Swabian onion cheese cake

Piece of onion cheese cake, served on a plate

In the autum, in the souther German reagion around thanksgiving festival, it's time for the apple cidre and fresh wine. The leaves are turning golden brown on the trees, cold rain starts to make the people flee indoors to a open chimney with a wood fire inside and what better to find there then the smell of a fresh baked onion pie that will be served with some new wine? This for me is the equivalent of the feeling of Gemütlichkeit (translation coziness, snugness) of a German autumn. Since I can think back to my childhood, the women of the villages have been making this cake for every festive occasion and I remember my nanny has been baking this cake many times. So it's time to me to go back to the roots and make this cake for myself. But I am modifying the recipe by adding cheese to it. Also, the original Swabian recipe requires you to work with a yeast based dough. But I do prefer a shortpastry as the yeast dough is likely to get old faster and it can dry out and get quite hard and chewy. Anyway, here goes the recipe.



A salty shorpastry
250 g flour
1 egg
1 pinch of salt
150 g butter

Onion filling
7 onions
40 g butter
300 ml double cream
300 g bacon bits
300 g grated cheese (Emmenthal or Gruyere)
1 Table spoon of corn starch
Salt and pepper to season
300 g natural yogurt

Ingredients ready for baking

As one can easily guess, the worst part about this recipe is to peel and dice the onions. So I usually start with this step to bring it behind me. Once this is done, I can put them aside and cover them up well so my tears can dry up while preparing the rest of the recipe and the next step, of course, would be to prepare the recipe.
Sieve the flour in a bowl and add a pinch of salt (go easy on the salt, the filling of the cake will be also salty on top). Open the egg and mix it before you add it to the flour. Then add the butter that you cut in flakes before. Mix everything well to a consistent dough that is smooth and all the ingredients are mixed well together, Wrap everything in a foil and pop the dough for 30 minutes in the fridge.
In the meantime, melt some butter and when hot, add the diced onions and the bacon bits, fry off until the onions are see through and take off from the heat and let them cool down.
In the meantime take a whisk and mix the sour cream, the yogurt with the eggs, the corn starch and the pepper and salt to season as well as the cumin and the cheese. Now add the onion and the bacon bits with the rest and mix it well through and put to the side.

Mixed filling ready for pouring in the cake form

Put some flour over a work plate, roll out the dough that you took from the fridge and roll it out. Grease a cake form and lay out the rolled out dough into the cake form. poke some holes in the dough with a fork. Pop this in a preheated oven (at 180 degrees Celsius) and bake the dough blind (without the filling) for about ten minutes. If you have a problem baking blind (sometimes the sides of the dough will collapse inwards), you can put some dried beans or peas in the cake form to keep the dough in shape until the blind baking is over. Now take out the cake and put the filling in the cake form now. Now pop the onion cake back in the oven at 175 degrees Celsius and bake it for approximately 25 minutes. until the top is nice and golden brown.

Onion cake coming out from the oven

Serve up with some fresh salad and a glass of fresh wine, a delight. Enjoy