Peach Melba Cheesecake for a summer party

 

 

Cheesecake seems to be my default dessert in the summer as it's light and creamy, and you can add all sorts of flavours - my husband prefers chocolate desserts but I don't want to cook with chocolate that much when the weather is hot!

Last weekend we went to his aunt and uncle's house for a family party and I was asked if I could make a dessert. Cheesecake is usually popular and easy to make, so I chose a peach melba cheesecake recipe from a book called Cheesecake by Hannah Miles.

I was buying the ingredients several days in advance and have found fresh raspberries go mouldy very quickly before, so decided to use tinned; I also had tinned peaches in the cupboard so decided to use those instead of fresh. Finally I decided not to make the glaze to go on top - so here's what I did.

for the base
300g malted milk biscuits
150g butter, melted
300g tin of raspberries in syrup, drained - reserve a few for the decoration

for the filling
4 sheets leaf gelatine
410g tin of peach slices in juice or syrup, drained
100g caster sugar
200g cream cheese
250g ricotta
150ml double cream

for the topping
half a 410g tin of peach slices in juice or syrup, drained
a few raspberries to decorate

I didn't make the glaze to go on the top partly due to lack of time but partly as I didn't think I fancied it - it looked like a thin layer of jelly essentially. If you want to find out how to do that part have a look at the book.

Crush the biscuits in a blender in a few batches.

Melt the butter in a small pan or in a microwave-proof bowl in the microwave and stir in the biscuits.

Press into the bottom of a loose-bottomed cake or tart tin, pressing some of the biscuit up the sides to form a crust. Spread the raspberries over the biscuit base.

Soften the gelatine leaves in a bowl of water for 5 minutes or according to pack instructions.

Meanwhile puree the peaches in a food processor and set aside.

Mix the sugar, cream cheese and ricotta in a large bowl until creamy.

Heat the cream in a small pan until it is just warm. Squeeze the water out of the gelatine leaves and stir into the cream, mixing until all the gelatine has dissolved. Whisk into the cheese mixture in the bowl and then fold in the peach puree.

Pour onto the prepared base and leave overnight in the fridge to set.

Just before you want to serve, decorate the top of the cheesecake with the peach slices and reserved raspberries.

This cheesecake was really light and creamy, with a nice flavour from the peaches and a burst of raspberry on the base. It disappeared quite quickly at our family lunch!

I'm sending this to Baking Crumbs hosted by Only Crumbs Remain
 and  CookBlogShare hosted by Glutarama

Oreo Marshmallow Fluff Cheesecake

Whenever I buy a jar of marshmallow fluff for a recipe I end up eating the whole jar  - not in one go, but it doesn't usually end up being used in the recipe I intended!

This time around I bought two jars so I could definitely make the recipe I wanted! My husband loves Oreos and I decided to make an Oreo cheesecake and use the marshmallow fluff in the filling.

I kind of made the recipe up as I went along and it didn't set particularly firm - you need to eat this with a spoon rather than a fork - but it tasted really good!

See the recipe below..









You need:
1 packet Oreos
50g butter
213g jar marshmallow fluff
200g tub soft cheese
100ml crème fraiche
100g icing sugar

 

Crush the Oreos either with a rolling pin or in a blender. Melt the butter in a small pan over a low heat or in the microwave and stir in the crushed Oreos.

Press into the bottom of a 7 or 8 inch loose-bottomed cake tin.

In a large bowl, mix together the marshmallow fluff, soft cheese, crème fraiche and icing sugar and spread over the crushed Oreo base.

Allow to set in the fridge, ideally overnight.

I'm sharing this with Baking Crumbs and Casa Costello's Bake of the week (even though there is no actual baking involved!) and CookBlogShare.

Easter Egg Cheesecake

 
Easter is definitely an excuse/opportunity for some nice baking and desserts - almost any recipe can be improved with the addition of mini eggs!

A few days ago I read about a cafe in Wales that was serving cheesecakes made inside Easter egg shells - the article has been circulating on the internet and while I thought it was a great idea, I was almost surprised it hadn’t been done before, as it looks such a simple idea!

In fact so simple that it looked pretty easy to make something similar myself, which is exactly what I decided to do.

