Muravyeva
Saint Petersburg
I have been working as a professional pastry cook since 2019. I started cooking on my own from the first grade of school. We did not always have a great variety of products at our home kitchen; but there was always flour, sugar, butter, and berries from our garden. My mother taught me to spent ingredients carefully, so we always baked from what we had. We were inventing, experimenting, baking not refine, but at homey and yummy things.
This childhood experience transferred to my vision of the pastry art. The simplest pastries are the most delicious for me. However, I am looking for new ingredients with great interest, trying them and discovering new combinations, studying, following the work of colleagues, communicating with professionals. All this is so fascinating!
“MEMORIES OF THE RUSSIAN VILLAGE” MINI CAKE
Ingredients
- (for 8 mini cakes)
- Rye cake
- Eggs 50 g
- Sugar 70 g
- Salt 1 g
- Kvass sour mash 20 g
- Water 12 g
- GRANDPRO Tart margarine 48 g
- Ground cinnamon 2 g
- Ground ginger 1 g
- Coriander seeds 1 g
- Rye flour 150 g
- Baking soda 2,6 g
- Plum gel
- Pitted plums (choose tight and a little bit tart variety)150 g
- Sugar 15 g
- Agar agar (900 bloom) 1 g
- Cream of baked milk tvorog
- Tvorog made of baked milk 5% fat 120 g
- Powdered sugar 10 g
- Caramel* 37 g
- Cream 33% fat 110 g
- *Caramel
- Sugar 33 g
- Milk 22 g
- Salt 0,2 g
- GRANDPRO Cream margarine 6 g
- Plum jelly
- Gelatin 3,2 g
- Water 16 g
- Pitted plums 180 g
- Sugar 20 g
cooking
Rye cake
- Mix egg, sugar, and salt. Separately dilute kvass sour mash in water. Melt GRANDPRO Tart margarine; add cinnamon, ginger, and crushed coriander seeds to it. Combine all the liquid mixtures.
- Sift rye flour and baking soda into that mass; knead the dough until smooth. Let it rest for 5–10 minutes.
- Roll out the dough in 2 mm thick layers between two sheets of parchment paper.
- Remove one sheet of parchment paper and prick the dough with a fork over the entire area. Make notches for 32 cakes (the size of each cake is 10×3 cm).
- Bake at 170˚C for 8–10 minutes until the edges become lightly brown. While the cake is soft, cut into pieces.
Plum gel
- Cut pitted plums and chop with an immersion blender.
- Put the puree in a saucepan; add sugar and agar agar. Bring to a boil and boil for 1 minute. Remove from heat and allow cooling until agar agar stabilizes.
- Then bled with an immersion blender until gel texture.
Cream of baked milk tvorog
- Rub tvorog through a sieve. Add caramel* and half of the specified amount of cream to it; blend until smooth.
- Whip the second part of the cream to steady peaks.
- Mix it gently with the tvorog mass.
*Caramel
- Cook caramel in a dry way. You may combine cream and margarine at once.
- Cool the caramel; then add it to tvorog according to the recipe above./li>
Plum jelly
- Soak gelatin in the specified amount of water.
- Cut pitted plums and chop with an immersion blender.
- Put the plum puree in a saucepan, add sugar and boil the mass to a rich burgundy pink color. Remove from the heat; add the soaked gelatin and stir until the gelatin dissolves.
- Pour a layer of jelly 1.5–2 mm thick on the tray. In total, you should get eight 10×3 cm jelly sheets.
Assembling the mini cake
- Take four 10×3 cm rye cake layers for one mini cake.
- Put the cream of baked milk tvorog (10 g) on the perimeter in small peaks. Place the plum gel (5–7 g) in the remaining space between the cream peaks.
- Assemble a three-layer mini cake and cover with a fourth (undecorated) layer. Put a sheet of plum jelly on top of it. Place the cream of baked milk tvorog in small peaks on the perimeter.
My idea for these mini cakes was to combine the special Russian flavors and show the potential of our local products. Creating the recipe, I immersed in my childhood memories of the village: grandma’s baked milk tvorog in the morning; okroshka with kvass and Borodino bread at lunch; evening in the garden, when I was picking plums, biting into the slightly sour peel and getting to the sweet pulp.