Shavuot: Cheesecake Time and Much Much More

Monday Morning Cooking Club’s Shavuot 2018

We absolutely LOVE the Jewish festival of Shavuot. We know it well as a time to eat dairy products. It is a time where many Jewish people all over the world fress (eat with abandon!) cheesecake and cheese blintzes. Any opportunity!

There are a number of reasons offered as to WHY.  The main one is that at the time Moses received the 10 commandments on Mount Sinai, it was Sabbath in the desert, and the new rules meant the meat they had already prepared for eating was not in fact kosher and they had no choice but to eat a dairy meal. (There are several other compelling reasons which you can read about by googling the question…)

But on this page, we are focussing on the food. As we love to say, it’s always about the food. It’s quite funny how things morph over time. We can imagine that centuries ago, a simple dairy meal would suffice. Now there are books, articles, blogs, competitions . . . all about the BEST cheesecake recipe or giving 8000 versions of cheesecake.

At the Monday Morning Cooking Club, we think we’ve done some of the hard work for you. Our years of research, testing and eating (yes it was so difficult, but someone has to do it) has produced the recipes for some of the best Shavuot recipes that can be found. Not to say that there aren’t still some great ones out there not yet discovered, but these ones are truly tried, tested and simply EXCELLENT. And we are honoured that ‘our’  wonderful cooks have chosen to share these recipes with us and with the world.

In our first book  Monday Morning Cooking Club (2011) we have superb cheese blintzes from Melanie Knep,  ricotta lokshen kugel from Natanya (complete with beautiful video) and two types of cheese cake, a South African one from Lauren and a Hungarian version from Eva Grunstein.

In The Feast Goes On, we also have a few Shavuot options: Judy Kaye’s sour cherry slice (we will be sharing the recipe on our instagram this week) and Paula’s melktert. And of course Suzanne Goldberg’s wonderful ricotta cheesecake, on this page.

In our third book, It’s Always About the Food, we have (savoury) egg strata pudding (p. 194) and Anglesey eggs (p. 197) and (sweet) Passionfruit (p. 222) and Lime (p. 223) ice cream and peaches with seekhund (p. 216).

Ricotta Cheesecake

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Course Sweet Things

Servings 10

Ingredients

  

• 7 eggs
• 290 g Caster (Superfine) Sugar
• 1 kg fresh ricotta cheese ,drained if wet
• 250 g Sour Cream
• 3 tbsp custard powder
• 1 1/2 tbsp cornflour (cornstarch)
• 3/4 tsp baking powder
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• finely grated zest of 1 lemon

Instructions

 

• Preheat the oven to 180C. Grease and line a 28 cm springform cake tin or a 24 cm square cake tin.
• Using an electric mixer, whisk the eggs and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the cheese and beat until smooth, then add the remaining ingredients and beat until well combined.
• Pour into the prepared tin and bake for 1 hour, or until golden and puffy. The cake will rise during baking, then fall once cooled.