Description:
This cake is made with fresh curd cheese, which is a very young cheese and tastes like yoghurt. The difficult part is to get the right ingredients in Singapore.
In Dutch this cheese is called "kwark" (pronounce as: quark), in French it's "fromage fraiche" - learn more at wikipedia:
This cake is not oven baked and it needs to stiffen up in the fridge overnight, preferably about 24 hours.
In this case I used strawberries, but other fruits can be used too (berries are best), try not to use kiwi's as they break down the enzymes in the cake - and some fruits don't work with agar agar if you use that instead of gelatin.
I couldn't find gelatin sheets, so I used agar agar, but with 2 packets of it it didn't get the same texture as gelatin - maybe I did it wrongly? If anyone has a suggestion, please let me know!
Ingredients:
half packet of digestive biscuits
50 g butter
2 packets of agar agar (maybe more?) or 10 sheets of gelatin
500 g strawberries
1 lemon (or orange)
500 g curd cheese
150g caster sugar
125ml whipping cream
Directions:
Crush the biscuits and mix it with melted butter to form a dough to stick on the bottom of the cake tray. Coat the tray with butter before plastering the cookie dough on the bottom. Use a spoon to flatten it and make it smooth.
Whip the cream with 25 grams of caster sugar in a bowl until nearly stiff. Fold it into the curd cheese. Wash half of the strawberries and cut them into small pieces, add to the curd cheese mixture as well. Add the remaining sugar to it as well. Give it a taste and make sure it's not too sweet and not too sour.
For agar agar - what I did was: squeeze the lemon, add a bit of water, dissolve the agar agar in it and slowly bring it to a boil. Keep stirring. Add this to the cheese mixture while it is still in fluid form. Mix well.
Add the mixture to the cake form and spread it on top of the base. Cover with plastic foil and put in the fridge. Let it firm up.
If you like, whip some more cream and spread it over the top and add fresh half strawberries for decoration.
Somehow it didn't firm enough and not equally with the agar agar.
This is how you would do it with gelatin: Place the gelatine in a bowl of cold water and leave to soak for about ten minutes. Squeeze the lemon and heat the juice in a pan. Squeeze the gelatine to remove excess water and stir into the lemon juice until dissolved. Allow to cool. Mix it with the curd cheese mixture.
If anyone has an idea where I can buy gelatin sheets in Singapore - please let me know!
[photo courtesy of Upali Kohomban]
Excellent photos!
ReplyDeleteExcellent photos!
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