Crispy shortbread basket, inside – cottage cheese filling with fruit, and on top – ruddy meringue. The perfect cake for a homemade tea party.
You can use any fruit or berries you have in the fridge. It is better if they are sour. Apricots, blueberries or currants are perfect. By itself, the curd-sand cake is quite sweet, otherwise you will play on the contrast of different tastes.
This pie recipe uses apricots – fresh, canned or frozen will do. Fresh pitted fruits just need to be pressed into the filling. If the fruit is canned, then you need to place it in a colander to drain the syrup. If frozen, then they must be thawed, carefully drained of excess liquid (otherwise the curd filling will not bake well!).
Ingredients:
For test:
- Butter (softened) – 125 g.
- Yolks – 2 pcs.
- Salt – 1 pinch.
- Sugar – 100 g.
- Vanilla sugar – 8 g.
- Wheat flour – 250 g.
- Baking powder – 1 tsp
For filling:
- Cottage cheese 9% and above – 600 g.
- Chicken eggs – 2 pcs.
- Sugar – 150 g.
- Vanilla sugar – 8 g.
- Cream 33% – 50 g.
- Vanilla pudding – 1 pack. (or 40 g cornstarch).
- Apricots – 6-8 pcs.
For the meringue:
- Proteins – 2 pcs.
- Sugar – 50 g.
- Citric acid – on the tip of a knife.
How to cook:
1. For the dough, grind softened butter with sugar, vanilla sugar and a pinch of salt. Then add a couple of yolks, grind again with a fork.
2. In one step, pour all the flour and baking powder at once. Stir with a fork – you get a wet crumb.
3. Quickly knead the dough with your hands, it will be soft, moist.
Shortbread dough does not like to be kneaded for a long time, because of this it becomes tough.
Put the “bun” in the refrigerator for 20-30 minutes to cool.
4. Meanwhile, prepare the filling. Combine cottage cheese, 2 whole eggs, sugar and vanilla sugar, heavy cream, pudding (meaning vanilla-flavored pudding powder; it can be replaced with 40 g of corn starch).
5. Punch with an immersion blender – you should get a homogeneous curd mass, quite thick.
6. Turn on the oven to warm up to 160-170 degrees. Lubricate a baking dish with a diameter of 25-26 cm with a thin layer of vegetable oil (although the dough is shortbread, this should still be done to make it easier for you to remove the finished cake). If desired, the bottom can be lined with oiled parchment. Lay out chilled dough. Knead – with your fingers and pressing with a glass, make a side of about 3 cm.
7. Put the curd filling into the resulting “basket” of dough, smooth with a spatula. Lay out the apricots in a chaotic manner, pressing lightly. And top with a mesh of meringue (beat the remaining two proteins with sugar and a pinch of citric acid with a mixer until stiff peaks, and then deposit from a bag with a closed star nozzle).
8. Bake at a temperature of 160-170 degrees for 1 hour. Do not exceed the specified temperature, otherwise the meringue will burn.
If your oven is “naughty”, is not able to maintain a constant temperature or bakes unevenly, then you should bake the cottage cheese pie first, and after about 40-50 minutes, apply whipped whites and bake for another 20-30 minutes – so you don’t burn anything and cook evenly.
9. Let the cake cool completely. Refrigerate for at least 3 hours (ideally overnight). Serve cold.
Bon appetit!