ABC - Quintessential Cheese Blintzes

Sweet cheese-filled Blintzes on homemade red fruit preserves

For this month's ABC baking project, I asked Toni of Big Smiles and Bigger Hips to select a recipe for us, and she chose the Quintessential Cheese Blintzes. I "met" Toni through the Heavenly Cake Bakers and was very happy when she decided to join ABC. One of the things I like about Toni is her honest feedback on the goodies she bakes as part of the baking group. If she doesn't like a recipe, she'll tell you :o) She also has adorable little helpers.

Blintzes (also called Blinis and a very other names) are similar to crepes with a sweet or savory filling. My (late) Russian friend, Svetlana, made Blinis for me that were filled with ground beef. That was my first (and yummy) encounter with Blinis/Blintzes. So I was very eager to try Flo Braker's sweet filling made with farmer's cheese, sugar, citrus zest, and a little salt. I substituted cream cheese for the farmer's cheese. Other substitutes that work well are ricotta cheese and small curd cottage cheese.

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Since I was only making a 1/4 of the recipe, I made the crepe batter in the cup of my immersion blender. It took about 10 seconds to whiz everything together. After that, it went into the fridge for a few hours while I ran some errands (Flo recommends a 1-2 hour rest in the fridge).

Crepe batter, ready for the fridge

Making the crepes, is easy. My small non-stick pan was slightly smaller than 6" so I used 2 Tbsp of batter for each crepes and got nice thin crepes. A total of 6, to be exact.

I cooked my crepes on both sides (sorry Flo!)

For the filling, I used 4-6 oz of cream cheese which I had in the freezer. After thawing it out in the microwave (slowly), I added 25 grams of sugar, the zest of 1 clementine (my lemon was too sad looking for any zesting), some salt, and some vanilla. I left out the egg. I figured a 1/4 egg is not going to give me that much binding power. And since there are stabilizers in the cream cheese, I wasn't too worried about a runny filling (and I wouldn't have to worry about whether the egg inside the blintzes is fully cooked), so it's a win-win :o)

Here are some step-by-step pictures on how to fold the blintzes (it's much like folding egg rolls):

Gently fried in a little butter for a nice crust and to heat up the blintzes

Bon appetit!

 To make these yourself and learn firsthand how good they are, you can find the recipe in Flo Braker's wonderful book, Baking for all Occasions, or you can find it online here.

Final thoughts/tips:

• I wasn't so sure hubby would like it since he's not a big cheese fan. Not surprisingly, his first comment was: "This is rich!". But he kept on eating and declared it a winner, also citing that the homemade preserves paired nicely with the blintzes. He gave it a 9 out of 10.
• I  loved these too. The blintzes had a thin crispy outer layer, while the filling was creamy, sweet, with a nice citrus punch from the clementine zest. I served our blintzes on some homemade red fruit preserves (made with strawberries and plums) that I heated slightly. A light dusting of powdered sugar sealed the deal :o) Thanks for another winner, Flo!
• Don't forget to check out what the other ABC bakers said about these Blintzes.