Blueberry Cheesecake Slice

One of my bestest friends in the whole, wild world is having a baby soon, so on one ridiculously hot day in early Februray I held a baby shower for her.

 

Em is having a little boy, and I'm super-excited by the prospect of being Aunty Ness. SQUEEEE! I'm totally going to be that cool "aunt" that bakes cupcakes and pays Lego and climbs trees and teaches him to use firearms drive a 4WD and takes him base jumping hiking and teaches him how to treat girls (although I'm sure his parents will have that one covered. Yeah, and in case you couldn't tell from the strikethroughs, Em is probably reading this... hi, Em! *waves*). Of course, before all that happens he will probably throw up on me more than a few times and possibly even make a habit of crying when I pick him up, but I'll try not to take that personally. Phht, kids.

 

Sorry, just had to get all that excitement out of my system. (Side-note - I've been doing a fair whack of online dating of late, and a few of the guys have successfully stalked Googled me despite my poorly-disguised fake email address, so this is a public service announcement to those ones who may have found my blog: Please don't freak out that I'm excited about my friend's baby, or that I love my housemates' squishy li'l pudding of a kid. Yes, babies are cute and yes, I do want kids... but I don't want them this week, so you can chill out! ;) )

 

Ahem.

 

Anyway, one of the ways in which my excitment manifested itself - and you should probably know that it has manifested itself in several ways - was to make everything for the baby shower blue. Blue lollies, blue cake, blue ice cream, blue cheesecake. Em's brother Heath did a fabulous job with blue decorations, too. The savoury food was obviously not blue, because that would have been disturbing, but thanks to Other Ness for providing the delicious, normal-coloured savouries!

 

I took the base recipe from Taste, but decided that it was nowhere near being blue enough, and the quantities were wrong, so I doubled it and changed the topping. I also made it in a slab pan with quite square sides (which I think is about 22 x 32cm), because I wanted nice, square/oblong servings. Now that I think about it, it's basically a denser, cheesier version of the Aussie classic jelly slice, and gosh it's nice!

 

Note that, using the tin I used, I ended up scraping about 1/4-1/5 of the mixture out (so, a heaped cereal bowl's worth) to make room for the jelly layer, so you could probably make do quite well with a 3/4 batch of this mix. Even doing a 1/2 batch (which is the whole, original batch) would work, although I'm not certain that the base would be robust enough to hold up.

 

INGREDIENTS:

500g plain, sweet biscuits (i.e. two packs of milk arrowroot biscuits)

250g butter, melted (i.e. one block)

3tsp gelatine powder

1/4c boiling water

1kg cream cheese, softened (i.e. four Aussie blocks of Philly)

1c castor sugar

2tsp vanilla bean paste

600mL thickened cream, whipped (i.e. large container of Pura/Bulla cream)

(Note - I had intended to fold some blueberries through the batter, but forgot to buy them that day, so the batter was plain. Feel free to add some here, though!)

 

500g-ish box of fresh or frozen blueberries (I recommend roughly chopping at least half of them up, to make it easier to cleanly slice the cheesecake later. Note also that you may not use the whole box if you don't like the look of it, so start by dealing with half and then add more if it feels right)

2tbsp gelatine

200mL boiling water

4-600mL cold water (note that I'm basing my quantities on hazy recollections of the gelatine tin saying 1tbsp of gelatine, 100mL boiling water, top up to 400mL mark with cold, but you should obviously follow the directions on whatever packet you end up using)

Blue food dye

Blueberry essence
(Alternately, you could just puchase blueberry jelly crystals from the supermarket, but apparently I'm not that smart!)

 

Grease and line tray with baking paper (make sure you get the corners and the sides of the pan where the paper doesn't extend to nice and greasy).

 

Process/crush biscuits until they resemble fine breadcrumbs. Mix in melted butter until just combined and press into tin. Refrigerate until firm (20mins).

 

Sprinkle first lot of gelatine over boiling water in heatproof jug. Whisk with fork until dissolved. Set aside to cool (15mins).

