Cheese-Filled Crepes - Russian Nalesniki Recipe

Hi everyone, it's Tatiana from Tatiana's Everyday Food, and today we're going to be making delicious dessert crepes filled with a free cheese combo. We're going to be using ricotta, mascarpone, and cottage cheese, and then we're going to bake the crepes in the oven. This traditional Eastern European and Russian dessert is called Melesniki, and it's usually served with dinner. You can also serve it with breakfast, some fruit, some syrup on top, they're really, really good. So let's get started. Let's get started on the crepe batter. Today we're going to be using five large eggs, and it's important to bring all your ingredients up to room temperature. That way your batter isn't going to curl, and it's not going to clump up once you mix it. And, you notice I'm not using a mixer bowl today, I'm just using a whisk, and that's important because you don't want to overmix your batter. I'm going to add my two cups of milk. Next I'm adding four tablespoons of melted butter, and this is a step where keeping your ingredients at room temperature is really important, because if you add the melted butter into cold eggs and cold milk, it's going to solidify. Next we're also going to add two tablespoons of sugar. Now I'm going to start adding my flour. I like to add my flour a few tablespoons at a time, and whisk it really well after each addition. We're going to need an eight inch either frying pan or crepe pan over medium heat, and you want to make sure to spray it with non-stick spray. And we're going to add just one fourth cup of batter in the center, and tilt the pan around as soon as you pour in the batter to make the crepe, just spread the batter evenly over the sides. Now that we have our crepes done, we can start working on our cheese filling. We're going to need one pound of each of ricotta and small curd cottage cheese, and I love to use whole milk ricotta cheese simply because I think the extra fat content really makes a big difference in flavor and in the texture of the cheese. We're going to need eight ounces of mascarpone cheese, and mascarpone is like a sweet Italian cream cheese. Now if you don't want to spend an extra couple dollars on it, and I think it's really worth it, you can always use regular cream cheese for the recipe. We're going to also need three tablespoons of white sugar and one egg yolk. I'm going to place all of my ingredients into a large mixing bowl. You just want to combine everything together until you have a nice uniform mixture. This is what you want your filling to look like. So you see the nice uniform mixture, and I like the cottage cheese because it adds a little bit of more texture to the filling. And now we're ready to fill our crepes. So I'm placing my cheese filled crepes into a large glass baking dish, and at this time you can also preheat your oven to 350 degrees. So we want to place about one third cup of our cheese filling into the center of the crepe, and we're going to fold them over and roll them into like an egg roll shape. So you want to just fold over the sides first, and we're just going to gently roll them into that shape. We're going to place them seam side down into the pan, and we're going to do that with the rest of our crepes. I'm going to place my crepes into my preheated oven, I'm going to leave them uncovered, and we're going to bake them for about 25 minutes. I just took these out of the oven, and they smell amazing. The aroma from these is just mouthwatering. Now I'm just going to plate them on my plate, and I also have some diced strawberries just to add a little bit of extra flavor. You can always use any type of fruit that you have on hand. Blueberries, raspberries, mangoes, a little bit of banana, sprinkle these on top. You can also add like whipped cream or chantilly cream if you have it, if you want to add a little bit more sugar. I'm going to get myself a little piece, also a little bit of strawberry in there. Mmm, this is so, so good. And I love that rich combination of the three different cheeses. The cheese like melts and just runs out of the crepe, and it's really, really delicious. Now if you don't want your cheese to be too runny, just let your crepe sit at room temperature just so the cheese can cool down a little bit. You can also place them in the refrigerator. These are great the next day for breakfast too, you can just heat up a saute pan, a little bit of butter, just sear them off on both sides until they're nice and crispy and warm on the inside. I hope you guys have really enjoyed this recipe. You can find the recipe ingredients listed in the video description below, and make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel, and you'll get updates every time I post new videos.