Photo: Flickr/mckaysavage

The recipes I fall in love with usually fall in one of two camps. The first is ordinary perfection, achieved through long trial and error and a careful reading of a recipe’s history – America’s Test Kitchen‘s inimitable pie crust falls into this category, for example. This kind of recipe is tried-and-true, a classic, what your grandma used to make but better – that sort of thing.

And then there’s the second camp, rarer, but more exciting – the kind of recipe that actually sparks your imagination. These are the sorts of recipes that let you imagine you’re living in a townhouse in France, or working in a cool modernist restaurant, or living on a hippie commune somewhere. In other words, these are the recipes that capture the magic of exploration – you’re not trying for perfection, but for an adventurous leap forward of the palate.

This recipe from my new favorite food blog, Scandi Foodi, falls somewhere in between. On one hand, it’s that classic light dessert – cheese and sweet fruit. On the other hand, read the recipe title: it’s “oven-baked fruit with Finnish buttermilk cheese.” Homemade Finnish buttermilk cheese, I should add. Reading that recipe, looking at the site’s gorgeous photos, it evokes a setting, a place and a time. You’re in a cottage surrounded by long grass and lavender; you have freckles on your face and curls in your hair; you serve oven-baked fruit with Finnish buttermilk cheese for breakfast.

Or maybe I’m the only one who responds to recipes in such a silly way. Whatever: it still looks divine.