As a blogger, I often find myself facing a difficult situation: who is going to eat all of the cake I am making? If it was up to me, I would be baking every day. But my understanding of a balanced diet tells me that this might not exactly be supporting a healthy lifestyle. That´s why I am often stuck between doing the thing I want and doing the thing I should. Life is tough I guess.
Anyway, by now I have developed some technics to get rid of all the tasty stuff I am making without gaining 5 pounds per blog entry. A very important part is played by the freezer. It´s awesome, I´ll just freeze those muffins and get one whenever I need. Another important factor is my family (whenever I am spending time at my parents), my friendly neighbours, my boyfriend and his roommates and my sister who is always there for me when it comes to eating cake and sweets. But by far my favorite way to make use of what I am baking is inviting friends to come over for coffee and cake.

This time I made raspberry-vanilla-cheesecake. Well technically it is not a cheesecake. The filling is made with vanilla custard, which is a genius idea. The original recipe is using the store bought thing. But ever since I made custard from scratch I have loved this far more than anything you can buy at the store. So I decided to use the handmade version for this cake. The result was pretty spectacular.
With this recipe I am saying goodbye to blogging for two weeks because I am going to CANADAAAA. I am so excited! My little brother spend one year there as an exchange student and now the whole family is going to pick him up. So if you have any advice on what to do, what to see and where to eat in Vancouver, Vancouver Island and Seattle, please let me know.

For the crust:
250 g flour
70 g sugar
Salt
150 g cold butter
1 egg

For the filling:
3/4 l milk
60 g corn starch
1-2 vanilla beans
60 g sugar
250 g sour cream
250 g quark
2 eggs
300 g raspberries
Strawberry or raspberry jam

1) Add flour, sugar, salt, butter, egg and 1 tablespoon cold water in a bowl and mix well until you have a firm pie crust. Place the crust in a buttered cake pan and cool in the fridge for about 30 minutes.
2) For the vanilla custard mix corn starch with a couple of tablespoons milk until it has dissolved completely. Split the vanilla bean and cut out the core. Heat milk, sugar, vanilla bean and salt until it is cooking. Remove the pan from the stove and stir in the corn starch until you get a thick custard. Let the custard cool before continuing with the next step.
3) Pierce the crust with a fork and bake in the preheated oven at 180°C for 15 minutes.
4) Mix the custard with sour cream, quark and 2 eggs. Place the mixture on top of the crust and decorate with 2/3 of the raspberries. Bake in the oven at 150°C for about 1 hour. Let cool. Add 3-4 tablespoons of jam and decorate with the remaining raspberries.

Tip: The custard recipe makes more than what you´ll need for the cake. Before continuing with the recipe, take out about 200 g. It is up to you if you want to use 1 or 2 vanilla beans.