Cheese pancakes
You can make lots of healthy – and, most importantly, delicious – dishes using cornflour, but we’ll focus on two of the most popular ones: cheesecakes and nut tarts.
You’ll need: 400 grams of coarse-grained quark, 4 tablespoons of cornflour, 2 eggs, 2 teaspoons of sugar (if you have a sweet tooth, add more sugar), half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda.
Pass the quark through a sieve; to make the cheesecakes more tender, add the eggs, sugar and flour to the quark and mix well.
Dust the work surface with flour and shape the cheesecakes.
Place the cheese pancakes in the frying pan, fry them on one side until they are golden brown, then turn down the heat and flip them over to the other side.
Corn cake with nuts
For this unusual cake, we’ll need 180 grams of butter (or about 9 tablespoons), pecans (which can be replaced with any nuts of your choice), a glass of icing sugar, 2 tablespoons of sugar, 3 tablespoons of plain flour, 1 teaspoon of baking powder, 7 tablespoons of cornflour, a quarter of a teaspoon of salt, 4 egg whites, 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract, as well as berries, nuts or ice cream to decorate the cake.
First, let’s make ‘brown butter’: to do this, heat the butter over a low heat. Cook it until it changes colour (this may take about 6 to 8 minutes) and gives off a pleasant, nutty aroma. Then remove it from the heat, leave it to cool and strain the butter through a sieve.
Mix the nuts, sugar and icing sugar, then blend them in a food processor until as fine as possible. Add the dry ingredients to this mixture — baking powder, wheat flour and maize flour, as well as salt. Separately, whisk the egg whites with the vanilla extract and add them, along with the brown butter, to the nut and flour mixture. Cover the dough with cling film and leave it to ‘rest’ in the fridge for 3 hours, or even better, overnight.
The batter is now ready to bake. Grease the sides of the baking tin with butter, line the base with baking paper and pour the batter into the tin.
Bake the cake for about 25 minutes until it develops a golden crust, then leave it to cool for 10–15 minutes in the tin, covered with a tea towel. Once cooled, turn it out onto a plate and decorate as desired.