 

Beat cream cheese, sugar and vanilla until smooth. Gradually beat in gelatine mixture until combined. Fold in whipped cream (this is where I didn't fold any blueberries through and should have, but it turned out fine). Pour most of the mixture into pan, leaving enough room on top for 5-10mm of jelly, smooth top and refrigerate.

Pour boiling water into heatproof jug (I actually used 2 separate, 500mL jugs as I don't have a 1L one), sprinkle gelatine over the top, let it soak for a minute and whisk with a fork until dissolved. Continue to whisk and add 4-600mL cold (room temperature) water (depending on how thick and rigid you want the jelly layer to be), then colouring and flavouring to taste. Leave to cool fully.

Lightly roughen the surface of the refrigerated cheesecake with a fork.

Lick the fork clean and then put it in the dishwasher so you don't accidentally use it again. Sprinkle cheesecake with blueberries (some chopped, as mentioned above).

You don't want a solid layer of blueberries as it will be difficult to cut and compromise the integrity of the cheesecake layer. You only want just enough to have a couple of whole ones and several chopped bits adorning the jelly on each slice. Gently pour on jelly mix, squash any floating blueberries into the cheesecake so you get a nice, smooth finish, and refrigerate until set.

Cut into oblong slices (I got 30 slices out of this tin), lift carefully out (you might as well know that the corner slice will be totally buggered and the biscuit layer will probably fall off it, but hey, you need to eat the "ugly one" anyway in the name of quality control!) and serve.

Nom.


Notes - Don't do what I did and add a bunch of frozen blueberries to the jelly - the jelly immediately around the berries will set almost instantly and make it quite tricky to make smooth.

I also recommend cutting the cheesecake with a hot, dry knife (you'll need a jug of boiling water and a tea towel to make that happen).

 

 



Review - The Tea Room at QVB, Sydney

I obviously didn't post last week, and that's because I was a bit busy - I found myself in Sydney for the weekend, and, determined to pack as much into my weekend as possible, my schedule looked a little like this:

  

9am - Breakfast with the entire St Kilda Football Club (hmm, I should think harder about how I word that one, given their track record... what I meant was that they happened to be in the Virgin lounge where I happened to be eating my breakfast!)

 

11:45am - get off plane in Sydney and high-tail it to my hotel to drop off luggage, then walk down George Street towards the Queen Victoria Building, foolishly wearing unpadded sandals

 

1:10pm - arrive at the QVB and spend some time wandering about. Decide that I like it well enough because it resembles Melbourne and its arcardes (sorry, Sydney, I like you on weekends but I can't imagine living there!), what with the mosaic floors

 

and domes

 

and old-style architecture

 

and general all-round arcade-y-ness.

 

1:30pm - finally find my way to the Tea Rooms on the third floor. It honestly took me quite a while to figure out how to get there, because I knew it was on the third floor but most of the building only goes to the second floor. Here's the tip: if you walk to the north end of the building, you will be faced with the Fat Budha restaurant, and most likely be confused. But if you look a little more closely you'll see a small sign and a staircase to the right, and you climb that to reach the tea rooms.

 

More on my jam-packed weekend later, because given the title of this post I should probably actually write about the tea room!

 

I chose the QVB tea rooms after contacting the lovely Lorraine at Not Quite Nigella and asking for her high tea recommendation. She said she hadn't been to QVB in a while and had heard that it had slipped a little, but that it was quite a traditional service. I think the Royal Albert flatware alone probably sold me!

 

I was meeting Cesar and Pete, two guys I met on my recent trip to Africa (I'll write about that one day, too, I promise!). I figured seeing as I'm rarely in Sydney I should try and see some Sydney-siders, and also should probably take the opportunity to cross off one of my New Year's resolutions, in addition to climbing the Harbour Bridge (that one's on my 101 Things list, and I did it the following day). Done, done and done.

