Sour Cream Cheesecake with Fresh Redcurrants

How, you may well ask, did I get my hands on these glorious fresh redcurrants? I've never, ever seen this quintessentially British summer fruit in a South African supermarket or greengrocer nor, indeed, on a bush.


Until a week or so ago, when I saw a little box of them at my local Woolworths. I made a lunge for them, blanched at the price and then, after a brief wrestle with my conscience, crossly put them back on the grounds that it's not very greeny-beany to buy stuff that's been flown in from Europe.

But I now discover that these are local redcurrants, grown near Porterville in the Western Cape, and in season for the next six weeks.

This intelligence came from my mate Trevor, blueberry grower and fruit-packer, and his wife Cindy, number one fan of this blog. Just a week after showering me with blueberries, she, bless her cotton socks, gave me two boxes of redcurrants. (Cindy saw on Facebook that I was on my way to see my uncle in Franschhoek on Sunday and, as she was having lunch nearby, got into her car and waylaid me on the road homewards to press upon me the fresh fruit.

(Reminds me of  Monty Python's Self-Defence Against Fresh Fruit sketch: 'Fresh fruit not good enough for you, eh? Well let me tell you something lad! When you're walking home tonight and some great homicidal maniac comes after YOU with a bunch of loganberries, don't come cryin' to me!')

Can there be a more beautiful breed of berry? I was tempted to bake them into the filling of this cheesecake, and then thought of making a glowing red jelly to top the cake, but honestly I think they are so luscious on their own that all you need do is drape them on top of the cake, and pop them onto your tongue between mouthfuls of cheesecake.

Here is my mum's old recipe for Sour Cream Cheesecake. I used low-fat Woolies cream cheese in this recipe, but go ahead and use full-fat if that's what your heart desires. I have reduced the amount of sugar in this recipe from a cup to three-quarters of a cup; use the full amount if you have a sweet tooth.

The original recipe calls for a teaspoon of lemon juice and the finely grated zest of a lemon, but as the redcurrants are tart enough on their own, I've flavoured mine with vanilla and just a whisper of cinnamon.

Sour Cream Cheesecake with Fresh Redcurrants

For the biscuit base:
¾ packet (about 150 g) plain sweet biscuits (Marie biscuits, or digestives)
½ cup (125 ml/125 g) very soft butter

For the filling:
500 g (2 tubs) low-fat cream cheese
1 cup (250 ml) sour cream
3 large eggs
2 Tbsp (30 ml) cake flour
a pinch of salt
3/4 cup (190 ml) white sugar
1 tsp (5 ml) vanilla extract
½ tsp  (2.5 ml) cinnamon

Preheat the oven to 160ºC. Crush the biscuits to a coarse powder in a food processor fitted with a metal blade, or place them in a plastic bag and pulverise them with a rolling pin. Put the crumbs in a mixing bowl, add the soft butter and mix well.  Press the mixture lightly into the base of a 22-cm, greased springform cake pan. Set aside.

Tip the cream cheese and sour cream into a mixing bowl and whisk in one of the eggs, to slacken the mixture. Now add the remaining eggs and continue whisking until you have smooth, lump-free mixture. Add the flour, salt, sugar, vanilla extract and cinnamon and stir well to combine. Pour the mixture over the prepared crumb base. Tap the sides of the pan sharply with the back of a knife to pop any air bubbles.

Put the tin on a baking sheet and place in the middle of the oven. Bake at 160ºC for an hour to an hour and a quarter (this will depend on the efficiency of your oven. It is done when it is slightly risen, developing small cracks at the edges, lightly freckled with brown, and still wobbles reluctantly when you give it a shake). Turn off the oven and allow the cheesecake to cool completely in the oven.

Remove from the tin, place on a plate, and drape artistically with redcurrants.

Makes one 22-cm cake.

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Lemon Butter Cake with Blueberries

Here's a second recipe using the wonderful blueberries I was given last week. This light, moist butter cake, scented with lemon zest and vanilla and topped with a crust of sugar and lemon juice, has been in my recipe file since I was in my early teens.

My mum, whose recipe it is, called it 'Lemon Nut Loaf' because the original contained pecan nuts. This lemon cake - and its variations - was popular during the 60s and 70s, and I am willing to bet that your mum or your grandma has a very similar recipe in her arsenal.

