Cappuccino Cheesecake

I promised it, and here it is: Cheesecake.

I took this recipe out of the same cheesecake recipe book as my first Cheesecake post, and I have to say it was just as good as that one. I modified the recipe slightly to use a brewed shot of espresso rather than instant coffee, but I'm a bit of a coffee snob like that.

So without further ado, here it comes.

Cappuccino Cheesecake
(Serves 1, unless anyone else hears that you've made it)

Ingredients

Base

1 1/2C crushed Wine Biscuits
2T Sugar
50g Butter

Filling

500g Cream Cheese
1/2C Sugar
1 1/2T Flour
2 Eggs
1/2C Sour Cream
1 Short Black, with a pinch of cinnamon mixed in.

Whipped cream to serve

Pour a strong shot of espresso coffee. Add sugar and drink. This will put a spring in your step, if nothing else. Pour another shot for the cheesecake mixture and place in the freezer or fridge to cool.
Combine all the ingredients for the base in a blender, then press into a 20cm springform tin lined with baking paper. Bake at 160C for 10 minutes, remove from the oven and cool. Increase oven temperature to 230C.
In the blender, combine the cream cheese, sugar and flour, mixing at a medium speed until well blended. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing each in well. Add the Sour Cream and blend.
Add the cold coffee to the filling and mix well. Pour the filling over the base and bake for 10 minutes. Reduce the heat to 120C and bake for another 1 - 1 1/2 hours. Test with a knife to determine that the centre of the cheesecake is cooked.
Loosen from the rim of the tin and allow to cool before removing. Chill.
Serve with whipped cream or natural yoghurt, and maybe, just maybe, coffee.

(I'm going to be honest - I ate this for breakfast, just because I could.)

A New Yorker in New Zealand

I'm not a big desserts sort of a guy. You may have picked up on that from the scarcity of desserts gracing these pages. That and the fact that I refer to my lovely wife as Dessert Chef.

It is Dessert Chef that does the desserts. That is just how it is.

Until Dessert Chef got a book for her birthday.
If there is a dessert that can get my mouth watering at the very thought, it is real cheesecake.

For real cheesecake, I will enter the kitchen, roll up my sleeves and make dessert.

Also, and perhaps more importantly, the opportunity to make cheesecake was the best excuse I had ever had to buy a blender.

Yes, I can hear you. You're saying: "what, you don't already have a blender?" Well now I do.

There was no point wasting any more time. It's many years now since we were in New York, but my first stop on the Cheesecake Highway was at the corner of Fifth and Broadway.

I will say this: living out this particular dream was not a cheap one. You could have bought three of those cheap, sugary things that call themselves cheesecakes in supermarket fridges by the time you'd made this cheesecake. But the taste, without a doubt, simply does not compare.

And in reality I could have halved this recipe and made one smaller cheesecake which would have served us perfectly well, too. As it was we were eating cheesecake every night for half the week.

I am not complaining. Not one crumb.

New York Style Cheesecake

(Serves just the two of you, if you hide it from your guests)
Ingredients

Base
120g Wine Biscuits
3/4 C Sugar
50g melted Butter

Filling
1 1/2 C Sour Cream
1 C Sugar
2 Eggs
1 t Vanilla Essence
500g Cream Cheese
40g melted Butter
For the base, blend the biscuits, sugar and melted butter. (Look at the blender go. Isn't it sweet?)
Grease a 23cm springform pan and line the bottom with the base mixture, pressing down firmly and as evenly as possible.
Blend the sour cream, sugar, eggs and vanilla until smooth. (There it goes; that's one sweet blender.)
Chop up your cream cheese into small blocks. (I just wanted an excuse to put in a photo of the cream cheese. Nomnomnomnom.)
Add the cream cheese to the sour cream mixture and blend. Pour in the melted butter as you blend the mixture down to a smooth consistency. (You couldn't do that without a sweet, sweet blender.)
Pour the mixture over the base and spread out in an even layer.

Put the oven rack one third of the way up, and Fan Bake at 170C for 45mins. Check the interior of the cheesecake is cooked by sticking a knife in it - if it comes out mostly clean, it's done. (Ours took almost an hour.)

Refrigerate for at least 4 hours, overnight if you can.
Dust with icing sugar and serve with freshly whipped cream.

The Pudding to End All Puddings

It's been an awfully long time since I wrote about dessert, hasn't it?

OK, maybe not that long. But long enough.

So when Dessert Chef started making noises about cooking up what sounded like the ultimate pudding of all time, I was all for it.
It involved lovely ripe winter pears.
It required stewing those pears down with sugar, and getting some stewed rhubarb out of the freezer.
It involved crumble. Lovely, lovely crumble.
It involved custard.
There was pastry, rolled and pressed into a buttered pan and filled with the stewed fruit.
The custard went on top.
Then came the crumble.
Then the oven.
Lastly, it involved a bowl, a spoon, and a dollop of ice-cream.

There are no words necessary.

Fruit Crumbly Umbly

As promised, there was dessert at Jarratt & Evies. What's more, I made it.

Yes, you heard right. I made dessert. If you'll remember from my last post, Dessert Chef was feeling under the weather, but since we had already said we would bring dessert, my hand was all but forced.

I know I've already posted a crumble recipe this year, but most of that was shot by torchlight, and it was all about living off the land and wotnot. This is exciting because, as I might have already mentioned, I made dessert.

