By Fumei Shirokuro
Eierkoeken
Well, let me start with Eierkoeken. You can translate Eierkoeken to egg cookies. Although that sounds a little strange, because Eierkoeken don’t really look like cookies. I would more say we should translate them to egg cakes, since Eierkoeken have a cakish, sponge-looking structure just like a cake. And I never get a cookie feeling from them, more like a cake feeling. And they are sweet and kind of healthy, so I would say that is a plus for these cakes! Healthy cakes… which just sounds strange, right?
An Eierkoek is fairly easy to make. You only need like four ingredients and an oven. The ingredients that you guys need to make these kind of cakes are as followed:
- 2 eggs
- 100 gram sugar
- 100 gram flour
- 2 teaspoons of baking soda
Before we are going to start mixing these amazing four ingredients, preheat the oven at 150 to 160 degrees Celsius. Take out a baking sheet and grease it with some butter.
Start off with mixing the flour and baking soda. Put it aside for a while, while you start mixing the eggs and the sugar until it’s all frothy.
When the eggs and the sugar are frothy, start adding the flour mix and mix this until it’s all frothy and smooth. Let the dough rest for at least 5 minutes.
After the 5 minutes are over, start making little heaps with a spoon on the baking sheet. Make sure you leave enough space between the heaps, because else the cakes will get stuck to each other.
When you have made the heaps, put the baking sheet in the oven and bake them until they’re a pretty golden yellow, which takes about 10 minutes.
When they are done let them cool down and you will have some lovely Eierkoek to eat! They are really delicious with some whipped cream and strawberries! Try it and you will love it! Some people just put some butter on them to eat them, so if you don’t like whipped cream and strawberries, you call always but a bit of butter on it!
Kwarktaart
So that was the Eierkoek! Let’s get on to the Kwarktaart. I don’t think you guys are really able to pronounce any of these cakes but that doesn’t really matter. You guys can think a Kwarktaart as a Dutch Chilled Cheesecake. It’s a cheesecake that we don’t bake and we use Quark, some kind of cheese, to make it with.
I love making this cake, because it’s all nice and fresh. Most of the time I make a Pineapple Cheesecake. I just love the taste of those, but you can kind of make it with all kinds of fruit. It’s pretty common around here to eat the strawberry version of it. But I like my pineapple version better so I’ll be teaching you guys how to make the pineapple one.
Ingredients
- 250 milliliters of cream
- 6,5 sheets of gelatine
- 450 gram of quark
- 175 grams white sugar
- 250 grams pineapple (easiest to use is canned pineapple, because if you are using fresh you have to make sugar water and cook the pineapple in it, so it’s a bit more work but doable… I mostly use canned, because I’m lazy)
- 100 grams of cookies (I mostly use sandcookies, because I love those and the taste of them. But you can also use plain bisquits or Oreos. Just what you like)
- 1 spoon of sugar
- 55 grams of butter
Take a spring cake tin and add baking paper on the bottom of it. Only cover the bottom. Put it aside and let’s make the bottom of the cake.
For the bottom you need the cookies, sugar and butter. First you have to put the cookies in a bag and make cookie crumbs out of it. Add the sugar to the crumbs. In the meanwhile, melt the butter but don’t let the butter cook. If it’s melted, take the butter off the fire and add the crumb mix to it. Mix it all until it’s mixed thoroughly, then spread the mix over the bottom of the spring cake, until it’s all spread. When it’s spread, put the spring cake tin in the fridge to let the bottom cool down and become ‘hard’.
Now we can move on to making the mix for the pie. I’m writing this under the assumption that we are using canned pineapple, so I’m not telling the part of how to make sugar water and what to do with it.
First off, soak the gelatine in cold water. Let it soak for a bit and we can go on to the pineapple.
Take the canned pineapple and cut it in little pieces, so you can use it in the pie. Don’t throw away the juice of the pineapple, we will be needing it in a little bit.
Wipe the cream with a little bit of the sugar and put it away. Take the gelatine out of the water and squeeze the water out of it. After that, cook the juice of the pineapple, take it off the fire, and dissolve the squeezed gelatine in it. Put this mix aside for a few seconds and take the quark and the sugar, so you can mix it. Put the pineapple through the quark and after that the pineapple juice with gelatine. When this is all mixed, put the whipped cream through it with a spatula.
When this is all mixed together, take the spring cake tin out the fridge and put the quark/whipped cream mix in it. When you have put everything in it, put the spring back into the fridge. Let it cool in the fridge for at least 2 hours. I mostly decide to put it in longer, because that way I’m always sure it’s hardened enough and won’t fall apart when I want to eat it. But normally at least 2 to 3 hours should be plenty.
After those hours you can take the cheesecake out of the fridge and remove the spring. When you want to remove the spring, you should use a knife to go through the border of the spring, just in case some of the cake sticks to the spring border.
After that you can decorate the cheesecake the way you want it to be decorated.
And these are two fairly easy recipe to make! The Dutch Cheesecake does take some time but it’s really worth it!