Baked Redcurrant Cheesecake

My favourite jam is redcurrant jam, but so far I have never really made anything with fresh redcurrant. Until I come to live in Germany. Red currant or Johanisbeeren as they are called here is to be found easily during spring and summer. Our neighbour has quite an amazing organic vegetable and fruit garden and we have had some of these berries from him. What to do with a bowl full of redcurrant? I find them too sour to eat as is. So after I made some fresh red currant lemonade and a jar of red currant sauce to go with vanilla ice cream, I decided to bake a cheesecake with a touch of redcurrant. So here it is my first ever, redcurrant cheesecake. I was first doubtful that it would turn into anything good, as I had simply used my normal baked cheesecake recipe and added the red currant puree as is, it turned out pretty good. The resulting cake is pretty soft and not so heavy and the red currant puree provides fresh contrast to the cream cheese. Although I should probably have used a bit more flour as the puree add more liquid to the mixture.

Ingredients

Crust Pastry

150 gr of plain flour

125 gr of butter at room temperature

1 teaspoon of vanilla essence

1 egg

50 gr of caster sugar

½ teaspoon of baking power

½ teaspoon of salt

The zest of one lemon

Cheese Filling

3 x 250 gr cream cheese (I use Philadelphia Full Cream Cream Cheese)

1 x 150 gr quark (or fine cottage cheese)

1 x 150 gr crème fraiche

150 gr caster sugar

4 eggs

4 tablespoons of plain flour

1 teaspoon of vanilla essence

½ glass of pureed redcurrant

Steps:

1. Wash the redcurrant carefully and get rid of the stems. Using a power mixer or blender, pureed the berries until fine and then sieve through to get rid of the seeds and skins. Add a couple of tablespoons of caster sugar to sweeten it if desired.
2. Set the oven to 200^o degree Celsius and line a round 30cm baking dish with baking paper or rubbed with a bit of butter. Note: a smaller diameter baking dish would also be okay, maybe better as with the 30cm, the cake is too thin.
3. Combine together all the ingredients for the crust pastry and mix until it forms a rough pasty dough and then knead for one minute, roll it out and transfer to cake tin. Pinch pastry on the edges along the side of the cake tin. Bake for 5-10 minutes until slightly golden. Set aside to rest. If the dough is too sticky to roll, place the dough in a plastic wrap and cool for 30 minutes or so in the fridge before rolling it thin (5mm) to fit the baking dish.
4. Prepare the cheese filling by combining sugar, cream cheese, quark and vanilla sugar together using a mixer. Then add the crème fraiche and then followed by one egg at a time. Mix until smooth.
5. Pour half of the cream cheese filling into the prepared crust.
6. Spoon the redcurrant puree in the middle of the filling and spread evenly.
7. Pour the rest of the cream cheese filling to cover the redcurrant puree. Another way could also be by swirling spoonful of redcurrant puree and create marbling effect on the cream cheese filling.
8. Bake in the preheated oven for 30-40 minutes.
9. Cool and let the cheesecake to set properly overnight.
10. Serve with extra fresh redcurrant or redcurrant sauce if desired