Czeladź cheesecake

I’ve already mentioned that there won’t be all that many dessert recipes here. That doesn’t mean there’s no room for dessert in my primitive kitchen. I do sometimes bake muffins, make a cake or put together a tiramisu. Just not very often. Cheesecake is the exception. For one thing, I love cheesecakes, especially the ones that live up to their name. Cheesecake means cheese. No thick crust for me, no cheese mixed with flour and other things to stiffen it up. Cheesecake means cheese. It has to be fluffy, delicate and velvety.

It’s actually hard to get that result the easy way. But you know how I feel about complicated recipes with a long list of expensive things to buy. I found a recipe, tinkered with it and now it suits me perfectly. What’s more, I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s tasted my creation and didn’t like it. Don’t expect an eminent food critic to call it an eminent achievement, of course (I get the feeling they mark things on how complicated they are). But for primitive palates brought up on cakes from the Nowakowski chain and other mass-market places like it, you’ll hit the spot. And why Czeladź? I was born there, and although I moved away a long time ago, I still feel a strong tie to the place. My mum made the best cheesecakes in Czeladź (she’s moved away too), so a good cheesecake always makes me think of Czeladź.

Recipe details:

Prep time: about 15 minutes

Baking time: about 65 minutes

Oven temperature: 175 degrees Celsius (why do I spell this out? A friend once baked cookies from a recipe by Martha Stewart, that famous American fraudster, and they came out a bit burnt. I asked if she’d had the oven too hot. No, she said, the recipe said 320 and she’d only baked them at 250 because her oven didn’t go any higher. Well, the recipe was in Fahrenheit.)

How many does it serve? It makes about 10 portions, but you can safely assume it’ll feed at most 4 people

How many calories? Better not ask

Ingredients for a delicate Czeladź cheesecake:

• 400 grams of twaróg (plain Polish curd cheese, unmilled and unprocessed, the kind that comes wrapped like a block of butter)
• a packet of digestive biscuits (chocolate ones are fine)
• 200 grams (one pack) of butter
• 3 eggs (whole – no need to mess about separating the whites from the yolks or any such nonsense in this recipe)
• half a cup of sugar
• the grated zest of one orange (freshly grated, on a grater)

How I make it:

If you’ve got a blender, this cake is ridiculously easy to make. The hardest part is crushing the biscuits for the base. Unfortunately, it’s best done by hand. That’s where I start. In a deep bowl (I use the same one for kneading my pizza dough), I crush the biscuits to fine crumbs. Meanwhile I melt the butter in a little frying pan. Once I’ve crushed the biscuits, I pour in the butter and mix until I have a loose, crumbly mixture.

I get out a cake tin, butter the bottom and sides and tip in the biscuit and butter mixture. I press it down with a spoon until it covers the bottom of the tin without any gaps.

Then, in the same bowl (I don’t wash it, even if there are buttery biscuit crumbs left in it), I beat the curd cheese with the eggs and sugar. First with a spoon, then with the blender. The mixture needs to be pourable and smooth, with no lumps. I pour it into the tin over the biscuit base. I sprinkle grated orange zest over the top. Quite generously. I grate pretty much the entire zest of the orange straight over the tin.

Into the oven it goes, preheated to 175 degrees Celsius, for about 65 minutes. Of course, once 50 minutes are up I keep an eye on it. If it’s risen a little and the edges have browned, that’s enough baking. I turn the oven off and leave the door slightly ajar. After about 10 minutes I take it out. The cake always sinks a little.

You can pretty much tuck in the moment it comes out of the oven, but it tastes better once it’s cooled a little (once it’s cool, you can put it in the fridge and wait an hour or two). It’s delicious. Enjoy!