Spundekäs'

I was going to make a recipe of Spundekäs that was given to me by a friend but it was slightly vague on the amounts of some of the ingredients; so I was glad to have this one as a guideline.

The main difference between this one and my friend's recipe is that the former uses sour cream, while the latter uses butter - and not just a bit, she uses just as much butter as cream cheese and cottage cheese (250g each). The reason is that originally, Spundekäs' was shaped to resemble the plug of a wine barrel ('Spund' actually means 'plug'); so to be able to do that, the cheese needed some texture. Without butter, it's a relatively thin and liquid mass; the butter helps thickening it, without actually making it taste heavy. In the end I decided to use 100g butter and no sour cream as it tasted fresh enough.

Furthermore, I used only 2 cloves of garlic and 1 teaspoon of sweet paprika; I'm still considering if I should add chives, I think I will.

To be served tomorrow together with carrots and Aubergine Dip as another dip, Spiced Nuts, Deviled Eggs, Chocolate Brownie and Mondriaan Cake.

Edited one day later: Maybe we should have added the whole 250g of butter; as it was, our dip was still relatively liquid, making it hard to eat with carrots. I think our Quark wasn't up to standard anyway, as it's fat content was only 9,4% in total - apparently, in German Quark the fat content is given in relation to dry matter, and can be anything from 10% to 40%, which is a lot more than the nearly 10% total fat in the version I used.

As we ran out of carrots at the end, I fetched a few celery sticks - I actually preferred the Spundekäs' with carrots, and I think it will also work really well with Bretzeln (pretzels).

Pictured: not Spundekäs', but I couldn't resist posting these...