Poppyseed cakes, ginger cakes, cheese cakes ... the traditional Christmas table groans with excellent, sweet food. Mums, aunts and grandmas excel in preparing new, surprising goodies. Today I would like to share with you a recipe for a dessert which on the one hand is traditional because it is a cheese cake, and on the other hand is simpler and served in a slightly different way.

Oreo mini cheesecakes will be a beautiful and very tasty treat on the Christmas table. They are easy to prepare, and you can make them between preparing the Christmas Eve soup and baking loin. They will be appreciated by very busy housewives, and all children will be delighted with the small sweeties.
The recipe comes from www.haps.gazeta.pl

Ingredients (for 12 mini cheese cakes):
250ml of 30% sweet cream
400g of mascarpone cheese
3 teaspoons of caster sugar
22 oreo cookies
lemon zest
75g of dark chocolate
3 walnuts
peppermint leaves

Gratineed toasties are one of my daughter's favourite dishes. Usually, I add ham, cheese, gherkins and onion and spice them up with curry powder. Recently, I have gone off ham, so today I added a filling without meat to the toasties. I combined spinach, dried tomatoes and walnuts, but without stretched cheese, toasties don't exist. I replaced ordinary cheese with mozzarella.

You may serve the toasties as a hot supper, or with beetroots or tomato sauce they can be an alternative to traditional soup.

Ingredients:
10 slices of toast bread
2 tablespoons of butter
300g of spinach
3 cloves of garlic
4 dried tomatoes
200g of mozzarella cheese
6 walnuts
salt and pepper

Every Pole knows Wisława Szymborska. We know that she was a poetess, essayist, literary critic, translator, columnist and Nobel laureate in literature in 1996. In 1989 she created the Polish Writer's Association, and in 2011 she was decorated with the Order of the White Eagle.

We can of course read this information in a reference book or biographical notes, but recently, thanks to an amazing book with the unpublished letters of Wisława and the man of her life, we can get to know her from another perspective. She was a typical woman - loving, flirtatious, jealous - who found love at a mature age. Her chosen one was Kornel Filipowicz, a novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and poet. An author of 37 books, he was known mainly as a master of short literary forms.

Though their relationship wasn't typical and they never got married and never lived together, their love was intense and mature. At the time of their separation they wrote letters that were equally as special as their affection. The letters gathered in the book "Your cat has it best in life. The letters..." are funny, moody, romantic and loving. As in every correspondence between a typical couple, we can find both declarations of love and promises about the persistence of affection, stories about friends and family and more mundane information about daily life. Along with the author, we go through the various phases of their relationship. The letters evolve just like their love: from formal and a bit shy to more tender and intimate.

Without herrings we can't imagine the Christmas Eve table. We can prepare them in the traditional way with onion, or with dried plums, or as a salad. Choose your favourite version: sweet, spicy or dry.

Serve them in an unconventional way in small glasses or tiny bowls with French pastry. This dish can be a decoration for the Christmas table, New Year's Eve dinner or a meeting with friends.

Today I would like to share with you my own set of salads. Everybody can find something for themselves. One of them is more spicy with pineapple, the second is with gherkins and the third is sweet with cranberries.

Ingredients (for two people)
6 bowls with French pastry
Salad 1
100g of herrings in oil
5 slices of tinned pineapple
half a chili pepper
2 tablespoons of minced chives
2 tablespoons of mayonnaise
2 tablespoons of pineapple juice

There are some dishes which we order with great enjoyment in restaurants and cafés, but it seems to us that preparing them at home would be very awkward and difficult. However, if we have a good set up and are not put off by early failures, we can in fact prepare some of the dishes in our kitchen. All housewives also know that it is possible to simplify certain recipes without losing the quality of the dish.

It is not worth trying new recipes for important meetings. In case of failure you would then have to look for a cake shop to replace the mess in the kitchen with something sweet. Before Christmas my mum always sets aside one day for baking cakes. Usually, at least some of them are not suitable for the Christmas table (of course, they rarely they go to waste, because who doesn't like sweet and moist sad layer cake).When she bakes a cake randomly at the weekend however, they are always irreproachable.

One of the desserts which I haven't worked myself up to preparing is tiramisu. In every recipe I have found raw yolks. I have a principle: I don't eat them and I don't serve them to my family. I discovered, however, that without eggs this dessert is equally tasty and its consistency is excellent.

Ingredients:
200g of sponge biscuit
3 espressos
4 tablespoons of amaretto