Cake – Homemade cream cheese

Cottage cheese is made by separating the whey from the protiens in milk. If you add lemon juice or vinegar to milk that has been brought up to 180 degrees and then cooled to 100 or so it will separate into small or large curds. All that is left is to rinse it through a strainer. If you want a Ricotta type cheese you can put the strained cottage cheese in cheese cloth (hence the name "cheese cloth") and squeeze out more of the liquid. If you put the cottage cheese in a press it will turn out to be a white firm block of Mexican style cheese. Many people add a little salt to the cottage cheese prior to pressing to aid in the removal of the whey and prolong the life of final product. All in all if you press plain cottage cheese you will just have firmer cottage cheese. Store bought cottage cheese will not work in a press. Store bought cottage cheese has cream added back into it to give it the texture that you are used to seeing in the container. It will not solidify. The cream will stop the curds from sticking together. Make your own and you will enjoy it way more anyhow.

I hope I am not making a wrong assumption here. But German quark is a soft cheese with somewhat creamy consistency which is made from a yogurt variety (or at least a cultured milk variety) .

If "yoghurt cheese" is similar to quark in the way I think it is, you are probably better off not making a substitution, but use a recipe which was made for quark (or topfen, which is the Austrian word for the same cheese). They will probably give you a better result than a substitution. The search term to use would be Käsekuchen, this is the German version of cheesecake, and it is traditionally made with quark. If you cannot decipher a German recipe, I noticed that Google returns some results for "Käsekuchen recipe", you can specify results in English in the advanced search options if needed.