ABC; Cheese Blintzes

 

This is our September challenge for the ABC Bakers where we bake recipes from Flo Braker's "Baking For All Occasions". This time we bake page 130: Quintessential Cheese Blintzes.

 

To my Dutch ears this does not exactly sound delicious. Now try to seduce me with: Crèpes filled with a lemony creme fraiche and raspberry sauce…..Aaah! Much better.

I really think this will make an excellent –if rich- dessert for a nice showy dinner party but since we don’t dine this exquisite during weekdays I decided to do dessert for dinner and serve these. My family thinks I’m an A-list Mom right now. (I’ll enjoy it while it last ;-))

Basically you make small really thin pancakes (crèpes), fill them with a heaped table spoon of fresh cheese mixture**. Roll them like you would roll an eggroll and carefully bake them again in a skillet with a little butter. Serve warm.

I used cream cheese I had in the fridge, mixed it with egg, some sugar, vanilla extract and lemon zest. No quantities here because I winged it and adjusted the other ingredients to the amount of cream cheese I had left. (Flo would like you to add a little salt to the mixture, I didn’t). My mix was a little runny and I added some custard powder to even that out. Turned out to be just right, a slight tang from the cream cheese very nicely balanced with sugar and lemon zest.

The raspberry sauce is just that; fresh raspberries from the garden, flash cooked in a sugar syrup. Yum!

Absolutely my kind of dessert!! (Or dinner..)

** (Flo mentions farmer cheese and I have no clue what that is, substitutes are ricotta cheese or something similar like creme fraiche or indeed cream cheese).

Side note for the savoury lovers: I had some creamy leek-mushroom ragout left over and filled a couple of crepes same style. Can we all say “stroke of genius”?