Dill and cottage cheese squares – Kapros-túrós lepény

by | Aug 23, 2014 | Desserts

This dill and cottage cheese pie was my grandma’s favorite dessert. It’s a real peacetime recipe from her hand-written cookbook. In fact, it can be regarded as a distant relative of the English cheesecake. The cottage cheese filling is soft and creamy, and the dill makes it fresh.

Dill and cottage cheese squares - Kapros-túrós lepény
Dill and cottage cheese squares – Kapros-túrós lepény – photo: zserbo.com

Ingredients:
For the dough:

  • 300 g (~2 1/2 cups) flour
  • 120 g (~4 1/4 oz) lard
  • 3 tbsp sugar
  • 20 g (~3/4 oz) fresh yeast (2 tsp dry yeast)
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 3 heaping tbsp sour cream

For the filling:

  • 750 g (~1 2/3 lbs) cottage cheese
  • pinch of salt
  • 50 g (~1/4 cup) butter, softened
  • 4 tbsp sugar
  • 3 eggs
  • 2 tbsp semolina
  • 1 heaping tbsp sour cream
  • a bunch of dill, finely chopped

For the topping:

  • 200 g (~7 oz) sour cream
  • 2 tbsp sugar
  • 1 egg yolk

Size of the baking pan: 32×30 cm / 11×12″

Preheat the oven to 180°C / 356°F.

For the dough place all ingredients in a bowl and knead into a smooth and pliable dough. On a floured surface roll out the dough into a rectangle and place in a greased baking pan.

For the filling separate the eggs. Whip the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Combine cottage cheese with egg yolks, salt, butter, sugar, semolina, sour cream and finely chopped dill. Gradually fold the beaten egg whites into the cottage cheese mixture. Spread the filling over the dough evenly.

For the topping add one egg yolk and sugar to the sour cream and stir to combine. Spread on top of the cottage cheese filling. Slide the pan in the preheated oven and bake the cake for about 45-50 minutes.

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2 Comments

  1. This resembles a pastry my Hungarian Great-Grandma in Cleveland made! She called it la paint.

    • I’m sure your great-grandmother’s pastry was delicious, too.

Hungarian cottage cheese

This is what Hungarian túró looks like

You often ask me what kind of cottage cheese (or curd cheese or farmer's cheese - call it what you want) I use in the recipes. In Hungary the store-bought cottage cheese is dry and crumbly as you can see in the picture. So if a recipe calls for túró, I mean this type. If you can't obtain túró, you can try to make your own from whole milk. Click on the link below.

Metric system vs cup

In Hungary metric units are in use, all the recipes on this website are based on this system, so a kitchen scale is necessary. Since I’m not familiar with cup as a measurement unit, I convert grams to cups by using an online converter. The values in brackets, therefore, are only approximate volumes, so, please, double-check them before you start cooking.

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