Russian Season

We baked this delicious, summery cake for Mom’s birthday just the other day.

A luscious raspberry filling resting on a buttery sweetcrust base and topped with a layer of airy, delicate whipped egg whites, covered with tiny drops of sugar syrup. Those amber-coloured drops appear if you leave the cake overnight; you don’t have to apply them specially, just in case you were wondering:) Just because when people first see this cake they’re mostly interested in how we make these drops of sugar for decoration.

Actually, if you look at the list of ingredients, you will see that it’s very simple.

I have to warn you however, that when you bake this cake, the hardest part is not to eat it all in the process of cooking. Personally I can never restrain myself from having a bit of raw home-made shortcrust pastry again and again while I am busy with other ingredients. Then, the egg whites; whipped with caster sugar and vanilla, they could serve as a standalone dessert, I believe. And of course the sugared raspberries – so ripe and enjoyable. So I am sincerely happy for you if you don’t like raw sweetcrust pastry or whipped egg whites. At least you’ll be able to wait patiently till the cake is ready. I can’t.

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One of the things I’ve always liked about living in Latvia is its dairy products. I love Latvian milk, sour cream, cottage cheese, yogurt, and all those products that I don’t even know the English names for. And, if you want to spoil my day, offer me some thin, transparent, blueish 0.5% milk for breakfast :) which they often do in hotels by the way.

Cottage cheese, or curd, or tvorog in Russian, is one of key dairy products for us, and an essential ingredient in a lot of dishes we cook at home. We have already talked about Khachapuri here, and now we’d like to offer you another kind of pastry which can be done with cottage cheese.

So, Raspberry and Cottage Cheese Turnovers. Sweet milky filling and luscious, fragrant berries enclosed in filo pastry. Oh, and there’s vanilla in them, too. Can you resist anything that contains vanilla?

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