I have a particular nostalgia for this recipe because, on the morning my second son was born, I was seized, like a nesting hen, by a compulsion to clean the house from top to bottom, which involved a lot of waddling and gasping.  Then along came a fierce craving for lemon cake, and this was what I made. The cake had not been out of the oven ten minutes when I sat down on a chair and then leaped up again like a scalded cat, thinking I'd sat on the sharp end of a large carrot. I'll spare you the details of my labour, but my son was born an hour and a half later and I never got a chance to eat the cake.

This is very good served warm with cream, or custard, or both.  The recipe is easily doubled but you may need to add a little more milk to slacken the batter.

Lemon Butter Cake with Blueberries

90 g butter, softened
1 cup (250 ml) white sugar
the zest of 1 lemon
2 large eggs
1½ cups (375 ml) cake flour
a pinch of salt
1 tsp (5 ml) baking powder
½ cup (125 ml) milk
1 tsp (5 ml) vanilla extract
1 cup (250 ml) fresh or frozen blueberries

Topping:
the juice of a lemon
½ cup (125 ml) white granulated sugar

Preheat the oven to 160ºC. Cream the butter and sugar together in a large mixing bowl until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one by one and stir in the lemon zest. Sift the flour, salt and baking powder into the bowl. Add the milk and vanilla essence and stir gently until well combined. This is quite a stiff batter: add a little more milk if it seems too rigid. Butter a 22-cm cake tin or a loaf pan and line its base with greaseproof paper. Pour in the batter and smooth the top. Push any protruding blueberries deep into the batter. Bake at 160ºC for an hour, or until risen, firm, and golden on top. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for 10 minutes. Take the cake out of its tin and put it on a plate. Mix together the lemon juice and sugar and, before the sugar has a chance to dissolve, drizzle it over the top of the warm cake.

Makes one 22-cm round cake. Print Friendly

Vanilla-and-Mace-Scented Panna Cotta with Warm Blueberries

An enormous box of plump Ceres cherries and three punnets of dewy blueberries and luscious litchis arrived at my door on Saturday.  Hand-delivered, nogal, in a coolbox, by my new mate Trevor, who farms  blueberries in Stellenbosch and who also packages fruit for export and for top-end South African supermarkets. If this wasn't enough to make me emit hamster-like squeaks of delight, in walked Trevor's wife, Cindy, who is the Number One Fan of this blog, and whom I have never met in real life.  We fell into each other's arms like long-lost family friends (which, in a tangential way, we are).

Life is so curious. Some months ago I received a lovely chatty email from Cindy, a stranger, telling me that this blog had 'ruined' her first-ever holiday in Mauritius. Cindy, while reclining on the beach, picked up an issue of Femina (a South African women's magazine) and was intrigued by a feature piece about my blog. "I became quite desperate to see what the blog was all about," she told me in her email, "so I  toiled up to Reception and, once there, spend twenty Euros for the four hours' worth of Internet access on the hotel computer.  It was somewhat difficult for me to concentrate, after drinking two cocktails before 11am (then again, we were on the Serenity Plus All Inclusive Package!)

"So I phoned my 18-year-old son, whom we'd left back home in Stellenbosch, and asked him to check out the site and get back to me.

"Dumb thing to do. He got so inspired that he started cooking like a maniac and every night held a party for different friends to enjoy the fruits of his labours.

"I had left cash, and my credit card, with them in case of emergencies. Apparently cooking your recipes constituted an emergency.  I was dazed with the speed with which SMS alerts arrived from my bank notifying me of transactions.  I spent the week on tenterhooks and got home to find the following:

• A sleeping son
• A cross daughter (she put on weight licking out the bowls)
• An almost empty fridge
• An entirely empty booze cupboard and drinks fridge
• 3 cross cats who had been ignored in the thrill of it all
• My birthday  bottle of homemade Limoncello mysteriously gone missing
• My credit card balancing on a huge pile of faked signature slips
• A letter from my char that read " Hallo ther Ciny I is ver cross met eksra werk wat Nick se kosmaakery bring. [I am very cross about the extra work caused by Nick's food-making]. I take my hollidey neks week please 2 WEEK thankyou RACHEL".

"I suppose I should look on the bright side and beg you not to stop blogging because it's cheaper than buying Nick recipe books," she concluded.

