Austrian style Curd Cheesecake Recipe
This Austrian style Curd Cheesecake is a sweet dessert, delicious in its simplicity, consisting of one main layer mixture of curd cheese or ricotta, flavoured with sugar, lemon zest, vanilla extract, eggs and the raisins that have been luxuriously soaked in dark rum.
This cake is quite moist, therefore refreshing and perfect for any occasion, it is very easy to make and a great recipe to keep in the repertoire for cakes that require minimum effort but deliver maximum satisfaction.
In Slovenia, where I come from, curd cheese, in Slovenian called skuta (also referred to as farmer's cheese or baker's cheese) has always been a very popular and commonly used ingredient in baking.
For this recipe, you can easily replace curd cheese for ricotta, which is what I used to do when I first arrived in England, and struggled to find curd cheese, but it is now available these days in most bigger supermarkets or Polish food stores.
Curd cheese
My mother and my maternal grandmother would make this cake very often, this is proper home made rustic baking, and I am sharing here this nostalgic and special family recipe.
Give it a go and try this wonderful cake, but please do remember, despite the temptation, it is really important to completely cool down the cake before cutting it into slices.
Ingredients
Serves 10
120g butter, softened
200g caster sugar
4 eggs, separated
1kg curd cheese or ricotta
100g semolina
3 Tsp vanilla bean extract or seeds of one vanilla pod
finely grated lemon zest of 2 unwaxed lemons
120g raisins or sultanas
4 Tbsp dark rum or lukewarm water (for soaking the raisins)
icing sugar for dusting
Curd cheese
Method
Place the raisins in a small bowl, pour dark rum or lukewarm water over them and let them soak and plump up for about 30 min.
Preheat the oven to 200C static or equivalent. Lightly grease a 23cm springform tin or loose-bottomed tin and line the base with baking parchment.
Put the softened butter and sugar in a large bowl and mix well. Beat together until light and creamy.
Start adding to the sugar and butter mixture the egg yolks, one at a time, making sure the egg yolk is fully absorbed before adding the next one.
Add grated lemon zest, curd cheese or ricotta, semolina and vanilla extract and mix well all the ingredients.
Drain the raisins, remove excess liquid, and add them to the mixture.
Put the egg whites in a separate large bowl, add a pinch of salt and whisk the egg whites until stiff but not dry.
Fold very gently and lightly into the mixture.
Turn the mixture into a prepared tin.
Bake the cake in a preheated oven for 30min on 200C then lower the temperature to 180C and bake further for another 30min. Cake should be golden in colour on the surface and firm to the touch.
If halfway through baking time the cake is browning too fast, cover the top of the cheesecake loosely with the aluminium foil, to prevent the top from becoming too brown.
When the cake is baked, turn off the oven but leave the cheesecake in the oven for about 1 hour allowing it to cool a bit.
Take the cake out of the oven and allow it to cool completely.
Loosen the sides of the cake, using a palette knife if needed, and remove the tin.
Invert the cheesecake, then remove the base of the tin and the baking parchment.
Turn the cake back the right way up.
Dust with sifted icing sugar just before serving. This cake is very moist and the icing sugar will dissolve if you dust the cake too soon, no permanent damage though.
