The Juiciest Poppy Seed & Lemon Cheesecake! Incredibly Tender! The Perfect Recipe! So Easy!

Hello dear friends, I am happy to welcome you to my channel. Today in this video I am baking a gorgeous, very juicy, delicate poppy seed lemon cheesecake cake. It has an amazing filling and we'll bake all the layers together at once. The dough is incredibly delicate. This cake is loved even by those who don't like poppy seed pastries at all. It results in an excellent cross-section. Cheesecake streaks will be throughout the poppy seed dough, giving this cake incredible juiciness and moisture. While the filling remains very airy. Before we start baking any cake, we prepare the pan. We grease it with just 3 grams of butter. Then we dust the pan with flour. We remove the excess flour and set the pan aside. And we immediately prepare the curd filling. 400 grams of spreadable quark. Minus 10% fat content. I add a tiny pinch of salt. 8 grams of vanilla sugar. 90 grams of sugar. And 1 medium sized egg. I also add the zest of 1 lemon. My lemon is organic, meaning it hasn't been treated with any chemicals. I also add a packet of pudding powder, which is 38 grams. I highly recommend using pudding powder. You can of course replace it with cornstarch. But pudding powder uses so-called modified starch, which thickens any mixture faster and more effectively, especially when baking. Under no circumstances should you confuse this with genetically modified products. During the production of modified starch, regular potato or cornstarch is heated with water, evaporated on special drums, and ground into a fine dust. This allows it to thicken mixtures much more densely and actively than regular cornstarch. Therefore it has absolutely nothing to do with genetic engineering. So we set the curd mixture aside. I squeeze the juice from the lemon I zested earlier. My lemon is small, just a medium sized one. I set that aside as well. Let's mix all the dry ingredients. 220 grams of flour. 50 gram poppy seeds. I am using poppy seeds that were already ground by the manufacturer. You can quickly grind them in a coffee grinder. And I add 6 grams of baking powder. Please do not add any more than that for this amount. I stir all the dry ingredients and set them aside for now. 150 grams of softened butter. I add 16 of vanilla sugar to the butter. A pinch of salt. And beat the butter for a couple of minutes to let it loosen up. I also add 120 grams of sugar to the butter now. I beat it for another couple of minutes. I add 3 eggs. You should beat the eggs for a bit longer. Mine just followed one after another here. That's why it happened that way in the video. Generally you should beat each one for about half a minute. I then add 80 milliliters of room temperature milk to the mixture. The mixture will look slightly separated. That is perfectly normal. I pour in the entire dry mix and process it with a mixer. The dough will look a bit dense. That is exactly how it should be. Otherwise it will just turn into mush and the curd filling won't create that beautiful layer. And at the end, once all the ingredients have mixed, I add the lemon juice. I quickly process it with the mixer again. There is no need to mix anything in with a spatula here. Our dough is ready and the curd filling is also ready. The most important thing now is the temperature setting and properly layering these mixtures into the pan. Be sure to scrape everything off the sides of the bowl using a silicone spatula. My oven is preheated to 170 degrees Celsius. I will bake it without convection. That is, such cheesecakes are baked without convection. My pan is 30 by 11 centimeters. That is the top perimeter of the pan. Now I'm spreading a good, I would say, half of the dough on the bottom and sides of the pan. And I definitely spread the dough like this, specifically onto the sides of the pan. This must be done, otherwise our curd filling will be very unstable later and the cheesecake won't have those nice stable edges. Once I've made a good base, I pour half of the curd mixture onto it. And now I spread half of the remaining dough over this curd mixture. You don't need to worry that the dough is dense. It's supposed to be that way. The curd filling here is, I would say, quite runny in appearance. Under no circumstances should you use fat-free cottage cheese. And don't even use five percent cottage cheese plus butter. The butter will boil in the oven. And with this poppy seed filling, with this exact amount of ingredients, the recipe is perfectly refined. It will create gaps and huge holes during baking, because the butter will simply boil and create a steam effect. Therefore, use only nine or ten percent cottage cheese. If you don't have paste-like cottage cheese, take regular curd but not dry. Blend it and you will get a nice glossy mixture. Now I just run a fork through it to mix the poppy seed dough with the curd mixture. We are absolutely not doing this for a zebra pattern. We don't need that here. This is a completely different kind of cheesecake. We are doing this for the flavor. Then there will be these thinnest veins of curd filling in this poppy seed dough. And this will provide an effect of lightness but at the same time incredible moistness to the dough. And at the bottom we will have this delicate curd filling. I will bake this cake at 170 degrees celsius in my oven for one hour and ten minutes. Check with a skewer to ensure it comes out of the center dry and clean. I didn't open the oven door for the first 55 minutes. Then after 55 minutes had passed, I covered the cake with foil and baked it for another 15 minutes. All ovens are very different. You should check based on your own oven. You might need a little more or a little less time. Everything will bake perfectly here. Now while the cake is still very warm, I'm turning it over onto a wire rack like this, removing the mold and flipping it back onto its base so it can cool to room temperature. And once it has cooled to room temperature, I can easily pick it up and move it to a serving dish. This strip where the cheesecake filling is, just like with all cheesecakes, will sink slightly since it's not protected by a dense shortcrust edge. This is absolutely normal. My cheesecake has cooled completely to room temperature. I'm covering it with confectioner's glaze. You could make a lemon glaze here using one tablespoon of lemon juice and just add powdered sugar until you reach the desired consistency. You could also use white chocolate. It also pairs very well with this flavor when drizzled on top. I'm also sprinkling poppy seeds and grating lemon zest on top for decoration. It slices perfectly into very small pieces like this. The cake holds its shape perfectly despite being very airy and tender inside. Answering a question from the comments right now, chocolate batter requires different ingredients. You can replace the poppy seeds here with nuts. Flour requires completely different proportions as well. As well, you would need to change both the flour and the butter. I'll film a separate video on vanilla batter with cheesecake eventually. And you can replace the nuts with 50 grams of finely ground nuts. This is very important, meaning don't use large pieces of nuts but rather finely ground ones. You could, for instance, use unpeeled nuts. The consistency of the nuts should be the same as the poppy seeds. Look at the cross-section. Every piece has this beautiful pattern and every piece has those delicate streaks of cheesecake inside. I mean the poppy seed filling. You can see them right here because we mixed it all with a fork. They just allowed the cheesecake filling to settle downward. That's a very good life hack here. It breaks apart perfectly with a fork and doesn't turn into mush even though there are so many poppy seeds. And a very delicate cheesecake filling. Do not use butter here under any circumstances as it would be ruinous for this recipe. You would end up with large air pockets that comes from mixing low-fat cottage cheese with butter. So for the cheesecake filling, you do not need butter here. And tap the mold on the table slightly before putting it in the oven to let any excess air escape and choose a temperature for you specifically for your oven. Look at how it breaks apart. Such tender dough. I mean the poppy seed dough is just airy here. And white streaks of cottage cheese filling run through this poppy seed dough everywhere. And I hope that this video was useful and informative. Subscribe to my channel, hit like and write comments. I wish everyone great success and see you in the next videos.