Cheesecake of the heavens

Otherwise known as “Caramel crunch Cheesecake”, this is heavenly in two ways:

1. It tastes like it was made by angels singing hymns to chocolate in the temple of cheese.
2. It will speed your ascent to the next world, to join the ranks of the chorus.

 

A little slice of heaven brings you little closer to it.

 

As discussed here, this cheesecake poses that age-old question, “cake and death?“  to which there is only one answer: “yes please!”.  You will note that the slice above is very, very small, as it leaves you very, very full and very, very happy. Despite this I still had to have another piece… oops.

There isn’t much to say except for the usual disclaimer:

Dan helped with the “cleaning the bowls” (no actual washing up was necessary, strangely…)

Who made it: Anna.

Recipe: Cheesecakes, Pavlovas & Trifles, by the Australian Women’s Weekly (!), page 8.

Vegan Blueberry and Apple Muffins

For Cake Club I decided to make Blueberry Muffins.  As we have a Vegan in our midsts it is always a good excuse to experiment.  I’m pleased I did – the normal muffins were something of a disappointment, but these quite made up for it.  Since I kind of made it up, I’ll give a full recipe (sadly no photo though).

The basic idea is that instead of eggs, the pectin from fruit can act as a setting agent.  Banana is a common option, but I opted for Apple since we had some.  Searching around on the internet, I found this recipe that was along the same idea – and didn’t require very many specialist ingredients.  I also didn’t have enough Blueberries for both recipes, so split them and made up the difference with cranberries, which worked really well.  They come out very moist, rich and delicately fluffy.

Clearly, you could replace the soy cream with real cream, and perhaps replacing a little oil with an egg would firm things up for non-vegans.  Saying  that, there really is no need – these are very tasty.

Ingredients (makes 12)

• 2 small apples
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar
• 250ml soy cream
• 200ml oil (vegetable, olive, sunflower, anything will work.)
• 200g self raising flour
• 200g caster sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 100g blueberries
• 50g cranberries (dried)

Method

1. Cook the apple in a saucepan with the sugar until soft (adding water to prevent it drying out).  When cooked, mash lightly.  (I forgot to do this…)
2. Mix the sugar, flour and baking powder together with the apple.  Whilst mixing, slowly add the oil and then the soy milk.  Finally add the cranberries and blueberries and mix gently.
3. Pour into muffin cases (it is OK to fill them at least 2/3rds full.  They do rise, but will not stay as risen as ordinary muffins – I underfilled them.
4. Bake at 200 degrees celcius for 20-25 minutes or until golden brown.

Recipe: Mostly my own, adapted from naturallyvegetarianrecipes.com.

Who made it: Dan

Quick Chocolate Mousse

This rich mousse is really easy to make, and for the lover of rich, dark chocolate is a great pudding.

 

Chocolate, in Mousse form

 

Actually, for me this was a little rich.  We used a rich, dark chocolate which is mixed in with (single!) cream, some raw egg and some Marsala.  That is all that is in there – but somehow, it tastes richer than the chocolate that went in!  Very strange. The egg doesn’t contribute to the flavour – it just makes it set in the fridge – and somehow the cream doesn’t take the edge off.

I think dark chocolate lovers would like this a lot more than I did, and perhaps I’d prefer it with milk chocolate.  But I do appreciate that there is no gelatine in it!

Who made it: Anna

Recipe: “The daily cook book” by Love Food, February 24th.

Banoffee pie

Mmmm, sweet wonderful banoffee pie.

The old-English* for perfection is written "banoffee".

This particular banoffee pie was a mixture of several recipes: A co-op leaflet, mixed with the BBC food recipe.  I think we scored the best of both here.  For a 7″ tin we made the base by melting 50g of butter into 100g of digestive biscuits, then pressing the mixture into the tin and baking for 10 minutes.  Then we put 1 small banana chopped up into pieces on the base, and covered with the toffee mixture: 200ml of condensed milk, 50g of buter and 50g of golden caster sugar, heated together in a pan until it boils then simmering for 5 minutes until the consistency thickens and the colour changes to a rich caramel.  On top of the toffee we added another layer of banana and refridgerated the lot.  To serve, you add 125ml of whipped cream and drizzle with chocolate sauce (we used a pre-made pack, but 20g of melted dark chocolate would be fine).

Mmm, banoffee.,, this stuff is death on a plate, there is no way you can say no.  Definitely one of the better banoffee pie recipes out there.

There are alternative things to try here: different types of caster sugar produce different toffee flavours, and I’ve seen suggestions for putting ginger or cinnamon in the toffee.  Then the cream can be flavoured in many ways too – I can imagine a baileys or Tia Maria flavour working very well.  Then the BBC recipe suggests using oaty biscuits instead of digestives; intriguing.  That there is 32 different banoffee pies – its my hope to try them all this year   What?  Its less than one a week!

