hiked yesterday on Lulin mountain, a repeat of our last year's hike mid July in the hope to find again some ripe raspberries for half a dozen jars of wild raspberry jam. Alas, summer is evidently late this year and the raspberries were at least two weeks аваъ from riping. However, the wild strawberries were still fairly abundant - another evidence that the seasonal fruits are late this year, as other years we've seen ripe strawberries on Dupevitza as early as June 10th.

Anyway, instead of raspberries, we gathered some strawberries and in the evening I made my first Tyrolean tart. I liked it a lot and I am putting down the recipe in my blog, as I know I'll be willing to repeat it, and soon.

The biscuit crust:

• 100 g butter
• 1 egg
• 50 g sugar
• 220 g flour
• 5 g baking powder
  

Beat the egg with the sugar. Add the melted, but not hot butter. Add the flour with the baking powder and mix into a soft dough. I don't have a tart form, so I used my spring cake form, covering the bottom and forming a border along the walls of the form, high enough for the filling of the tart. I pricked the thus formed biscuit layer with a fork and placed it in a preheated oven to bake for 25 min at 180C.

The cream filling:

• 350 ml milk
• 2 egg yolks
• 50 g sugar
• 2 tbsp flour
• vanilla
• 10 g butter 
  

Stir the egg yolks with the sugar, add the vanilla, the flour and a small amount of the milk and stir, until homogeneous. Add the rest of the milk and cook over the hot plate at medium heat until the cream thickens and begins to boil. Set aside to cool down to room temperature. Cover with cling form to avoid a crust being formed.

The fruit layer

Here any fruit and any syrup goes. I used the wild strawberries and I prepared a syrup out of home-made strawberry jam, diluted in 150 ml water. This made my syrup somewhat murky, so next time I'll use something else for the jelly. To thicken it, I added 5 g of gelatin, prepared according to the instructions on the pack. 

Finally I assembled the tart and placed it in the fridge overnight. The resulting dessert is delicious crispy crust with sweet creamy filling and divinely aromatic wild berries with a very delicate sour tinge. Definitely recommend this recipe and will be making it soon with other berries (wild raspberries :), hopefully).

Under The Biscuit Roof

Every February 14th there's a noisy discussion in Bulgaria if we should celebrate St. Valentine's Day or  St. Tryphon's Day - a traditional holiday, celebrating wine and its production. As far as holidays go my credo has always been the more the merrier :) So husband and I honor both holidays with flowers, a bottle of good wine, a good dinner with candles and the obligatory cake - both of us have such a sweet tooth (alas?!).

My Valentine's cake this year - the popular Biscuit Roof, which I'm making for the first time. I bought a packet of combined cocoa and vanilla biscuits of good quality, but a bit small in size for this dessert, so my roof form didn't come as neat as I hoped. My cream is my own idea, there are versions with butter, cream cheese and various other options.
So, the products for this super easy and interesting dessert:

• 1 pack of cocoa biscuits (15 pcs)
• 1 pack of vanilla biscuits (15 pcs)
• 1/2 cup of milk
• 250 g ricotta
• 200 g sour cream
• 100 g powdered sugar 
• 2 bananas

Mix the ricotta and the sour cream and add the powdered sugar. Cover the working plot with stretch foil. Soak the biscuits slightly in the warmed milk and arrange in a checkered form 3 x 5. Cover with 1/3 of the cream.

Arrange the second checkered layer of  biscuits, spread the rest of the cream,place two average bananas upon the central row of biscuits, optional - add nuts, raisins, jam (I used homemade strawberry jam).

With the help of the stretch foil gather the biscuits to form a triangular prism and place in the fridge for a couple of hours.

Cover with chocolate spread or melted chocolate and serve. The dessert is very light, creamy and tasty, I'll be doing it again soon with bigger biscuits (or smaller bananas) :)

And a sneak-peek or rather a full frontal of my first attempt at tulle petticoat. So far so good, but the 50 cm of tulle I had bought only sufficed for half of the petticoat - one layer is not sturdy enough so I'll be buying another piece of tulle to repeat the exercise and finish it properly to get a decent double layered petticoat for Gaby's 50s style Lindy Bop dress.

