Pastry Ingredients:
1. 2/3 cup flour
2. 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
3. 1/3 cup sugar
4. 1 egg--beaten
5. 1/3 cup margarine or butter
Sift baking powder and flour into a bowl, and then push it to the sides forming a hole in the middle. Add the beaten egg and sugar in the hole, spreading the margarine around on the flour in clumps. Knead ingredients together until a ball can be formed. If the ball of pastry tends to stick to your fingers after being well-kneaded, add more flour in small amounts.
Filling:
1. 2 packages (8 oz. Philadelphia Cream Cheese)
(I'm still experimenting, but I think you could substitute two batches of quark for this. One doesn't make quite enough filling, but in the right sized pan, it's fantastic)
2. 1 cup milk
3. 1 cup sugar
4. 2 teaspoons vanilla
5. 2 stiffly beaten egg whites
6. 2 egg yolks
7. juice of a lemon
8. 4 Tablespoons cornstarch
9. 1 teaspoon baking powder
Mix cheese and milk until creamy. Add sugar, vanilla, egg yolks, lemon juice and mix well. Stir in baking powder and cornstarch and mix well. Fold in egg whites.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease two round smaller cake tins. Divide pastry dough. Press it evenly over the bottom of the cake tin, allowing it to be thin and forcing it a bit up the side of the pan. Use a fork to make ventilating holes in the pastry. Pour in the cheese filling and form it with a spoon or spatula to a mound in the center. Bake low in the oven for 45 minutes. Make sure that the cake browns well on top before you take it out of the oven. It shouldn't jiggle at all, so you may also need to cover it with tin foil. Cool before eating.
From my earliest memory of being in Germany, I loved cheesecake. When I first heard someone say the word in English, I thought it was revolting.
I came from a small town in Idaho, where people made pies and cakes, but a cheesecake was not something that I had ever encountered.
Then I tasted my first slice in Germany in the early spring of 1972. I became an instant fan. And eventually, I found someone who made their own.
Baking was something you didn't have to do, because I lived in the Ruhr Valley, where 18,000,000 lived within a very small circular area that would stretch from St. Anthony to the Utah border in the southern part of Idaho. It was big city in every sense of the word.
This was the city of Oberhausen, where I lived for five months. The part of the city here was Buschhausen, and one elderly lady befriended us and enjoyed baking us a cheese cake, but she referred to it as Quarkkuchen.
It tasted the same, and ironically, when you make the cheesecake I make from a German recipe I found in Germany, you use Quark.
A person could use Philadelphia Cream Cheese to make a great cheese cake, and that's what I used for years, but then I found an alternative. The German Corner is a site that sells merchandise that is great for just a dilemma like this.
Salton makes a Quark maker, and with a quart of buttermilk and 16 hours, you have a finished product that will allow you to make a cheesecake or a Quarkpudding.
The best type is the full fat version of buttermilk, which most generally appears as "Hungarian-style" or "Hungarian Buttermilk."
The finished product is not only great for the uses I mentioned, but I also use it as a homemade version of cream cheese. It tastes like Quark I bought in Germany, when I lived there, and on toast or a bagel, it's fantastic.
The only problem is the fact that Salton no longer makes this machine. It processed a quart of buttermilk, which was enough for one pudding or one cheesecake. For the cake, I prefer the "Hungarian-style" buttermilk, but for Quarkpudding, I always use the low fat version. When I add the recipes, it will be obvious why I do that. The pudding already has some great full fat dairy.
So why did I mention the whole thing about the Quark making machine? They still sell a larger version, which also looks to be better.
The old one also could make yogurt, but this appears to be even better. Eventually we will get something like this, but for the time, the one we have works extremely well.
So here are two recipes for the great things to do with Quark, but if you don't want an additional kitchen gadget, you can always use Philadelphia Cream Cheese. But seriously speaking, it's like the difference between driving a Ford Edsel and a Porsche 911.
Quark Pudding
Ingredients
1. 1 8 oz. package of Philadelphia Cream Cheese, or one batch of processed Quark, made from a quart of low fat buttermilk.
2. 1 3/4 -2 cups of full fat milk
3. 1 1/2 pint of heavy whipping cream
4. 1/3 cup of sugar
5. 1 capful of vanilla extract
6. 1 large box of Instant vanilla pudding
First you soften the Cream Cheese, either removing the foil and zapping it in a microwave for 30-45 seconds. Use a hand mixer until it's smooth. It should be a bit thick, so you add a little milk, just enough to make the mixture very smooth. On the back of the instant pudding, you will find the instructions that tell you how much milk to use. If it calls for 2 cups, I use a bit more than 1 3/4. You want the pudding to set up a bit. Add the pudding and milk slowly, so there are no lumps. The mixture should be smooth.
In a separate bowl, whip the cream. As it begins to set, add the vanilla and add the sugar last. Fold the whipped cream into the pudding.
Now you use berries to complete the pudding. In Germany, we used strawberries whenever we made it. Anything with seeds doesn't work as well. And kiwi does not combine with the ingredients well. It always had a bitter taste. Strawberries and bananas are a great combination. Fresh blueberries are fantastic too, and during the winter, when it's difficult to get quality fruit, I use bananas and mandarin oranges. We prefer three or four bananas and two cans of drained mandarin oranges. We also always buy the better quality fruit. It makes a difference.
After you let it chill, you serve in bowls.
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