The bully called Nature

It seems like work follows me wherever I go, even on well deserved holidays! Let me explain you the situation...I am totally in holiday-mode, relaxed like never before. I'm in the beautiful sunny countryside of Hungary, nothing special you would say? well, true if I would be in a five star hotel, sipping on cocktails by my infinity pool overlooking the lake, but thats not the case, so you better think twice. For starters I'm in the beautiful village of Csopak, on the north side of the Balaton Lake and in the middle of the Olasz Riesling vineyards, one of the most common grape varieties in the whole of Hungary. Personally I'm not the biggest fan of the Olasz Riesling since its a quite dry and mineral wine and I'm more the sweet kind off wine guy. But persistent as I am, I will find some late harvest Olasz Riesling to keep my sweet tooth satisfied.

But that's not all. I didn't even talk about the backyard where I have apples and pears growing on the trees and a massive blossoming bush of Rosemary, with beautiful white flowers who have an amazing earthy flavour and a much more soft rosemary aroma. By now you should know where I'm going with this...I had to bake something!!!

So that's the situation... the bully called "Nature" has struck again and left me with this beautiful produce but without a professional pastry kitchen. If I had this given to me in London, I would have gone nuts but I wasn't, so like they say "One must make shift, with what one has" and honestly how hard can it be when you have fresh ingredients like these at your disposal, I'm practically one foot in!

I have decided to make a baked cheesecake with apple and rosemary, so I started of by making the dough for my tart case, and of course the eggs came from our neighbour his chickens, no joke! Anyways, once the dough was made I kept it in the fridge to cool down and went to the garden to handpick some apples and rosemary to make a compote for on the bottom of the cake.

For the compote I peeled and diced the apple, put some butter and sugar on the stove, make a nice blond caramel, deglazed it with some local late harvest Riesling and throw in the apple with two branches of rosemary. Cook them until the are al dente. Then I took 2/3 of the apples and the liquid and blend it into a compote, then I added the leftover apple to the compote so I would have some nice big chunks of apple in the compote.

By now it was time to take out the dough and roll it out, so I could line the tart case and blind bake it. While the tart case was in the oven for about 15 min I had time to make my cheesecake mix. I decided to use some Hungarian cottage cheese to make this mixture since this whole cake is based on local products. So when the tart case came out of the oven, I've put a nice layer of the apple/rosemary compote and topped it with the cheesecake mix and put it back in the oven for an hour... And finaly after hours of hard kitchen labour I was done.

In the evening we sat around the table with the family and opened a bottle of late harvest Olasz Riesling and enjoyed each others company with a slice of home made pie. It can't get better then that and one thing is sure, this is not the most beautiful dessert that I have put on my blog, but it definitely embodies the true meaning of baking! And finishing off, I have to say that my respect goes out to all of those who bake at home cause it isn't as easy as it looks.