I was delighted and flattered by Cindy's warm email (let's face it, blogging is vanity publishing) and we became virtual friends, via email and Facebook.  Shortly after that, Cindy sent her email to Femina magazine, and won a handsome suitcase when it became the star letter of the month.  Now here's the curious bit: my husband saw Cindy's name on an email in my inbox, and immediately recognised her name.  It turned out that they knew each other well, and were at school together at Bryanston High School during the late 1970s.

Anyway, it was lovely to meet her at last and for two days we have been feasting on fruit. I had no idea that blueberries were grown so extensively in South Africa - Trevor tells me that he sources blueberries from at least 18 different South African growers, and that the bulk of his own crop is exported to the United Kingdom.

I've only ever used blueberries in smoothies and muffins, so I promised Cindy that, to repay her in part for her  unswerving support of my blog, I'd come up with some blueberry recipes.

So, for starters, here is a delicate vanilla-and mace-flavoured panna cotta with blueberries.

Panna cotta so easy and quick to make that an 8-year-old could manage it, but it's vital to use just enough gelatine to achieve a light, trembling, barely set texture. I have used leaf gelatine in this recipe, which in my experience produces a more delicate jelly than powdered gelatine. You can - at last - buy leaf gelatine in South Africa (I bought mine in a Spar in Johannesburg; it's also available in specialist food stores) but if you can't lay your hands on some, you can use powder. I believe that, in general, two sheets of leaf gelatine are the equivalent of one teaspoon of gelatine powder (in which case this recipe would require 2 teaspoons, or 10 ml), but as I haven't tested this particular panna cotta using powder I can't vouch for the results.  I will make it again tomorrow using powder and give you a definitive measurement.

POSTSCRIPT: Here is that measurement: Use exactly 1½  tsp (7.5 ml) gelatine powder in place of the gelatine leaves. 

Vanilla-and-Mace-Scented Panna Cotta with Warm Blueberries
320 ml  full-cream milk
320 ml rich pouring cream
1 whole vanilla pod
1 blade of mace (or a pinch of freshly grated nutmeg)
100 ml white granulated sugar or caster sugar
4 leaves of gelatine (7 cm x 11 cm rectangles), or 1½  tsp (7.5 ml) gelatine powder
250 ml (1 cup) tepid water, for soaking

For the blueberries:
375 ml fresh or frozen blueberries
3 t (45 ml) white granulated sugar
the juice of half a lemon
4 T (60 ml) water

First make the panna cotta. Put the cream and the milk in a small saucepan. Split the vanilla pod in half, scrape out the seeds, and add the pod and seeds to the saucepan, along with the blade of mace. Bring gently to the boil, whisking now and then. Allow to simmer for a minute, then remove from the heat and lay a piece of clingfilm [saran wrap] directly over the surface of the liquid to prevent a skin forming.  Set aside for 15  minutes to allow the flavours to infuse.

In the meantime, fill a small bowl with a cup of  water and add the gelatine leaves, pressing down so that they are submerged. Set aside. Strain the cream/milk mixture through a sieve into a bowl and discard the flavourings.  Pour the mixture back into the pan, add the sugar and bring back to a gentle boil, stirring all the time to dissolve the sugar. After a minute remove from the heat. Scoop the gelatine leaves out of their water and squeeze out any excess water.  Put them into the hot cream and whisk lightly to dissolve the gelatine  Lightly oil 4 deep ramekin dishes or dariole moulds and pour the cream into them (you can also make this in a single dish or jelly mould).

Allow to cool on the counter for 20 minutes, and then refrigerate for at least 5 hours.

When you're ready to serve the dessert, put the blueberries in a sauce pan, add the sugar, lemon juice and water and bring gently to the boil, stirring frequently so that the sugar dissolves. As soon as the mixture begins to bubble, turn off the heat. Set aside to cool for 10 minutes.

Remove the panna cottas from the fridge. Fill a shallow bowl with very hot water and dip each dish in the water for 30 seconds (shorter if you're using metal moulds).  Use a sharp knife tip to loosen the sides of panna cottas and release the vacuum.  Now unmould them onto little flat plates. (The easiest way to do this is to place each little dish face-down on your - clean! -  hand and with the other hand smack its base sharply so that the jelly plops out onto your palm.)  Slide onto plates and serve with the warm blueberries.

Makes 5 small panna cottas.  Print Friendly