Keep Calm and Bake The Cheesecake

When the week is hard and the challenges at work are overwhelming everyone needs the 'Keep Calm and Carry On' moment. That was what I needed. I needed it bad. A little balance in my life, a kick of confidence, a little 'I've got this under control'. And the recipe for all this mess and stress was The Exquisite Cheesecake. My answer to all the challenges, my hope to restore some balance. 

The Exquisite Cheesecake
500 g ricotta
250 g mascarpone 
100 g powdered sugar
4 handfuls of almond flakes
1 lemon zest from one fruit
1.5 tsp vanilla extract
3 tbsp flour
3 eggs
75 g unsalted butter
140 g digestive cookies

Step 1: the cookie layer.

Melt the unsalted butter in a pot and in the meantime crumble digestive cookies. You can crumble them with the use of a blender or you can mash them with hand (if you had a bad day). Mix crumbled digestives with melted butter and transfer it to the baking tin. Press the cookie mixture to the bottom of the baking tin with the use of a spoon. Place it in the fridge for 20 minutes and preheat the oven to 180 C. In the meantime... step two!

Step 2: the OH-so-creamy-and-delicious layer. 

Grind the almond flakes and prepare the lemon zest. Add them to ricotta, mascarpone, eggs, sugar, flour and vanilla extract and mix well until smooth and creamy.

Easy? Easy. Now transfer the cheesecake mass on the digestive cookie layer and bake for 50 minutes or until the cheesecake becomes golden. As you wait and inhale the heavenly, the sweet smell of the cheesecake miracle you can fill your time with a pinch of classy. I enjoy the combination a lot.

The Beatles- I've just seen a face

When the cheesecake is baked cool it by slowly, step-wise opening the oven. Open the oven at few centimeters, leave it open for few minutes, open wider, etc. In the meantime roast a handful or two of almond flakes on the frying pan for 10 minutes. Decorate the cheesecake with roasted almond flakes and powdered sugar.

Keep the cheesecake in a fridge (applicable only if you can withhold yourself from devouring it on spot at once), but remove it from the fridge 15 minutes prior to serving. 

So when the week was hard or the day was bad and the deadlines are coming and the work is piling, keep calm and bake a cheesecake. Come back from work, leave it all behind, make a cup of excellent tea and savor every bite and crumble of the cheesecake. 

With cherry on top

It was rainy, warm and gloomy day- just the way I love the most. All my way back home was accompanied by rain and intensively rain-scented air and I just couldn't be happier. All around me there were leaves growing, rain was rustling and until I got home I was soaked. And it all called for a little celebration. 
'So what would it be?'- I asked myself drying my hair and bowing to the fridge searching for an appropriate flavor combination, and there could be only one good choice to complete the mood: Cherry almond vanilla cookies for the five'o'clock cup of tea.

Would you like to make your rainy afternoons complete and cosy too? This is how...

Cherry almond vanilla cookies

65 g unsalted butter

1 tbsp sugar

1 egg yolk

1 tsp lemon juice

2 tsp vanilla extract

1 cup grounded almonds

1 cup all-purpose flour

1/4 tsp salt

1 jar of cherries in syrup

Beat the softened butter with sugar. Add the 'wet' ingredients (egg yolk, lemon juice and vanilla extract) and beat them together until the dough is homogeneous. Add the remaining dry ingredients (almonds, flour and salt) and beat them well. When you're done with beating, knead the dough manually and form a compact block. Preheat the oven to 180 C and in the meantime form little cookies and place them on the baking paper. Make a dimple in the middle of each cookie (with your thumb or a spoon) to make a place for the cherry filling that will be added after baking. That is how I chose to shape my cookie batch.

Put the cookies in the preheated oven for 20 minutes or until they start changing their color to golden. Having that fulfilled here comes an extremely important part of the recipe. Sit down, relax and listen to this piece of music:

Mumford&Sons- Little Lion

Of course it might not be your cup of tea, but you don't have to become a fan. It's purely for the sake of experience, but I secretly hope that you will enjoy the heart-warming combination of Mumford&Sons with the smell of almond vanilla cookies in your home.

After the cookies are done remove them from the oven and add the cherry on top by placing it in the dimple. You can also add some cherry syrup, but try to limit it to one teaspoon. This is because its sugary feeling may dominate almond and vanilla tastes so they would become less intense and that's definitely not the effect we are after. 

Put the cookies with cherries to the oven for another 3-4 minutes and afterwards allow them to cool down. In the meantime brew the tea in a teapot, my choice was a strongly scented Earl Grey which perfectly matched this flavor mixture. I enjoyed my cookies in the company of Mumford&Sons, strong tea and heavy rain drumming against my window. Do you already know how you will enjoy yours?

Feeling blueberry with blueberry filling

Spring is here, oh, spring is here! And with the spring here comes the strawberry, blueberry and slowly other members of the beloved berry family. To my enthusiasm every day was followed by more berries in the markets and so I tracked the increasing number of berries making plans in my head on what I will do with them when the weekend comes. And the weekend came and the choice was made, a good choice, a perfect one: Blueberry-Strawberry Pancakes. Simple, fresh, fruity. 
A perfect choice for a Sunday breakfast.

As for the pancakes, there exists (what I call) 'The Pancake Phenomenon' what simply means that no matter how many people you ask for their pancake recipe, so many different recipes you will collect. Well, you know what they say... variety is a spice of life, but I have my favorite type of pancake. 
It's thin, delicate and a little bit crunchy on the edges.

Pancakes:

1 egg

1 tablespoon of oil

300 ml milk 

160 g all-purpose flour

Mix the ingredients together in a bowl until the batter is smooth and all the flour clumps have been removed. Pour the batter on a preheated dry frying pan. There is no need to add additional oil for the frying as we have already added some to the batter, in this way pancakes will be healthier and more crunchy. One tip for getting them thin and delicate: simply pour less batter on the frying pan. 

Servings: 5-7 pancakes (depending on the size of your frying pan)

Put the blueberries and strawberries on the pancake and roll it tight! Decorate it with blueberry sauce.

Blueberry sauce:

1 cup blueberries

1 teaspoon vanilla sugar

When dealing with frozen blueberries (doesn't matter if you take fresh or frozen ones for the sauce) keep them in warm water for a short while or remove them from the freezer much earlier. If thawing them with water dry them well before putting them in the pot. Adding water with blueberries will just dilute the precious sauce and this is not what we want. Place blueberries in the pot, add sugar and when they become warm start mashing them with a fork or a masher. Continue mashing and stirring the sauce to let the juice mix well with the pulp. Let the mixture boil for 3 minutes and transfer it on a sieve placed on a top of a bowl. Stir the mixture on a sieve with a spoon to separate the sauce from bigger clumps and blueberry skins, this way the sauce will be smooth. Use the sauce for decorating the rolled pancakes.

I know, I know... it already looks delicious and mouth-watering, but there is one more detail missing: sour cream! 9% sour cream is absolutely sufficient but even if you are on a diet don't resign from it. It's a small drop (1 or 2 teaspoons) but it brings a lot to the taste of this pancake-fruity mix. Add the sour cream on top of the pancake and enjoy, enjoy, enjoy. Because I assure you that you will enjoy every single simple bite of it.