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).

 

 



"It's a Miracle!" Freeform Berry Tart

Kia ora!

Well it's been quite some time since I posted. I could give you a million reasons, but mostly it's just that I've been living life (and loving it!).

As I write this I'm on holidays with Kirsti visiting Kat in NZ . We've been bumming about Auckland with Kat for the last few days, and tomorrow we head off to find us some Hobbitses. We haven't yet decided if we will make it a habit to eat Second Breakfast in our travels but I guess we'll just have to take things as they come ;)

Speaking of breakfast, this recipe is one you could **almost** get away with for breakfast - I mean, if berry Danishes are breakfast food then surely so may this be. I made it for a friend the night before I flew out, so the lucky bugger had the option at any rate!

I made a half batch (or at least I **thought** I did - recipe as follows), but the full recipe can be found in Margaret Fulton's Baking (which Kirsti gave me last year for my birthday). True to form I only vaguely followed the instructions. You should all know by now that I'm pretty impatient and also tend towards laziness, interspersed with forgetfulness. And yet, it turned out just fine. Things usually do, when it involves butter and sugar, not to mention berries and cream. Can't really go wrong :)

HAHAHA oh man, I just re-read the recipe before copying it out, and realised just how poorly I halved it. So the recipe below is the complete one. I halved the flour and almonds in the first bracket (I can't say for sure whether I halved the butter. I may have, but make no promises), and everything in the second, and it's actually a bit of a miracle that it held shape at all, but hey, it tasted great!

INGREDIENTS:

2c plain flour

125g butter

1/2c ground almonds

2tbsp castor sugar

1 egg, lightly beaten

A little grated lemon rind

1tbsp rum

1/2c ground almonds

1/2c castor sugar

600g mixed berries (frozen is fine - thaw them first though, and if there is lots if juice/water, drain most of it off)

3tbsp icing sugar

Cream to serve. 

Have all ingredients at room temperature. Mix ingredients in the first bracket in the order in which they appear (I dumped them all in the food processor) until combined. Form into a ball, wrap in glad wrap and refrigerate for an hour. (I chucked it in the freezer for about half an hour. Impatience and all!)

Roll out on baking paper in a 30cm circle, put on a tray and chill for 30 minutes. (Seeing as I had halved the flour and almonds, my circle was a bit smaller, and I estimate that I smooshed it to around 5mm thick. With my hands. Yep, I was totally winging it.)

Preheat oven to 180oC. (Check!)

Sprinkle tart shell with the second lot of almond plus 1tbsp of the sugar. Spread fruit over shell, leaving 5cm border. Fold border up to hold fruit in, leaving a gap in the middle. Sprinkle remaining sugar on pastry. 

(Because I was transporting ingredients, I  combined the almonds and sugar in a freezer bag. Fortuitously there was a big lump of sugar in there to sprinkle on the pastry at the end, so I set that aside then sprinkled a thin layer of the combined mixture onto the tart shell, then dumped the berries into the bag, trapped some air in it as if you were crumbling/flouring meat and shook it around to coat the berries. I then spread that mixture on, folded the edges up and sprinkled on the sugar. More than one way to skin a cat!)

Bake on the lowest shelf for about 45 minutes, until the pastry is golden. Cool on tray until just warm (we know how impatient I am - I cooled it for around five minutes!), dust with icing sugar (I didn't), cut into slices and serve with cream. 

Dodgy iPhone photo (nicely styled cream, though!):

 

The half(ish) batch would have served four. 

Leftovers!

 

This is quite an easy recipe, and although it requires refrigeration steps, you can kind of work around that as you cook your main course. It's definitely one I'll make again. And because it's freeform, it doesn't matter a jot if it turns out "rustic" (or, to the average bystander, "ugly"). 

Enjoy!

Teacup Apple Crumble

So... is it me, or does anyone else suffer from the illusion that things that come in tiny servings must be healthy? Mini muffins. Fun-sized Mars Bars. Fun-sized anything. Mini Magnums. Doughnut centres. Aeroplane-sized cans of Coke. And that somehow, because it's in a tiny portion (and therefore uses more packaging - three cheers for environmental destruction!), you can eat more of them. Like two. For the purposes of this, let's say two. We don't need to dig deeper into my abysmal snacking habits here right now.

 

Now, I love apple crumble. I love apple crumble almost as much as I love deluding myself. So making apple crumbles in tiny portions seemed like the perfect idea. Sure, I could have made them in shot glasses like you see at cocktail parties, but come on, you need enough apple crumble for it to work its wonderful, warming magic on you.

 

INGREDIENTS:

 

3 apples

1tsp sugar

1tsp cinnamon

3 cloves

A little water

1tbsp butter

1tsp cinnamon

2tbsp brown sugar

3tbsp plain flour

 

(Note that I "wrote" the quantities into the My Fitness Pal app in grams (which was a rough conversion to begin with), and now I'm converting it back, so they may be a little out. Play with it until it feels (and tastes!) right!)

 

Peel and roughly dice apples. Cook them, covered, with a little water and the sugar and spices until softened - around 5 minutes. Make sure they don't stick. Once softened, tip off any extra water and leave cover off.

 

Meanwhile, rub butter, cinnamon, sugar and flour together until evenly distributed. Try not to "test" too much of it - rest assured that it really does taste quite nice!

 

Grease 3 (or 4, depending on their size) oven-proof teacups. Divide apple mixture among the teacups. Remove and discard cloves. Top with the crumble mixture.

 

Bake in a pre-heated oven at 200oC for around 5-10 minutes, until lightly browned. Obviously I can't remember whether it was 5 or 10 minutes, and as you can see from the scorched bits hidden under the ice cream, I overshot the mark, so keep an eye on it! All you're doing is browning the topping as the filling should still be hot. At some stage in the near future I will make this again and test the times but for now, hey guys, it's apple crumble. It's not rocket science. It needs to be hot, and apple-y, and cinnamon-y, and wonderful. No biggie.

 

 

Enjoy one with a scoop of ice cream. Or two.

 

And for those health-conscious peops out there, there are 301 calories per serving without adding ice cream. So it's probably just as well you made these in a tea cup, otherwise you'd go back to the pan a sneak another spoonful. And then another... and another... and another... yeah, I'm onto you!