*: The banoffee pie is actually an English adaptation of an American recipe.  See, who said trans-Atlantic cultures couldn’t learn anything from each other?

Who made it: Anna and Dan jointly.

Recipe: Mysterious internet mixture of ideas.  See above for details.

Tiramisu

Tasty yummy tiramisu.  What can be said about it?

Lite cake gone mad...

Well, its sponge fingers soaked in coffee and marsala, with cream that is also flavoured by marsala and mascapone.

That is that, really.  Its very tasty and very easy.  Also, the recipe makes about 4 times more than it claims to feed, evidence that perhaps there is divine support for the pudding.

Who made it: Anna and Dan jointly.

Recipe: “cheescakes, pavlovas and trifles”, by Woman’s Weekly.

Lemon Delight Pudding

This excellent pudding is extremely simple and very moreish. I guess it’s somewhere between a cake and a milk pudding.  Sadly we have no picture, but its nothing at all to look at – just a pale yellow “stuff” baked to a golden brown on top.  Instead I’ll describe what goes in: 150g of sugar, 50g butter, juice and zest of a lemon, 50g flour, 2 eggs, separated, and 200ml of milk.  You whisk the egg until stiff then fold everything in together.  This keeps the pudding airy during baking, which is for 30 minutes at 150 degrees.  It sets to an extremely light fluffy mixture with the lemon zest proving the occasional bit of texture.  It’s a very lemony, very tasty pudding!

Who made it: Dan and Anna jointly.

Recipe: “Cakes, bakes, puddings and prayers” by Susan Over, page 38.

Profiteroles

The final stop in our three course dinner was:

Profiteroles

Profiteroles: an excuse to have chocolate. Mmm, chocolate.

I’ve never been that fond of profiteroles, and until making them, I never understood why.  It turns out that there are two styles of profiterole: the “true” ones that we made, but there is also a sweetened version that I suspect you most often get from bakeries and supermarkets.  It turns out I like the sweetened version most.

The “bun” part of the profiterole is “choux” pastry: butter, flour and egg.  Notice the lack of sugar.  As they are, these taste the same as a scone, with a slightly lighter texture.  As you can see from our picture, ours didn’t come out in the nice round circles I’m used to seeing, but actually looked like mini buns.  They are also quite finicky about how long you cook them; half of ours were a bit too crispy, though the rest were just fine.

You then chop these in half and fill them with whipped cream.  Here comes my second disappointment; I don’t really like cream.  When its sweetened, its just great, but these aren’t.  So: we basically have cream sandwiches at this stage; chocolate éclair without the chocolate.  They don’t taste any better than shop bought ones, and it is fairly tricky to get right.

Finally, you drizzle the whole lot in chocolate sauce, and finally I begin to see the point in profiteroles.  The recipe calls for brandy to give the sauce a little extra, but we took a gambit and came up trumps by instead adding Cherry Brandy.  I’ve only recently discovered this stuff (see here), and I’m forming the following hypothesis:

“Everything tastes better with Cherry Brandy.”

Now this is still an open question; we need to do some experiments before I can call this a true theory!  But it certainly works here; it turns a dull pile of cream sandwiches into a cherry chocolate explosion.   I don’t really see any purpose in making profiteroles again – not unless I find sweeter recipe – but I’m certainly going to take the next excuse I can to make chocolate sauce with Cherry Brandy.  Yum!

Who made it: Anna and Dan jointly.

Recipe: “Halleyujah! Chocolate!” , page 44.

Chocolate Pots

Chocolate Pots. That would be pots, filled with chocolate.

Dark chocolate, white chocolate and milk chocolate make for a chocolatey chocolateness

This recipe comes from  the “Co-operative magazine” which mysteriously appears every so often in the post.  In fact, this magazine has some exceptionally good recipes in; so good we thought “Mmm, lets write a blog about all this yummy food”.

This comes as a slight disappointment on the tail of the previous recipes from the co-op, which remain sadly unreviewed. The bottom layer is a creamy chocolate sauce, topped by white chocolate mousse, and a milk chocolate mousse.  These are all pretty tasty as you’d expect, but the overall effect is extremely sweet and it took me two tries to make it all the way though.

This is a shame, as the dessert would have made a perfect topping for a cake, or flavouring for smaller chocolates.  In general, I’ve found this sort of dessert a bit much, favouring instead cakes or baked puddings.  Perhaps I’m just a simple cake monster and should stick to what I know and love?

Who made it: Anna slaved over a hot stove and a whirring blender whilst Dan supervised by licking everything he could find.  Yes, everything.