German baked cheesecake recipe

This recipe is based on the Dr Oetker recipe in German, adapted for products available in the UK:

For the springform pan (diameter of 26 cm):

a little extra butter/margarine for greasing 

Shortcrust pastry:

150 g plain flour

½ tsp baking powder 

80 g vanilla sugar*

1 pinch salt

1 egg (medium)

75 g soft butter or margarine

Filling:

2 egg whites (from medium eggs)

200 g cold whipped cream

500 g quark (low fat)

100 g sugar

2 tbsp lemon juice

35 g cornflour

2 egg yolks (from medium eggs)

1. Grease the base of the springform pan. Preheat the oven about 200 °C/fan 180 °C

2. Mix the flour with the baking powder in a mixing bowl. Add the remaining ingredients for the dough and mix everything together with a mixer (dough hook), first briefly on the lowest, then on the highest speed, then form into a roll. (If your butter or margarine isn't already very soft, you can rub it into the dry ingredients with your fingers before adding the egg).

3. Roll out a good 2/3 of the dough on the base of the springform pan and place the springform pan rim around it. Prick the base of the pastry several times with a fork. Keep the remaining 1/3 of the dough to one side (do not do anything with it yet). Place the tin on a rack in the bottom third of the oven and pre-bake the base for 10 minutes.

4. After pre-baking, place the springform pan on a cake rack and leave the base to cool. Reduce the oven temperature to about 160 °C/fan 140 °C

5. Form the remaining dough into a long roll. Place the roll as a rim on the base of the dough and press it against the tin to form a rim about 3 cm high.

6. To prepare the filling, separate the eggs, then beat the egg whites until stiff. Set aside in a bowl.

7. Beat the whipping cream until stiff. Set aside in a bowl (optionally the same one as the whipped egg whites).

8. Mix the quark with the sugar, lemon juice, cornflour and egg yolks until well blended.

9. Fold the beaten egg whites and whippec cream into the quark mixture. Spread the mixture evenly on the pre-baked base. Put the dish back into the lower third of the oven Bake for about 70 min.

10. Turn the oven off and slightly open the oven door. Leave the cake in the turned off oven for 15 minutes.

11. Take the cake out of the oven and place on a cooling rack still in its tin. Leave to cool.

* You can make vanilla sugar by keeping a vanilla pod in your sugar. Over time, it flavours your sugar with vanilla

The second year of rhubarb

This is the second year of me having rhubarb, and I'm looking forward to being able to harvest some for the first time this year. You don't get to harvest any in the first year, but in the second year, you can harvest it between April and June once the stalks reach 30 cm and the leaves are fully unfurled. The important thing is not to take too many stalks – only a few stems at a time and never more than half the plant so that it stays vigorous. Mine is nowhere near big enough to eat yet, but I'm hoping to get at least a pie worth out of it by the end of June. I'm not sure how big the plant is going to get, but if I end up with too much (more a hope than an expectation at this stage), I can always freeze it.

You can freeze rhubarb raw, blanched or cooked. I've only tried it raw and chopped into chunks in the past, which is what I've done for pies or crumbles. It becomes more watery when you freeze it, but this doesn't seem much of a problem for pies and crumbles. However, fancier items, such a muffins or cakes, don't do work with frozen. The BBC, which gives a full list of handy instructions for freezing rhubarb, says that later in the season when it's tougher, it's better to cook rhubarb before you freeze it, so I'll give that a go if I have spare in June.

My rhubarb is the Rosenhagen variety, which I chose because it's an old variety and contains less oxalic acid, which means it's supposedly sweeter than normal rhubarb, so I'm hoping to need less sugar.

The garden's doing surprisingly well for how little time I've had to work in it. I started growing broad beans late last year. I bought Super Aquadulce, which you can plant earlier than a lot of other broad beans (from as early as October), so they're now flowering already. I started them off in pots, as my slugs and snails have a history of devouring the tender new shoots of broad beans when planted straight in the ground and killing the plants. My broad beans also have a history of catching rust and getting covered in black fly later in the season, and I'm hoping that by giving them an early start, I'll get a decent amount of beans before the rust and black fly hit.

I've also made a good amount of fairly well composted compost this year. It does contain more uncomposted shredded paper than ideal – possibly because the paper slipped down from where I added it at the top into the well composted part. Generally it looks better than it has in the past. I always more or less follow the general rules of composting. I'm not great at turning the compost frequently enough, but I do usually put a mixture of both "greens" and "browns" in – partly because that's what my garden tends to produce. What I think I've down differently this year is that I've added more vegetable peelings and banana skins from the kitchen and I've maybe chopped some of the woodier stalks up more than in the past. If I were making the compost bin again, I think I'd make it a little bit bigger so that it gets hotter in the middle, as then I wouldn't need to chop things up as much. Apparently 1 cubic metre is the smallest you can get away with for that, and I suspect that bigger produces results more easily. At any rate, I managed to make quite a lot of good compost this year, which I'm pleased with. Doubly so, as my local garden centre has changed ownership and no longer sells the composted stable manure I like to spread over my garden, so I may have to make do with my onw compost.

I've also remembered to use my greenhouse to start some plants off early in pots. Those are peas. I've got growing in there. I probably ought to be bringing more plants on it, but I haven't got much time on my hands at the moment, so I'm just pleased I even managed to start the peas off there.