I used a basic no-bake cheesecake recipe keeping the flavour plain, as it has the chocolate shell and I was going to add some decorations on top, but you could easily change the flavour of the cheesecake by adding lemon zest and juice, or butterscotch flavouring, or cocoa powder and/or grated chocolate (I did consider the latter but thought it would be too much chocolate), you could even crush up some Easter egg shells or some maltesers or some mini eggs to the cheesecake mix!

You can also make your own Easter egg shell using a mould, which I have done before, but this time didn’t have that much time so bought a cheap Easter egg and used the shell from that. 

Easter egg cheesecakes

To serve two, you need:

One hollow Easter egg shell - I used one from a 141g Mars Easter egg but I think the weight included the Mars bar itself. You don’t want a particularly big egg shell as this is a rich dessert so the sort of small Easter egg aimed at children is probably best

300ml double cream

3 digestive biscuits

25g butter
70g icing sugar
180g tub Philadelphia cheese 
Choc Shot (liquid chocolate in a bottle that's technically for making hot chocolate but can be used for all sorts of things), mini eggs and mini malteser bunnies to decorate - or whatever you like

Unwrap the foil from the Easter egg and place the blade of a sharp knife in a cup of hot or boiling water for a few minutes - this will help cut through to separate the shell into two halves without breaking it. Carefully insert the knife on the join around the easter egg and cut it into two halves.

Crush the biscuits either in a blender or in a plastic freezer bag with a wooden spoon and put to one side. Melt the butter in a bowl in the microwave or in a small pan over a low heat, and when melted stir in the crushed biscuits.

Stand each chocolate egg shell on a plate and spoon half the biscuits into each one.

With a hand mixer, whisk the double cream until it forms soft peaks, then beat in the soft cheese and stir in the icing sugar until combined.

Spoon into the chocolate egg shells and put in the fridge to set.

Decorate however you like - I squeezed some Choc Shot in thin lines over the top and added some Cadbury Mini Eggs and a mini Maltesers bunny.

 

 

I'm sharing this with Cook Blog Share

Low Sugar Low Carb Diabetic Lemon Cheesecake

My sister, her partner and their one-year-old came to stay for new year which was lovely (especially fun introducing my niece and my cat to each other – I think it went fairly well!). I wanted to make a nice dessert for new year’s eve but of course am a bit limited now I have gestational diabetes (sorry to keep harping on about that – but it’s relevant to this recipe!).

 

Sweetener is a god-send when you can’t eat sugar – though I know there are people who avoid artificial sweeteners and have health concerns, so it’s not something I use often but as I did want to make an actual dessert that others would enjoy as well, it came in very handy.

 

I can also eat dairy products like cream, soft cheese, yogurt etc, so quickly decided on making a cheesecake. I prefer no-bake cheesecakes for the taste and texture, but a lot of them involve using condensed milk (I don’t know if you can get an unsweetened one but I figured it probably wasn’t possible to get sugar-free) and some cheesecakes involve raw egg. I made mine very simply, using a tub of Quark (curd cheese that is a bit like cream cheese only thicker, and doesn’t really have much of a flavour) mixed with soft cheese, lemon juice and sweetener – it tasted really good.

 

 

I’d read on a gestational diabetes diet sheet that I could have a couple of light digestive biscuits or rich tea biscuits (which struck me as odd as they do contain carbs and sugar) but I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I crushed up some digestives with a rolling pin in a plastic bag (the biscuits were in a plastic freezer bag, that is – not the rolling pin) and mixed with some melted butter and pressed into the base of a loose-bottomed cake tin. I then spooned the cheese topping on top and decided not to decorate it as most of the things I could think of involved sugar!

I left the cheesecake in the fridge for a day until we wanted to eat it – it really was the easiest thing to make and tasted really good. My sister was surprised that I could have it, even after I told her what was in it, but I had a reasonably-sized portion after a dinner of chicken and vegetables, and got a blood sugar reading that was perfectly within range. So this is a dessert I can recommend!

 

Mini Trick or Treat No Bake Lemon Cheesecakes for Halloween Party

 

Party food for Halloween parties is pretty easy, I think - as well as all the usual suspects (sausage rolls, sandwiches or mini burgers or quiche or whatever) and then any kind of 'scary stuff'. Here's an idea that's hopefully a little bit different.

