Over the holidays while grocery shopping spied some quark, and decided better buy while the store had it. Exotic groceries are not as plentiful here in winter. I like summer for many reasons, but one of them is deluge of tourists and cottagers to area also brings better grocery shopping.
Why quark? Well long ago in Bracebridge was really scrumptious German bakery. My favourite item at bakery was cheese danish. They were made with a quark filling, very tart and lemony. On top of the filling was streusel. The bakery closed many years ago, and I have never found such wonderful danish anywhere else So, I though maybe could make something like that. After searching around on internet found recipe for quark streusel cake About German cooking blog http://germanfood.about.com/od/baking/r/streuselkuchen.htm. So, made the recipe, had to adapt making the dough work with more liquid, and adding apple to layers.
The taste of quark layer was very similar to my memory from the bakery danish. The rest of cake was quite good as well. Overall this make again cake. Although there are several steps, making the dough the night before using the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day method of just mixing the dough and letting is sit worked well and is very easy. It is not very sweet, and even though like cakes are only little sweet, might add some brown sugar to apple layer next time. A slice is great for break fast you cant stand cottage cheese one more day (try eat high protein and nutritious break fast, but occasionally fall off wagon and have something like this instead).
Here is adapted recipe. The quantities are pretty forgiving, so feel free to adapt or use another fruit or no fruit at all, and enjoy the “quarky” goodness of filling.
Apple Quark Cheesecake
(Adapted from recipe on About.com germanfood)
| Ingredients | Method |
| Dough
2 c flour 1 tsp yeast (dry type) ½ cup milk 2 Tbl butter 1 egg 2 T sugar ½ tsp salt Enough additional water to make dough (around a ½ cup, but depends your flour) |
Melt the butter in milk. Add the yeast and proof this until the yeast develops a foam.
Put the flour in bowl with the rest of ingredients, add the milk, egg, and mix until this turns into a soft dough. You will probably need to add a little water, depends on size of egg and your flour. Let the dough rise at room temp for about hour or until has risen and started to fall, the put it fridge or cool place. (Basically this follows the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day method) The next day push the lump of dough into greased pan, used pyrex pan just one size smaller than 9 x 13. You could also use 10” springform pan. Let the dough rise until is doubled again (about 1 hour). |
| Quark Filling
1 ½ cups (about 1 container) of quark 1 tsp lemon zest 1 egg 2 Tbl cornstarch |
Mix this all together as cheesecake. Spread over the dough. |
| Apples
Peel, core, and slice about 4 apples. Granny Smith are good, needs to tart apple. |
Layer the slices over the quark filling are overlap each other and completely cover the filling. |
| Streusel Topping
1 ½ cup flour 2/3 cup sugar (use some brown and some white) ½ cup butter ¼ tsp salt ¼ tsp cinnamon |
Note: This was the original recipe. I ended up only needing about 2/3 of this, so I saved the rest and froze it for another apple concoction, but if you are using a larger pan you might need all of it)
Mix the incredients like pie dough so you have lumps of butter remaining. Spread this over the apples evenly. |
| Bake at 350 for about an hour, watching that the crust gets slightly brown and the apples and streusel are cooked. This cake freezes well. | |