Crème Brûlée and Other Desserts

I was in the mood for cooking desserts yesterday - I made three :) My very first Crème Brûlée - I read a few recipes and in the end kept close to the one in My Cooking Book Blog:
Ingredients:

• 5 yolks
• 375 g cream
• 125 g milk
• 85 g sugar 
• 2 vanilla extracts

I brought the cream and milk to boil together with the vanilla extracts. In a separate bowl I stirred the yolks with the sugar and slowly added the hot, but not boiling cream to the yolks, stirring all the time. Then I sifted the egg-cream mixture for better texture and poured it into four small bowls. I placed the bowls in a cooking tin, added 1l of boiling water to the tin and placed the cream to cook in the preheated oven at 160C for 45 min.

I don't have a cooking burner, so I mixed two spoons of white and brown sugar, spread it on top of the cream and then burned the sugar, placing the bowls under the grill of my oven.

The cream was divine, the texture extremely smooth, only the burned sugar was not perfect, I'll have to practice on that.

And as we were having pizza with mushrooms and pineapples for lunch, I decided to use the rest of the pineapple to make a pineapple cake. I've made this cake many times with various fruit and it is always a success:
Ingredients:

• 2 eggs
• 200 g sugar
• 180 g milk
• 40 g oil
• 220 g flour
• 2 vanilla extracts
• 10 g baking powder
• 300 g pineapple (pear, apricot, peach, banana, plum) slices

Beat the eggs with the sugar, add the oil, milk, flour with baking powder and vanilla. Pour the batter in a baking tin, covered with baking paper. Distribute evenly the fruit slices. Bake in a preheated oven at 180C.

And because I had the white of the 5 eggs I used for the brûlée, in the evening I made meringues. They are so very simple to make and I didn't even squirt them, just used a spoon to drop them into rough rounds:
Ingredients:

• 5 egg whites
• 300 g powdered sugar (I only had 260 g, so I added 40 g of regular sugar)
• 1 vanilla extract
• 1 tsp of powdered instant coffee (optional - I didn't like the taste of coffee at first, but it grew on me)

Sweet summer life :))))

Peach Panna Cotta

My first panna cotta :) I was inspired and followed this recipe with some modifications to my taste:

Ingredients:

• 400 ml cream 20% (Meggle)
• 100 ml milk 3%
• 100 ml water
• 10 g gelatin
• 120 g sugar
• 2 sachets of vanilla extract
• 3 average peaches (300 g)

I cut the peaches and blended them to a pulp together with 120 g sugar and 100 ml milk in the blender. Soaked the gelatin in 100 ml water. Brought the cream with the vanilla extract to boil and added the gelatin. When the cream had cooled to room temperature, added the peach pulp, stirred and poured into cupcake forms. Left in the fridge to cool for the night.

Very light and delicious summer dessert. Should be great with a number of fruits.

Far Breton

I first came upon the recipe for Far Breton last summer in Mira's cooking blog and was immediately intrigued. Flan meets custard - my two favourite desserts - who wouldn't want to try it. I even made the prunes at home, in the oven, following instructions I found on the web.

However, instead of a few hours, it took a few ... days!, so next time I'll probably buy a fruit dryer first or experiment the traditional way with sun and air.

However, I made the mistake of using a rather big baking dish for my far breton and the batter came very thin, not covering the prunes. It was delicious, but not a real far breton. I put away the remaining prunes in the freezer and have been meaning to make a proper go at the recipe ever since.

Until Mira's latest publication on flan reminded me of the Far Breton. This time I used a more suitable baking dish and everything went as planned.
Ingredients: 

• 250 g flour
• 500 ml milk
• 3 eggs
• 150 g sugar
• a pinch of salt
• 2 tbs of alcohol (this time we didn't have rum or cognac at home, so I used Irish cream)
• butter to graze the tin
• prunes

The method I used is as described by Mira - you mix the dry and the liquid ingredients separately and then add the liquid to the dry and mix thoroughly.Then pour the batter onto the prunes and bake in a preheated oven at 200C for 15 min and at 150C with a fan for another 45 min or so, until the crust is golden.

The resulting dessert is interesting, tasting something like flan and something like baked macaroni with milk, but not quite. Still, if it's going to be eggs, milk and sugar, I think I'll stick to flan or custard next time :)

And my new beginnings - three new puzzles I bought yesterday:

And the sleeve of my Jirachi cardigan - I think the transition from the moss stitch border to the chart went very smoothly, so far I love it!