 

We met at the table, which I had booked the day before. I was under the impression when I booked that we had nabbed literally the last table in the house, so you should definitely book ahead by more than 24 hours. And because they start to close at 3pm on a Saturday they wanted me to make a 1:30pm booking, not a 2pm one like I had originally planned (I've been stuffed around by flight delays so many times that I nowadays try to build in a half-hour contingency to everything). Anyway, it all worked out okay and Virgin ran on time despite a late take-off in Melbourne. You never used to be able to trust them but these days they're definitely improving.

 

They took our order quickly - probably a little too quickly, given Pete had literally just sat down and had not even picked up his menu when the waitress came scurrying over - but because we were having the traditional afternoon tea ($43 on weekends, including tea or coffee) it wasn't a big deal. We were given glasses of water almost straight away, and little silver teapots came with matching tea strainers about 5 or so minutes later - one individual one for Pete, and a two-person one for Cesar and I. From there it was probably another 10 minutes or so before the food came out, and I was starting to wonder where it was but I suppose they were heating the things that needed heating.

 

As it turns out, three tiers plus one plate of food all spaced out might not look like much, but it's actually quite a challenge to get through!

 

I started with the spinach and feta pastry, which was moist on the inside, flaky on the outside and very tasty.

 

Next, assuming them to be warm and that they should be eaten that way, I attacked a mammoth scone with clotted cream and jam. The scone wasn't as warm as I had expected, wasn't really warm at all, in fact, and I have to say the scone itself didn't impress me greatly... but that's because - yes, I'm going to say it - I make the world's best scones. I'm sorry, but I do. Or, I did, this one time. They were utterly perfect, and every scone that has passed my lips since has paled in comparison. But this was a good, robust scone; not too dry; and didn't fall apart when I spread my jam and cream on it, which is important. Not a scone to be ashamed of, and certainly generous in size.

 

Next I moved onto the fingers of sandwiches. There were two for each diner, and there were two each of three different types of sandwich, so you had to hope that the other diners wouldn't want the same sandwiches that you did! Our plate included two tuna, two curried egg, and what we thought was two chicken salad but turned out to be one chicken and one ham. I had an egg sandwich and a chicken one, and both had lovely, fresh bread and the fillings were just right. The chicken salad had a little celery and a little walnut in it, which was a nice touch.

 

On the same tier as the sandwiches there were these tiny, odd little pastry cases filled with what seemed to be a warm cheese sauce or maybe even aioli?? I think we had all assumed that it was a mini quiche and one of us actually tried biting into it and ended up with it on their chin. If it was a quiche it certainly had not set properly. I, unusually for me, put it all in my mouth in one hit and didn't make any mess at all! The filling was too runny for it to stay long on my tongue so I didn't have much of an opportunity for the flavour to register, so I can't say a lot about it. Perhaps we were supposed to put it on the sandwiches or on the spinach pastry - I really have no idea. Maybe someone more cultured than me can tell me what it was supposed to be?!?!

 

Coming in for a slightly closer view now, the next thing I attacked was a passionfruit yo-yo (melting moment). It's the round one between the two macarons at the front of the bottom tier. The two biscuits were quite thin and melt-in-your-mouth shortbready, and the passionfruit buttercream was tasty and full of flavour, but I knew the very second I picked it up that it had been sitting out a little too long and that the filling was soft and warm. So I sort of slid the two halves of the biscuit off so that both had some filling on them, and ate them separately. I once again, surprisingly, made the right choice, because when Pete bit into his the cream squirted out the sides. But the filling hadn't separated out or gone greasy; it was just a bit tricky to eat.

 

Next came those little oblongs of cake on the top tier. From what I can tell, one layer was a hazelnut (or possibly almond)-based cake, one was plain sponge and the top was a chocolate gel. The cake reminded me a little of tiramisu, although not as strong, with its moistness and chocolate and hazelnut flavours. Definitely a winner, and certainly only for consumption in inch-long pieces!

 

Back down to the bottom tier for those little lemon meringue boats. Barely a mouthful, airy and light, and the lemon filling was beautiful. I could probably rack up half a dozen of these and eat them with a cup of tea and good book in hand, no problem at all.

