Kasekuchen

Baking projects tend to come in twos for me. The first project is to produce a birthday cake or scones for breakfast or candies and petit fours for a certain red dominated holiday in the recent past, the project that was planned out and ingredients purchased for and a final home pre-determined. The second project is then found to be necessary to use up the leftover cream or spare egg whites or spare egg yolks or abundance of butter that take up residence in the fridge and threaten to invite their fungal friends to visit if allowed to grow bored. These second projects have the benefit of requiring a fair amount of creativity to use up what random and perhaps mismatched ingredients were left by the first project, and they also give me a fun chance to test the type of recipes I might never otherwise make.

And, if the experimental second project bombs and lands in the garbage, I haven't really lost anything compared to throwing the offending ingredients away directly.

Anyway, there was in the recent past a holiday devoted to chocolate, and so I opted to celebrate one of my favorite ingredients and the birthdays of a few friends by making a tray of goodies. I make chocolate-covered candies and petit fours iced with mousse. It was all quite good and eaten quite quickly. But the mousse had required heavy cream, and after my previous sad experiences trying to get French cream to whip properly, I had bought rather too much. Downsizing the butter and egg populations in my fridge didn't look like such a bad idea, either.

Now, I probably could have made another cake and covered it in whipped cream, or manufactured a lot of chocolate ganache or several batches of scones (which is what I normally use cream for). But after making candies half the weekend, those ideas didn't appeal. Then a friend of mine got stuck listening to me listing ingredients and pondering recipes and said, why don't you make this? and sent me a link to a kasekuchen recipe.

I had never heard of kasekuchen before. It's a German cheesecake that involves heavy cream and eggs and vanilla sugar and a type of cheese called quark.

At that point, the particle physicist in me sided with the baker in insisting that I needed to try this recipe. I was out-numbered and could not resist. So I didn't, and made the cake. It involved a cookie-ish version of a rolled out pie crust and allowed me to use vanilla sugar for the first time ever. The filling was a mixture of whipped eggs whites and cream and sugar and cheese. Of course, I couldn't actually use the quark cheese the recipe called for, since I live in France and finding German cheeses is rather difficult. So I used fromage blanc instead. The recipe is a bit more involved than a batch of brownies, but has fewer steps than making a frosted layer cake. It was much lighter than a New York-style cheesecake, and certainly I was able to get my colleagues to try it without too much difficulty.

So, a success, and one that taught me a new German word. Kuchen means cake. I can't pronounce it, but I know what it means now. Of course, that isn't the first word I learned in German. Like any good non-German physicist, the first German word I learned was bremsstrahlung.