I'm back with another recipe. Yes, two days in a row now and today I'm going to show you a recipe I put together, meaning it's from my "Fake It Till You Make It" category. The last one was a Pizza Hut fake, which did not turn out so well. This recipe was a bit of a stress as there were many things I was worried about but let's take it step by step.
There's this sweet very popular not only in my country, but in Europe as well, maybe under different name. In Transylvania we call it Darázsfészek, which in English means wasp nest or vespiary. In Hungary they call it Csiga, which means snail, because it looks like the shell of the snail. In Romanian it's called Melc, which mean snail.
It should look like this, with any possible filling you like.
But as I always love to experiment (this is a nice word to say fake it) and try to create something new, I thought why not make a cake, since I have a cake pan.
As I had no recipe, I thought I can put together one. It is a risky business as you need to take into consideration quite a lot, but if you are not experimenting, you're never going to discover anything new.
For the dough I thought it would be good to look for a recipe, so I took the first one from the search result.
Ingredients:
For the dough:
- 500g all purpose flour,
- 1 pack vanilla sugar,
- 1 egg,
- 1 pack dry yeast (7g),
- 2 tbs sugar,
- 300ml lukewarm milk,
- 50g butter
- pinch of salt.
source
Ingredients for the fulling:
- 500g cheese,
- 200g raisins,
- 2 egg whites,
- 150g sugar.
Method
To make the dough, put the flour in a mixing bowl, add salt, vanilla sugar, dry yeast, 1 beaten egg, 2 tsp sugar, 50g butter and then knead the dough adding gradually 300m lukewarm milk. Knead till the dough is non sticky and soft.
Cover and let rest one hour, till it doubles in size, in a warm place.
This is my dough after one hour rest.
Flour the working surface, knead the dough a little, to eliminate the air bubbles, then divide the dough into two equal part. obviously mine is not equal as I'm not good at that, but here this counts less and soon you'll see why.
And this is where the real challenge began for me. I needed to decide how thick to be the roll and how big the pieces, in order to fill the cake pan. I'm not a visionary and it was the first time I did this. I was thinking to make a rectangle, rather long than large, so this what the dough looked like after rolling it out. The other one was smaller, because I did not divide the dough properly, but that doesn't matter anyway.
The filling was another stress factor as that one was put together by me entirely, but let's start with the cheese.
I'm having difficulty defining the cheese as some of you may not know what kind of cheese I'm talking about. We have a cheese called Tehéntúró In Hungarian, Branza de vaci in Romanian, which means cow cheese. It's fresh cheese, something similar to the Italian ricotta.
I thought 500g would be perfect for the recipe, but this was pure gambling, lucky guess I believe. Next I thought 200g raisins would do.
These raisins are dry, so you will need a good liquid to soak them in for an hour or two. The best is a good quality rum, so I used this James Cook genuine overseas dark rum.
Make sure to mix the raisins, steer them to absorb the rum, after which drain them as there's no need for liquid in the filling.
Mix the cheese with sugar, egg whites and spread on the dough.
Sprinkle with raisins and roll it up.
At this point I thought I need to brush the roll with either melted butter, or olive oil, in order fr the pieces to not stick together. Olive oil was a quicker method, so without exaggerating, I brushed the roll quickly.
After some thinking, I took a deep breath and cut the roll in 4cm pieces, which is 2inches. I see my working mat is helping me here as the width of the pieces is measurable.
This was the moment of truth. After lining the cake pan with baking paper, I tried to place the pieces in it in a way to form a real cake after it's done.
Baking time I also had to figure it out, but in the end it was 50min at 150C.
And this is why I needed to brush the rolls with olive oil, to be able to separate them after baking. I know this trick from another recipe, which is also very good.
All in all I'm satisfied with the outcome, fake it till you make it this time ended in making it. The only thing I would change is the amount of sugar in the filling. I would reduce that to 100g as raisins are sweet as well.
Soooo, cheese cake anyone? 😂
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