 

I then ventured into macaron territory. Now, I have to say I'm a little embarrassed to admit, but my macaron experience is quite limited. My first-ever macaron was at Doncaster shoppingtown at Laurant Patisserie and I expected big things, given that we were in the midst of the Great Macaron Craze of 2011. I found it to be a bit meh, but then, when I thought about it, I realised that a biscuit made of almond meal and egg white is likely to be quite plain and that the star performer should be the filling. I don't think Laurant should take what I say personally as I have only tried one in their range so far so can't really judge.

 

My next macaron (okay, it wasn't one - I ate three) was at La Maison du Chocolat in New York City in October last year (why yes, I do have a knack for sniffing out patisseries, chocolatiers et al in foreign cities, why do you ask?), and I also tripped over Magnolia bakery, just around the corner, which is why I didn't get around to eating the macarons until late the following day. I wasn't terribly concerned as I was aware that they are at their best on Day Two or Day Three. So they were stuck in my hostel locker with a stinky backpack that has done a lot of work over the years in my travels with no wash (you'll be pleased to know that the first thing I did when I got home was throw it in the washing machine!), but they still fared reasonably well. It confirmed for me that the ganache in the centre was the star performer of a macaron.

 

So when I encountered a pistachio macaron I wasn't really sure what to expect. I mean, it was certainly the exact shade of pistachio, but I like in-your-face flavours like lemon and raspberry and dark chocolate, and pistachio is obviously a much more subtle flavour. I am pleased to announce that the flavour of the macaron did not disappoint me - it did taste like pistachio, and the light but creamy filling carrying that flavour did not overwhelm it. But the structure of the biscuit went much the same way as the passionfruit yo-yo - the filling oozed out the sides, and this time I hadn't thought to separate the two halves. Sigh. Now I feel like I have to go on a macaron-tasting adventure to determine what makes the perfect filling, both in flavour and in texture. If there's somewhere you know (preferably in Melbourne but not necessarily) that will offer me a spectacular macaron experience, pease let me know!

 

At around this time, the tea rooms were starting to be packed up around us, table cloths and all, and bills being brought to tables, which was a little bit offputting. I suppose that was the intention! The room, surprisingly, became even echoey-er than before with fewer people and furnishings in it. It had previously been quite difficult to hear Cesar and Pete speak, I suppose because of the shape of the room, but then, I am a bit hard of hearing with background noise. It's probably not the best choice of location if you want a quiet, intimate chat, though.

 

My last-but-one petit four was one of those fruit tarts on top. I saved it until amost-last because I love fruit tarts in all their forms, and they're pretty hard to get wrong. I also wasn't certain I'd be able to fit it in if I ate that orange miniature cupcake on the bottom of the stand first, and the waistband of my skirt was already a little snug, so I didn't want to risk not eating it. The pastry was sweet and crumbled perfectly; the creme patisserie was light but rich; and the fruit was, well, fruit. As I said, pretty hard to get wrong (unless the creme patisserie tastes like uncooked cornflour, in which case you know you have a problem!).

 

And finally, as the bill was paid, I made a final lunge at the orange mini cup cake. It was rich and buttery, with a strong orange flavour which balanced the butteriness. I'm glad I squeezed it in :)

 

All in all, I would recommend the Tea Room at QVB, if only for the setting - it is a mixture of tables and of old-fashioned, studded leather and brocade lounge chairs - and the experience of having high tea on nice china. There was a good selection of food, and most of it was well-prepared, but I was a little disappointed by how soft the filling in the biscuits was. I would suggest perhaps going in the morning instead of the afternoon to counter that. Luckily I don't judge a tea room by its macarons ;)

 

As for the rest of my weekend, well it involved two dinners with friends down at Darling Harbour, two lots of fireworks, a drink down at the King Street wharf with Pete and Ceasar, a Harbour Bridge climb, a couple of cocktails at Bar 100 in the Rocks, and hot chocolate and cake at the Lindt cafe. Not a bad weekend at all, thank you Sydney!