Mandarinen Quarktorte

To distract you from aliens whom I may or may not resemble, let us return to the beloved topics of tortes. I wanted to bring an especially delicious cake to my work's end-of-the-semester party. (It was a potluck lunch before a meeting, which is pretty festive for academics.) This is the cake I chose, Mandarin Ricotta Cheese Torte. Officially, it's supposed to use quark, but this is hard to find in the U.S. and I didn't have time to be making dairy products from scratch, so I used a recommended substitution of Ricotta cheese mixed with yogurt.

Here was the result:

Let's see that from another angle:

Notice the excessive height? A height that one might even call precarious? Soon after, the cake slowly crumbled. I will make it again because it was delicious, but when I do I will most certainly use a pan with a larger area, because my structural integrity field was not up to the job.

Although my cake was not stylish, my new Tortenmesser is. It was an unexpected, perfectly selected, early Christmas gift from a torte-eating friend.

I shall treasure it for years to come. It will be useful for both cake serving and any pastry-related battles for which I should be armed. (Check out that blade!).

I've included the recipe (in English!) for anyone who wants it. From Marion's Cookbook.

Mandarin Quark (Cheese) Torte

120g softened butter

120g sugar

1 t. vanilla

150 g flour

10g baking powder

1000g Quark (or about 900 g Ricotta cheese with ½ c. yogurt)

2 T. fresh lemon juice

100g Sugar

400 g whipping cream

3 or 4 packets (That’s most of a box) of unflavored gelatin

600g canned mandarin oranges

Cream the softened butter, 120 g sugar, and 1 t. vanilla. Add the eggs and mix well. In a separate bowl, mix flour and baking powder, then add that to the butter and mix. Grease a 28 cm springform pan, then spread the batter in it. Use a greased spoon to smooth the batter. Bake at 400F for about twenty minutes, until the top spring back when pressed. Let the cake cool.

In the meantime, mix the Quark (or ricotta cheese, thinned with yogurt) with lemon juice and 100g sugar. Whip the cream until stiff peaks form. Fold the two gently together. Now dissolve the gelatin in cold water, probably about ½ c. Quickly mix until there are no lumps, then mix in several spoons of the cheese mixture. Finally, fold the gelatin into the cream. Reserve a few well-drained mandarin oranges for garnish, then fold in the rest of the oranges. Spoon this on top of the cake, then chill for at least an hour. Garnish with oranges before serving.