A Cheese-Cake Cup-Cake Experiment

Partial success with Cheese-cake cup-cakes

Apart from President Trump increasing the trade war stakes by suggesting that he will impose tariffs on imported european cars, and Jeremy Hunt explaining how wonderful Theresa May's speech was yesterday in uniting both conservative remainers and brexiteers, not much of interest politically.

Not really feeling up to much today, and with a pot of curd cheese (Quark) in the fridge, I thought I would have another go at making cheese cake, inspired by a 'cream-cake deficit' post by a friend on facebook.

I took my inspiration from a recipe for 'Muttis bester Käsekuchen' (Mummy's best cheese cake on the basis that it used ingredients I currently had in hand. That is, apart from the minor fact that it used 1kg of  Quark and 3 eggs, and I only had 250 g of Quark and two eggs.

Undaunted, I decided to go for:

• A quarter of the recipe amounts
• Make little cup cake sized cheese cakes instead of one large one
• Use whipped egg white to make the filling lighter!

For the base

Ingredients & Preparation:

• 25 g butter
• 25 g caster sugar
• 1/2 egg yolk
• 65 g plain flour
• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon of milk

These were rubbed to until I had a coarsely crumbed dough.

The  crumbs were distributed over 9 paper muffin cases in a 12 cup cake hole tray and then stamped down to a base with a glass and evened out with a finger!

For the Filling

Ingredients & Preparation:

• 250 g Quark (soft curd cheese)
• 62 g sugar
• 1/2 egg yolk
• ***1 egg white beaten until stiff peaks formed
• 40 g sunflower oil
• 20 g Birds Custard Powder
• 125 ml milk

I mixed all the ingredients EXCEPT the stiff egg white together first to get a faint pink smooth mixture. Then I folded the stiff egg white into the mix. This was done carefully until the mixture looked smooth again.

Baking

The cheese-cake mixture was then spooned in equal quantities on top of the dough base.

The small cheese cakes were baked at 170 degC in a fan heated oven for ****45 minutes. They looked spectacular - like this!

Having had past experience with a collapsing cake, I left them to cool in the turned off oven. However, they still came out looking like this!

Chilled in the fridge, they still tasted delicious!

*** I think next time, I will simply add an egg directly to the cheese cake topping mix (as the original recipe specified, duh!). 

**** The original recipe specified baking one large single cheese cake for 90 minutes, I think that the cup cake sized cheese cakes could bake completely through in less that the 45 minutes that I gave them.