Savory Hungarian Cheese Biscuits Pogácsa Recipe

My husband Andrei is an avid baker. Being born in Hungary he has close ties with this country and occasionally bakes Hungarian pastry. We would like to share a recipe of Pogácsa our favorite Hungarian savory cheese biscuits.



Ingredients:
- 250g cottage cheese
- 100 ml milk
- 1 level tablespoon of sugar
- 2 tsp salt
- 2 tsp yeast
- 600g flour
- Two sticks (250g) butter
- 1 cup sour cream
- 2+1 egg yolks
- 200g shredded cheddar cheese plus some more for topping



- Microwave the milk for 20-30 seconds until warm, but not hot. Add the sugar and yeast, mix, let stand for 5 minutes.
- Mix the salt into the flour.
- Mix two egg yolks with the sour cream.
- Mash the cottage cheese with a potato masher, add the milk and sour cream and mix into an even mass.
- Cut the butter to 5mm (1/4 inch) cubes, then mix it into the flour. Crumble the butter pieces with hands or with a pastry blender, until you get pea-sized pieces.
- Add the cottage cheese-milk-sour cream mass, mix quickly and make a dough ball. Don't knead or overmix. If the dough is not coming together, add more sour cream, one tablespoon at a time. Don't over-moisturize the dough.
- Let the dough stand for an hour at room temperature.
- Roll the dough out into a square ~1cm (1/2 inch) thick.
- Spread the cheese evenly over the dough.
- Roll it up tightly and let stand again for 30 minutes.
- In the mean time, preheat the oven to 200C (400F), line two cookie sheets with parchment paper and lightly grease with spray oil.
- Roll the dough out into a long rectangle ~2cm (1 inch) thick.
- Cut out the pogácsa biscuits using a 4-5 cm (1.5-2 inch) round pastry cutter and carefully place them on the sheets.
- You can collect and combine the leftover dough, roll it out and cut again. The resulting "second round" biscuits won't be as pretty as the first ones, but they will taste just as great!
- Brush the biscuits with the remaining egg yolk.
- Top each biscuit with a pinch of shredded cheese (optional).
- Bake the pogácsa the hot oven for 20-25 minutes, until golden brown.

Enjoy!

Sponge Cake with custard and fruits on top

I would like to share a recipe for a very easy, yummy and beautiful sponge cake with custard and fruits.

For the sponge cake you will need:
- a few kiwis
- a pack of strawberries
- a pack of Dr. Oetker's organic custard
- 4 eggs
- 1 cup of sugar
- 1 cup of flower

I start with mixing eggs, sugar and flour together. Since my recipe is an easy one I don't complicate the process by mixing eggs with sugar first and later carefully adding flour. I mix everything right away. You won't get a pie 5 inches tall but you'll still get a nice cake! It takes good 15 minutes to mix everything up well. The goal is to double or triple the original volume of the mixture.

I bake the mix for around 30 minutes at 365F and when the pie is ready I let it cool and cut it horizontally in half. While my mix is in the oven I cut fruits and prepare Dr. Oetker's custard.

After the pie is cool and cut I pour warm custard on one half, cover it with the second half, pour the rest of the custard on top and nicely arrange pieces of fruits on the very top. After 30 minutes our cake is ready! Bon Appetite!



For those who like baking I would like to share a link to a recipe of a pizza with anchovies and blue cheese . I recently came across the recipe on a blog of Lana living in Argentina. I've never bakes anything like that before. It sounded super yummy and will be my next baking project!

Cheese bread Khachapuri from Georgia

Have you heard how delicious Georgian (a beautiful country in the Caucuses) cuisine is? With a wide variety of meat and vegetable dishes spiced with unique herbs it is one of the most appetizing cuisines in Europe.
The Georgian dish we like to cook is called "Khachapuri" which means farmers cheese with bread. It somewhat resembles cheese pizzas, cheese bread and calzones all together and is cooked using salted cheese or feta.

To prepare the right dough one should use Kefir a fermented milk drink available in most supermarkets across the U.S. Adding Kefir to the dough will make it soft and partly fermented. The stuffing is prepared from any type of salted cheese preferably Feta which is also available in most supermarkets. There should be enough cheese as the total volume of the stuffing should twice exceed the volume of the dough.

Khachapuri or Georgian cheese bread is cooked on frying pans one at a time. They fry very fast (approximately 5 minutes on each side) and, thus, don't require much cooking time. In Georgia Khachapuri is very popular as a fast food dish either at home or in numerous fast food restaurants all over the country.