curd cake with plums

curd cake with plums

• 20 Mar 2022

 

With the ongoing conflict in Ukraine I thought I'd share a Ukrainian recipe with you. Olia Hercules is a British based chef and food writer who was born in Ukraine and she shares the recipes of her homeland. Today's recipe is adapted from her recipe for curd cake with caramelised apples.

 

 

The cake should be made with dry cottage cheese which is hard to find in Sydney and expensive, so at Olia's suggestion I made the cake with ricotta. Ricotta is a little bland compared to cottage cheese so I added a little bit of lemon rind to get that tang I associate with cottage cheese.

 

I went out and bought apples to make the cake but as it's plum season here, I decided to use plums instead. I thought I'd bought black plums so was a bit surprised and disappointed when I sliced the plums and found they had yellow flesh. All was forgiven when the plums turned this delicious shade of pink when cooked.

Here's the recipe for you which makes a 7 inch square or round cake. For all my recipes I use a 250 ml cup, a 20 ml tablespoon, unsalted butter and 60 g eggs. My oven is a conventional oven so if you have a fan-forced oven you may need to reduce the temperature by 20°C. 

 

Curd Cake with Plums inspired by this Olia Hercules recipe
Topping

20g melted unsalted butter
¼ cup brown sugar
3-4 plums, halved pitted and sliced

 

Cake
115g room temperature unsalted butter
135g caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ tsp grated lemon rind
350g ricotta cheese or good-quality cottage cheese
2 eggs, separated
80g fine semolina or polenta
pinch of salt

Method
Preheat the oven to 200°C, conventional. Grease, flour and line the base of a 17.5 cm/7 inch square square or round cake tin with baking paper. Pour the melted butter into the base of the tin followed by the brown sugar. Evenly spread the sugary slurry over the base of the tin then decoratively arrange the plum slices over the sugar, overlapping the slices.

Place the softened butter, 115g of the caster sugar, the vanilla extract and lemon rind into a food processor and process until well combined. Add the ricotta and the egg yolks and process until smooth. Transfer the mixture to another bowl and then fold in the semolina or polenta (the latter will result in a cake with more texture).

Place the egg whites with a pinch of salt in a clean dry bowl and whisk until they form soft peaks. Add the remaining 20g of caster sugar and keep whisking until the sugar has dissolved. Now take a large spoonful of the egg white mixture and fold it quite vigorously into the butter and cheese mixture to loosen it up. Add the rest of the egg white mixture and fold in gently. Pour the mixture over the plum slices in the cake tin and bake for 30 minutes, or until the cake has puffed up and is still a little wobbly, but not liquid. The cake will continue to set as it cools. 

Leave the cake in its tin to rest and cool down before turning out, then slice and serve.

 

Some unsweetened tea with lemon goes perfectly with this, which is exactly what I did. It was indeed the perfect accompaniment to this very tasty cake, somewhat reminiscent of my Mum's cheesecake. 

See you all again next week with some more baking from my kitchen. 

Bye for now,

Jillian