There is a river running right through the middle of my city which essentially turns into a public swimming pool as soon as summer hits the town. If you cross the bridge around 6pm, there will be little heads bobbing about in the water as far as you can see, with the famous “schwimm-fisch” (waterproof swimming bags shaped like fish) in tow, enjoying their after-work cool down. To complete the Rhine experience, one must then lay out and tan, have a beer and a legendary burger sold at one of the little bars set up along the river. Pure bliss. And now for today’s recipe: this is a simple delicious summer dessert which I  had once roughly 2 years ago at a friend’s place. I managed to sneak the recipe out of the kitchen, but since then I have always missed the red currant season … until now! I got sooo excited when I went shopping and saw red currants and this is what happened.

Quarkcake with Red Currants

Original recipe from saison.ch
for a 20cm cake tin

You will need:

100g Petit Beurre biscuits (plain butter biscuits)
50g Butter
6 sheets of gelatin
2 Eggs
1 Lemon, zested and juiced
350g Low fat quark
60g Sugar
0.5dl Water, warm
125-175g Red Currants
A note for those people not in German-speaking Europe: Quark is not yoghurt or cottage cheese or cream cheese or fromage frais or ricotta, but sort of somewhere in between the lot. It can sometimes be found in supermarkets NOT in Germanic Europe, but can be hard to find. Apparently Greek yoghurt is an acceptable substitute, or possibly cream cheese. Or, if you’re feeling particularly industrious, you could make your own quark at home.

1. Line the tin with baking paper.
2. Place the biscuits in a plastic zip-lock freezing bag and crush them with a rolling pin. ( I was lazy and just put them in a food processor). Melt the butter and mix the crushed biscuits with the butter.
3. Spread your butter-biscuit mixture evenly across the tin, press down firmly and place into the fridge until needed later.
4. Soak your gelatin in cold water.
5. Separate the eggs. Mix the eggyolks with the quark, sugar, lemonjuice and zest. Once your gelatin has softened, take it out of the water and squeeze the excess water out. Slowly dissolve it in the warmed water.
6. Once the gelatin is dissolved, add a bit of your quark to the gelatin and stir it in. Add the gelatin mixture to the rest of the quark and mix it in well.
7. Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form and gently fold into the quark. Pour into the prepared tin and cover/decorate with your red currants. Don’t worry if they sink once you put them on top of the quark (will be quite liquidy), this is normal and I should have done the same. I thought I’d wait a little until the mixture had hardened a bit. Clearly I waited too long and the currants wouldn’t even stick to the top of the quark…oops.
8. Place your quark cake in the fridge for at least 3 hours before digging in.

Rating: 7/10

Minus points for the berries falling off, and it was not as amazing as in my memory. But still very tasty.