As our kefir grains expand, we have to culture more milk.  While growing a bud to send to my mother, I ended up with more kefir than we wanted to eat with our breakfast and decided to use the excess to make individual-serving chocolate kefir cheesecakes.  I decided to keep the recipe grain- and sugar-free, so I ditched the crust and came up with the recipe below for the filling:

• 0.5 cups of strained kefir milk and cream.  (More on this below.)
• 1 egg
• scant 0.5 cups of cocoa
• 0.25 teaspoons of vanilla
• 0.25 cups of honey
• strawberry freezer jam for the topping

The first step was to strain the kefir to give it more of a cream-cheese consistency.  I had about a quarter of a cup of kefir sour cream leftover from another day's meal along with 0.75 cups of kefir made from whole milk, so I used both.  You could certainly just use kefir made from milk, although the result would be less decadent and probably a bit runnier.

To strain the kefir, I simply took out the grain and put it in a jar to start the next day's culture, then poured the rest of the kefir into a cloth napkin on top of a colander on top of a bowl.  Three hours later, quite a bit of clear whey had collected in the bowl.  I'm not sure what I'll do with this whey --- worst-case scenario, I'm sure the chickens will enjoy it.  The Greek-yogurt-like kefir that stays on top of the napkin is what you use for this recipe.

Now preheat the oven to 275 degrees Fahrenheit and beat all of the ingredients except the jam together.  Pour the batter into a greased muffin tin to make six mini cheesecakes, or into a 9-inch-square pan for one big cheesecake.  Bake for about 35 minutes until the top fluffs up and a knife in the center of one of the cheesecakes comes out nearly clean.  (You want the cakes to stay a little on the moist side, so I took them out about five minutes before I would have if they were normal cakes.)

Cool your cheesecakes, then top them with strawberry jam.  Although not precisely paleo, I think this decadent dessert is at least moderately healthy, and it's certainly delicious!  Plus, it would be pretty easy to source most of the ingredients on the farm.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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