Memories from Shavuot 5780. Leisurly follow a video from the fabulous New North London Synagogue care of Rabbi Oliver Spike and fall in love with the way Fabienne explains her sephardi cheesecake making process.
Scribble down a sort of recipe that includes a kind of phyllopastry called Kataifi originally from Iran.
Decide to go this unexplored way, instead of the classic western many kinds of cheesecake that are flooding your FB page and look delicious. At the supermarket in Modena, Italy, you only find the regular phyllopastry, yet your stubborn enthusiasm is too big to let go of the project, and you don t have time to find an Iranian shop.
You also can’ t find date syrup as requested in the recipe to decorate the cake. Fortunately (I believe that Evelyn z’l’ is watching over the whole process of our first home made cheesecake) as you enter the supermarket to buy a lot of cream cheese, i.e. 700g Philadelpia, you are faced with a wall of boxes of fantastic dates from Israel.
Ariel finds online the recipe for home-made date syrup and the dates you bought work great!
You have tahini as for the recipe, because you often make hummus, and pistachios left from Pesach that you will crush to decorate the cake.
So I proceed to cut 750g dates into pieces and let them simmer in 2lt boiling water. When they are very soft, I push them into a very thin net strainer obtaining a runny syrup, and put aside the drained paste that will be wonderful as jam. I bring the syrup to a further boiling to make it more dense. Et voila’!
I try to imitate the volume of the Kataifi phyllopastry by cutting my phyllo down to tagliolini-stripes and prepare the base like a nest, then bake it at 200c until golden brown.
Then I distribute the cream cheese on the baked base with our brand new piping bag.
I drizzle the top with date syrup and tahini, sprinkle with crushed pistachio, and put it in the fridge. This is what it looked like, quite wilde!
The morning after, the cold reality is that the base of the cake has turned into a thick, nonsensical layer that is also separated from the top (no wonder there!)
I must save the cake! Taking a page from all the classic recipes that I have snubbed the day before, I crush about 300g of my everyday delicious rice biscuits and mix them with 250g melted butter. Bake at 200c until brown and let cool.
Meanwhile, I also realise that I should have decorated the cake last minute before serving: now, all the fabulous date syrup, tahini and pistachios have sunk into the cream cheese, which I need to make my new cake.
So I carefully lift the whole top of the cake away from the wrong base and throw everything into the mixer. I know that the cream cheese will no longer be white! But the surprise!! What I proceed to spread generously on the new cookie-y base is a pink mousse (because of the mix of the red of the date syrup and the green of the pistachio) that tastes delicious!
Finishing touches on my new assembled cheesecake with more pistachio and .. grazie Evelyn!
