Cheesecakes in mini format. How cute is this? I had a craving for cheesecake these days and the very first one that came to my mind was this one of USA kulinarisch. I had made them once before and everybody loved them – so I gave it a try.
What I love about this recipe is how easy you get a good amount of these cuties. You just mic up the ingredients and bake the mass – can’t be easier!
There is a round shortbread cookie at the bottom of each paper wrapper I put inside before baking. I had to push it down to the bottom so hard, the cookie broke – but in this way you can put more cheesecake mass into the molds. So don’t worry if the bottoms break, the cakes will be fine.
Mini Cheesecakes
(makes about 30 cakes in muffin molds)
600 g (20 oz.) cream cheese
200 g (7 oz.) sour cream
200 g (1 cup – 1 tbsp.) sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 pckt. vanilla pudding powder (or 2 tbsp. flour)
30 round shortbread cookies
Preheat oven to 180°C (350°F). Lay out muffin molds with paper wrappers and put shortbread cookies inside. Press them to the bottom.
Put the other ingredients into a large bowl. Cream untill the mass is smooth. Put 2 tbsp. of the cream into each mold and bake for up to 25 minutes (the cakes should be just slightly brown around the edges – oh and they will rise and fall in a little after cooling, don’t be afraid).
Enjoy!
I know Easter is over and you are probably sick of Easter recipes. But in the religion of most of the Bulgarians, the Greek Orthodox, another calendar is used. Therefore the traditional Easter will be celebrated on May 5th, which is a coule of weeks ahead.
However, for last Sunday I made traditional Bulgarian Easter bread using a recipe from my aunt. It is an yeast dough, originally with butter inside. But after discussing it with my grandma on the phone, I decided to use oil instead of butter, so the baked cakes do not dry out very fast. This was a very important thing to me, because the amount of dough you get as a result is quite big and can usually be eaten for days.
In this post, I am publishing this traditional recipe the way I used it. I think it turned out quite delicious, just like I remember it from Bulgarian bakeries. Some of the instructions are not exact, like baking time or the amount of flour. But I am sure that if you have a little practice with yeast dough and a feeling for baked goods, you will succeed.
Traditional Bulgarian Easter Bread
9 eggs
350 g (12 oz) sugar
250 ml (1 cup + 1 tbsp) sunflower oil
350 ml (1 1/2 cup) milk
30 g (1 oz) yeast (or 2 pckt. active dry yeast)
all purpose flour, about 1,5 kg (12 cups)
1 pinch salt
1. Put 2 tbsp sugar, the milk, 1 pinch of salt and yeast into a bowl. Stir in about 90 g (3/4 cup) of flour, until you get a kind of thin mash. Let that sit at a warm place (e.g. over the heater) for about 100 minutes.
2. Add all the other ingredients and stir with hooks until everything is incorporated. Add flour until you can knead it. Add flour until the dough stops being sticky, add some tablespoons of oil from time to time, this will speed up the effect a little. The dough should look like a lot of parallel threads when you pull it apart. Let sit at a warm place until the dough has doubled its size, for abour 90 minutes.
3. Form the dough and place it into oiled pans. You can form braids, rolls, etc. Let sit at a warm place for about 60 up to 90 minutes, until the dough has doubled its size again. Preheat oven to 160°C (325°F).
Bake the breads until a toothpicker comes out clean. Put a baking sheet on top of them after 5 minutes of baking, this way they will not burn on top.