Did I mention that I made this dessert myself? Well, I did.
So I mixed up some stewed rhubarb, blackberries and apple,
made up a crumble from butter, flour and sugar, and took it all with me to assemble and cook after dinner. If you're not going to cook them straight away and you don't keep the two separate, you see, the flour goes soggy and then you have more of a stewed fruit mush than a crumble.
So the crumble goes over the fruit, like so, and it goes in the oven for about 20 minutes at 180c, maybe with a little bit of a grill/broil at the end.
So there you have it. If even a pudding-lummox like me can do it, it must be pretty easy.

(For the record, before you start pointing out continuity errors, the picture above is the little one I cooked at home for Dessert Chef and the little guy. I might have gone out and left them at home to be sick together, but at least I was good enough to make dessert before I went).
Jarratt's oven was a teensy bit more powerful than ours. But I have a good nose, so disaster was averted. Certainly nothing that ice cream couldn't save.
I had a little bit of leftover crumble, so the next day I stewed up some overripe pears we had sitting in the fruit bowl and made a pear crumble.

Two desserts in one weekend! That's like two eclipses in one year!

Holiday Kai: Blackberry Crumble

You've gotta love wild blackberries. Of course, the Thames-Coromandel District Council regards them as a noxious weed, due to the thorny plant's invasive nature, but it seems a bit ridiculous to make them illegal.

"That plant produces vast amounts of edible berries that people can gather and eat for free. Ban them!"

Ah, but enough with the cynicism. Let's just bear in mind that if bureaucracy has its way, the simple pleasure of ripping your hands and legs to shreds as you tread gingerly through wiry patches of sprawling blackberries may be drawing to a close, so get out there and make the most of it.

Well, maybe next season.
I'm very lucky, in that there is a huge blackberry patch on my Dad's farm, which he is making an effort to look after and keep harvestable (read: careful pruning to leave paths through the creepers that won't leave you in need of a transfusion by the time you've filled your ice-cream container). When we were up there last month, we made the most of the end of the season, by stocking up on lovely, sweet berries to use in a crumble.
Ice-cream containers full of blackberries remind me of being a kid. Nomnomnom.
Anyway, my Nana made the crumble using her old recipe that never fails. Start with your blackberries, about a litre (for want of a better measure),
and one apple, stewed down to sauce.
Mix the apple, berries and 1/2 - 1 Cup of sugar, to taste.
Make sure your little campfire is hot, and burning down to lovely embers.
Add the crumble, which is a mixture of butter, self-raising flour and more sugar. (I wish I could be more accurate, but whatever I made my notes on about this at the time is nowhere to be found now)
Carefully place the pie dish in a Camp Oven, and make sure it's tight.
Spread out a nice bed of coals, put the Camp Oven in the centre of the embers, and pile them up around the base of the oven.
Shovel hot coals over the top of the Oven, covering the lid completely. Leave to cook for about 20 minutes.
Dust off the ashes and remove from the fire. Carefully remove the lid and extract the pie dish.
With the help of a torch, dish up the crumble and try to get photos. Indulge while it's hot, then stoke up the fire and enjoy the bush in the cool of the evening.

(It's OK Dan, you'll be on holiday again one day.)

How to make a Bug out of a Cake

Our son is 2, and he loves bugs. For his 2nd Birthday, Dessert Chef decided to make him a bug cake.

I'll point out once again that anything which is essentially a pudding, even if it's masquerading as a Southeast Asian delicacy, is not my cup of tea. But the effort that went into this work of art and the awesome final result both deserve mention.

Full credit to the girl who doesn't even like bugs getting up close and personal with this one.

Bug Cake
Bake two chocolate cakes, one smaller than the other. (Don't look to me for a cake recipe, mind you.)
Ice one with vanilla icing, the other with chocolate icing with a touch of black food colouring.
Get creative with the sweets jar to give our friend a grin that little kids won't run away from.
Spend a long while getting intimate with a piping bag full of, alternately, green and black icing, until you have a deceptively furry spider.
A for Affort, Dessert Chef!
A few bits of licorice for legs and some marshmallows for feet, plus a menagerie of followers, and you have one cake disguised as a cuddly insectoid beasty.

I think it might be the only insect I've ever eaten and enjoyed. It sure was tasty.

Crunchy Lemon Muffins

I have said in the past that I need to post more desserts here, but the fundamental flaw in that plan is that I really don't do desserts. Luckily, my lovely wife has earned the moniker Dessert Chef for a reason.

Not so much a dessert or a pudding as a sweet treat, these lemon muffins are straight from Kiwi legend cook Alison Holst's repertoire. They're sweet yet tart, and soft on the inside but crunchy on the outside. They're more than just a dessert. They're an artform.

Crunchy Lemon Muffins

(Makes 6 large muffins and 12 mini Muffins - so probably makes 12 normal-sized muffins - that's my inexpert guess, based on what I have to move out of the way in the oven drawer when I'm trying to get a roast ready...)

Sift the following into a bowl:

2 Cups of Flour
4 t Baking Powder
3/4 Cup of Sugar

Melt 75g of butter in a bowl and add 1 Cup of milk, 1 egg, and the grated rind of 1 large lemon (or 2 small lemons) and combine well with a fork. Combine wet and dry ingredients until the dry ingredients have been lightly dampened but not thoroughly mixed. Divide the mixture into greased muffin trays and bake at 200C for 10 mins.

Stir together 1/4 cup of lemon juice and 1/4 cup of sugar, without dissolving the sugar. Brush this over the muffins as soon as they are removed from the oven. Remove the muffins from the trays as quickly as possible so that the sugar doesn't set and stick to the tray. Brush any excess mixture over the underside of the muffins.