I wanted to make something a bit different for Halloween but wasn’t quite sure what. I was in Iceland picking up a few groceries and saw these on the Halloween display: a pack of six mini plastic pumpkins, which you can fill with treats (or tricks!) and use as a game, a bit like an Easter egg hunt perhaps. They were only £1 so I bought them. I had a better use for them though – use them to serve desserts!

 

 

Of course these are plastic and can’t go in the oven but my mind went straight away to no-bake mini cheesecakes. When I got home I devised the following recipe.

I made, and served, each mini cheesecake inside the pumpkins – I went with a lemon flavour with a ginger biscuit base, but you could always do pumpkin flavour cheesecake or anything you like. I wanted to make one of the six a ‘trick’ rather than ‘treat’ and thought about putting a small plastic spider inside to surprise the recipient – but didn’t think that would go down too well with my husband!

 

Instead I decided to colour one of the cheesecake toppings green with food colouring. You could easily do that to all of them for a children’s Halloween party, but I thought it would be a nice touch when I served the mini cheesecakes in the closed pumpkins, if everyone chose their own and when one person opened theirs, they got a bit of a surprise!

Here’s the recipe I came up with

Mini no bake Halloween lemon and ginger cheesecakes - an original recipe by Caroline Cowe @Caroline Makes

 

 

Makes six mini cheesecakes

You can also make these mini cheesecakes in paper cupcake cases, or ramekins, or anything you think will work!

6 McVitie’s ginger biscuits

2 level tbsp. butter or marg, melted
175g cream cheese
60ml double cream
50g caster sugar
Juice of ½ lemon (or more to taste)
Couple of drops of green food colouring if desired

Crush the biscuits either in a food processor or with the back of a wooden spoon. Melt the butter either in a small pan over a low heat or in the microwave and stir in the crushed biscuits.

Divide between the cheesecake cases and press the biscuit mixture down using the back of a teaspoon.

In a separate bowl, beat the cheese, cream, sugar and lemon. If you want to colour all the cheesecakes, add the food colouring now.

 
Divide the cheesecake mixture between the cases. If you are only making one green, reserve a little of the cheesecake mixture in the bowl, add the food colouring then fill the final cheesecake.

Refrigerate until ready to serve.

 

 

I'm sharing these with Treat Petite, hosted by Kat the Baking Explorer and also with Cook Blog Share.

Red Velvet Cheesecake for Valentine's Day

I spent my first Valentine's Day with my husband at his mother's house - our boiler had broken down and luckily we were able to move in with her for a week. It did mean that my planned Valentine's dinner got postponed to some extent - I had wanted to make a nice dessert but didn't really want to make a mess of her kitchen!

So I waited until the following weekend when we were back in our house where I could make as much mess as I wanted, and finally made my husband his Valentine's dessert. I had fancied making a red velvet cake as I don't think I'd ever made one before, then while searching for a recipe online found this Eric Lanlard recipe for a red velvet cheesecake. It's a cross between a cake and a dessert so great for after a meal or in the middle of the afternoon on a weekend with a cup of tea.. any time really!

This cake-cum-cheesecake is absolutely amazing. It was pretty easy to make and tasted so, so good - the creamy filling in the middle was much better than buttercream!

You can find the recipe on the Baking Mad website; the only part I didn't manage to do was the cream cheese frosting around the sides. I made my frosting following the recipe but it was far too runny, and also slightly yellow in colour rather than white; I decided that I actually preferred to leave the sides of the cake exposed so you can see the depth of the filling inside.

I levelled the cake and crumbled up the part I sliced off, and spread the top of the cake with whipped double cream and then sprinkled the cake crumbs over the top; I'm not really sure that made a lot of difference to the appearance, taste or texture, but it did mean the crumbs all rolled off when I ate a slice of cake!

Did you know that when you make red velvet cake, it's not exactly a chocolate cake but does have 2 tbsp. cocoa powder in the mixture?

