What happened?
Made some Estonian Cookie Cake! Not the prettiest, but one of my favorite desserts to make. I learned the recipe in France while studying abroad from an Estonian friend, and have since made it many times because it’s so easy and tasty, and relatively healthy as far as desserts go. As it doesn’t involve any baking, I even got to share it with a lady in India who wanted to make a cake for her daughter’s birthday, but didn’t have an oven in their house!
This time I made it with pretty standard ingredients: box of graham crackers, tub of sour cream, strawberry jam, bananas, some chocolate chips. Since we no longer have milk in the house, I dipped the graham crackers in hot water, and melted down the chocolate chips with oat milk.
Instructions:
- Dip graham crackers in hot milk/water very quickly, then lay onto tray. Do them one at a time as they get soggy very fast. Lay them one next to another, no space in between. Make a square or rectangle out of the graham crackers, according to how big you want it and how many graham crackers you have. You want to make a minimum of three layers, but more is better if you have enough graham crackers.
- On top of the first layer, spread an even layer of sour cream. If you only have enough crackers for 3 layers, also add a layer of sliced bananas. If you plan on making more layers, you can separate the bananas and sour cream with another layer of crackers.
- Add another layer of dipped graham crackers on top of the bananas.
- Add a layer of sour cream and jam, similar to the sour cream and bananas, can be separated by crackers or together.
- Add one last layer of dipped graham crackers. This is the top. Again, if you wanted more layers of stuff in between, feel free to have added them.
- Melt down chocolate chips with a bit of milk to liquify it, then pour it on top of the cake, spreading it into an even layer.
- Put it in the fridge for a bit to cool the chocolate and stiffen the graham crackers.
Here it is as a whole:
The procedure is pretty similar to tiramisu but not as fancy / particular in ingredients you use. Ingredients are super flexible and quantities are not fussy! You can replace just about anything you’d like in it. In the India case just about everything was changed but it was still just as delicious.
What learned?
I used semi-sweet chocolate chips and I found it not too sweet, which is great. Makes it feel healthier. And using oat milk / water made it closer to being vegan. That didn’t seem to affect the taste.
Since I didn’t have any other use for sour cream at home, I used the whole tub in this. We found it to be too much sour cream. It could also have been because I only made three layers, so the sour cream layers were very thick. Might have been better spread out.
To learn
Ideally I’d find a vegan replacement for sour cream as well so that it becomes fully vegan. Need to research that.
Next time I also want to try not dipping the bottom layer so that it stays crunchy. The flavor does taste cheesecake-like, would be interesting to see if this would make it similar to the cheesecake crust.