Bilberry cheesecake

Fact 1 – I’ve been away a while.

Fact 2 – I was somewhere else.

Fact 3 – I’m back.

Fact 4 – There’s going to be a poem, and no ordinary poem either. It’s by an independent observer of Polish political life, my good friend the Greek. Here’s what he wrote to me:

If it’s a punchline you’d like to land

over a saddle of rabbit,

don’t be some Bydgoszcz chump, my friend:

eat a slice of cheesecake first, then have at it.

Fact 5 – I’m back with a bang, and a decidedly bilberry-flavoured one at that. Bilberry cheesecake. Or perhaps I should say cheesecake with bilberries.

Right, enough facts. I’m back, and I hope I’ll have a few more things to post here on Prymitywna Kuchnia. Truth is, there were several reasons I wasn’t writing. Lots of work, lots of time on the road, no time to spare, of course. But I didn’t particularly want to eat much either (though I stuffed myself with the French beans that are so good in June, usually with a hard-boiled egg). The reason was simple: my enormous ar… And then there’s my mate Jacek, who plays almost as dirty as the footballers at the World Cup. He’s secretly started slimming down. Again!

He wrote to me the other day to say he was almost slim. The sod!

Red rag to a bull, that was. A pretty frustrated bull, mind you, because instead of hitting back I made a cheesecake. Talk about the opposite effect. Oh well. I’ll just get even fatter.

Oh well.

Hmm. But you can’t imagine how well this cheesecake turned out. Photos, especially my rather primitive ones, could never do it justice. You’ll have to try making it at home.

So what is this cheesecake anyway? Why bilberries? Well, a woman I used to work with once brought exactly such a creation into the office: a bilberry cheesecake. And seeing as cheesecake is pretty much the favourite as cakes go. My favourite, that is. I took quite a liking to it. I had it a few more times and then, suddenly, that was that.

We don’t work together any more or see each other, so that cheesecake rather slipped out of my life. The day before yesterday I went out for strawberries and some bilberries caught my eye. Perfect for a shake, I thought. Actually it was the price that caught my eye, because it didn’t look too scary (22 PLN a kilo). So I bought 250 grams.

Then someone asked if I’d bake a cake for somebody, and somehow the bilberries and the cheesecake came together in my head. I went looking for the recipe and found the one I think was used for that cake I loved so much, namely this one. But I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t change it. So here’s a cheesecake inspired by a recipe from Moje Wypieki, with different cheeses, more ingredients, a different base and a slightly tweaked topping.

My bilberry cheesecake. Give it a go!

PS

This isn’t the cheapest dessert. Whichever way you add it up, the ingredients will set you back about 40–45 PLN:

bilberries about 5 PLN, two packs of Philadelphia about 7 PLN, half a kilo of curd cheese about 6 PLN, brown sugar about 2 PLN, 4 eggs (free-roaming ones in my case) 4 PLN, sour cream about 3 PLN, biscuits for the base about 7 PLN, butter 2.5 PLN, plus the rest, which is bound to add another few PLN.

At a glance: 

Prep time: 25 minutes

Baking time: 80 minutes

Oven temperature: 150 degrees Celsius

Serves: enough for a small party

Calories: if you only look, there are none at all

Ingredients for a seriously good cheesecake:

• 150 grams of bilberries
• 3 tablespoons of wheat flour
• 1 and a half packs of Philadelphia Original (that’s 125 grams + 65 grams)
• 500 grams of semi-fat twaróg (Polish curd cheese) (I had two 250-gram blocks of the traditional kind, not milled)
• a glassful of fine brown sugar
• 4 hen’s eggs
• 4 teaspoons of vanilla extract (I had a lovely one from Madagascar)
• 1 tablespoon of lemon juice (mine was bottled)
• 2 tablespoons of lime juice
• 300 grams of 18% sour cream (the thick kind)
• 3 tablespoons of icing sugar
• 1 packet of digestive biscuits
• half a packet of sugar-topped shortbread biscuits
• 100 grams of butter

Method (you’ll need a blender):

I started by crushing the biscuits for the base in a huge bowl. Not a fun job. I don’t like it. I have to do it by hand because, as you know, apart from my blender I don’t own any of the gadgets that might come in handy. So it takes me quite a while. I try to get the biscuits down to the texture of fine sand. I melted 100 grams of butter in a small saucepan, added it to the crumbs and mixed it all together.

I spread the base “mixture” in a fairly large square cake tin (you can see it in the photos). Cover the bottom very thoroughly, in a layer that isn’t too thick. I put the tin in the fridge.

I tipped both packs of twaróg into the bowl I’d used for the base and went at them with the blender. The idea is to get the same effect as milling the cheese. I don’t have a mincer, unfortunately, and the ready-milled stuff sold in tubs is usually a very runny smooth cheese. So I blend the twaróg myself and get a lovely creamy texture that way.

To the blended twaróg I added the Philadelphia, 4 hen’s eggs, a tablespoon of lime juice, a tablespoon of lemon juice, 3 teaspoons of vanilla extract and the sugar. I blended everything until smooth, added the bilberries and three tablespoons of flour and blended it again. The filling is quite runny (a bit like a bilberry shake). Don’t worry about it.

I poured the filling over the biscuit base that had been in the fridge for a little while. I heated the oven to 150 degrees Celsius and put the cheesecake in. I baked it for 70 minutes.

While it was baking I made the topping. I poured the 18% sour cream into a small bowl, added a teaspoon of vanilla extract, a teaspoon of lime juice and three tablespoons of icing sugar. I mixed it well with a spoon and set it aside.

After 70 minutes of baking I carefully took the cake out, poured the sour cream mixture over the top and spread it evenly with a spoon. Back into the oven it went for another 10–15 minutes. Then I turned the oven off and left the door ajar to let the cake start cooling. Once cool, I put it in the fridge. By morning it was perfect. Enjoy!