And the red colour originally came from the way the cocoa powder reacted with the acidity of baking soda, buttermilk and a dash of vinegar. But these days the cocoa powder that is commonly sold doesn't have such an acidic Ph level so you won't get the same kind of red colour any more. So most of the time when you see red velvet cake the colour has come from food colouring - which is exactly what I did here.

Spooning the cake mixture into the tin and levelling the surface.... yum

The cake came out of the oven with a fair dome to the top and a couple of cracks but that doesn't matter as I was going to level it.

Making the filling was fairly easy though involved a few steps. First you beat together the cream cheese, sugar and lemon juice then dissolve the gelatine and mix that in. Finally whip some cream and fold that in.

Here's the levelled cake, sliced in half - there is definitely a red tinge to the chocolate!

 

The way to get the filling to set properly inside the cake is to place a large piece of clingfilm in the loose-bottomed cake tin you used to make the cake (when it is cold of course). Put the bottom layer of cake into the tin onto the clingfilm and thickly spread the cream cheese filling over the top. Place the other layer of cake on top and wrap the whole thing in the clingfilm by bringing the film over the top. Put in the fridge overnight.

Carefully lift the cake, still in the clingfilm, out of the tin and unwrap. You have a delicious looking cake with a very deep layer of cheesecake in the middle.

 

I spread some whipped cream over the top and sprinkled over the reserved cake crumbs as I mentioned before.

I decided it needed something else - having decided that I wasn't going to or couldn't do the cream cheese icing around the sides and on the top, so piped on rosettes of double cream all around the top.

It looks quite pretty I think!

The cake and cheesecake combo was absolutely delicious and definitely something I would make again - I might try in a different flavour next time!

I'm sharing this with We Should Cocoa, hosted by Choclette at Tin and Thyme.

I'm also sending it to Cook Blog Share, hosted by Kirsty at Hijacked by Twins.

 

Chocolate and Caramel Brownie Mini Cheesecakes

 

 

Coming back from our honeymoon in the Galapagos Islands earlier this year, we had a very long layover at Miami airport. To kill some time we went to a nearby shopping mall and had lunch at the Cheesecake Factory - the third US city where I've eaten at one of those restaurants. I can't get enough of the cheesecake!

This time I had the caramel pecan turtle cheesecake - named after a particular brand of chocolate called turtles. It consisted of a pecan brownie and caramel-fudge swirl cheesecake, topped with caramel turtle pecans and chocolate. It was so good- though of course I couldn't eat more than half of it!

Back at the airport, shopping to use up the last of my dollars, I bought a packet of  - which contained a pecan and soft caramel covered in chocolate. I'd had them before so didn't eat them right away and brought them home. A few weeks ago I found them in the cupboard and decided to see if I could recreate the Cheesecake Factory dessert. The only caveat being that my husband doesn't like nuts!

I found this copycat recipe which looks amazing; but I was making the dessert on a night when I had been out all day and needed to make some shortcuts. I also wanted to turn them into mini cheesecakes rather than one large one. I'd just had an Asda delivery a couple of days before so had bought some chocolate brownies; I used these as the base of my dessert, cutting out a circle to put in the bottom of a silicon muffin tray.

 

I followed the recipe instructions for the filling, using a tin of Carnation caramel for the caramel sauce. This is the cream cheese, egg, sugar and vanilla mixture, poured on top of the brownie base which was obviously already cooked as it was ready made.



 

I mixed the chocolate sauce with the caramel sauce and swirled it in to the cheesecake mixture:

 

 

Here they are after being baked in the oven.

 

 

I topped each mini cheesecake with a layer of Carnation caramel and a drizzle of chocolate sauce - I used Choc Shot as you can squeeze out a thin drizzle easily. Finally I topped each one with a mini chocolate turtle.

 

 

Here is the view from the side. These were amazing - one mini cheesecake was enough as they are quite rich but the flavours of the caramel and chocolate, and the texture of the cheesecake on the brownie base, were just amazing. Almost as good as at the Cheesecake Factory!

 

 

I'm sending these to Treat Petite, hosted by Stuart at Cakeyboi and Kat, the Baking Explorer, for their monthly baking challenge.

 

 

I'm also sharing these with We Should Cocoa, hosted by Choclette at Tin and Thyme.