Cur(d)ious heritage

We Hungarians love curd cheese – in cakes. I know it sounds strange to some foreigners, but believe me, it’s not more bizarre than cheesecakes are to us. Our curd cheese is quite dry and crumbly, with a tinge of sweetness.
Perhaps you’ll wonder no more if I show you the absolute favorite snack of all Hungarians, young or old: Túró Rudi, which is roll shaped curd cheese covered in dark chocolate (at least the original, now you can buy milk chocolate versions, and ones with fruit jellies in the middle, etc. )

As hubby is especially keen on curd cheese cakes, and I just got a lovely book from him which contains a recipe I’ve not heard of before, I thought I’d surprise him with this. The recipe can be found in a book called (roughly) The taste of Székely land. The Székely are a group of Hungarians living in Transylvania, Romania and since my husband’s grandfather comes from there, he’s very interested in everything related to this people.

So here goes the recipe, it is really easy and quick to make:

Curd cheese pie with meringue topping

Ingredients:
2 tbsp sugar
7 tbsp (sunflower) oil
2 eggs
2 tbsp cocoa powder
12g baking powder
1 ½ tsp white wine vinegar
15 tbsp milk
15 tbsp flour

For the filling:
500g curd cheese (or ricotta if that’s what you can find)
4 egg yolks
5 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp vanilla sugar
3 tbsp semolina (more if your cheese is too wet)

For the meringue topping:
4 egg whites
200g sugar

Mix the first five ingredients and the milk in a bowl with a wooden spoon. Put the baking powder in a small bowl and pour over the vinegar and let it start foaming (do not stir but make sure the whole thing is foaming). Add it to the mixture, stir well and add the flour (add more if necessary, you want a muffin-thick batter).

Spread the batter in a 30x20x5 cm baking tray (lined with baking paper). Stir the ingredients for the filling and dollop it over the batter with a spoon.

Bake at 180C for about 30 minutes (or until tester comes out clean). Let cool.

Whisk the egg whites with an electric whisk until almost stiff and add the sugar while whisking further. Put the bowl over simmering water and continue whisking for about 4-5 minutes. Spread it over the cooled cake, make waves with a fork and replace in the oven and dry at 100C until the top is slightly set.

The result was very pleasing and what shows it more than the beloved husband taking several helpings, which is really unusual for him :)