strawberry & rhubarb cheesecake tart

Time is doing freaky things all over the place at the moment, and I don't like it. I keep intending to post a particular recipe that just-can't-wait, and then thinking, you know, 'shit, better post that asparagus tart before next year's asparagus turns up', or 'when is rhubarb season over'?

I don't know when rhubarb season is over, but I'm posting this in the hopes that the answer is Not Yet.

So that's annoying enough to keep track of, but you want to know what's really weird? My nineteenth birthday. The other day. Um, what? Nineteen is old. Nineteen is resolutely Not A Child. Nineteen sucks.

Interesting fact for you: I was sixteen when I began Happy Love Strawberry. I mean, okay, it was like the day before my seventeenth birthday. But still! I was technically sixteen! And ever since, one thing I've heard a lot is 'I can't believe you're only 17/18/so young'. No longer!

I think I can feel my cells dying.

Anyway, since summer is going by crazyfast - does time do this as you get older? Oh my god, I'm having an age crisis here - I had to rethink the post I'd initially planned for today so I could share this with you before the last of the strawberries & rhubarb is lost to us. Lost, like my youth.

So: this recipe. You know when I fell in love with the brown sugar cinnamon pastry of my apricot galette, a few weeks ago? Well, I promised you'd see it again, and here it is; but this time, with a creamy layer of baked vanilla cheesecake between pastry and fruit - because everyone knows that anything is better with cheesecake involved. And yes, it's another big hit with my mother, especially warm from the oven and finished with a melting scoop of vanilla ice cream. Oh my.

Strawberry & Rhubarb Cheesecake Tart

I had no idea if I even liked rhubarb before making this tart - but yum, apparently I do. If you're dubious over it, you can definitely use all strawberries, but you'd need to reduce the sugar a little (likewise, if you wanted to use all rhubarb (900g/2lb), I'd up the sugar back to 85g/3oz; these were the original proportions in the recipe I based this upon).

This is the perfect late-summer dessert: a little sweet, a little tart, kind of wholesome, and wrapped in brown sugar cinnamon pastry. Do you think I've said those words enough times yet?

For the pastry:
150g (5oz) plain flour
50g (2oz) wholemeal flour
2 tsp cinnamon
140g (1 stick + 2 tbsp) cold butter, cut into small chunks
85g (3oz) light muscavado sugar
1 egg, separated
1 tbsp demerara sugar

1. Put the flour & cinnamon in a food processor and add the butter, processing to make fine crumbs. Reserve 2tbsp of the muscavado sugar, then add the remainder and the lemon zest, and briefly mix. Add the egg yolk and 1 tbsp water, then pulse to make a firm dough. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and briefly knead. Wrap in cling film and chill for 30 mins.

For the fruit:
juice of 1 whole lemon
450g (1lb) rhubarb
450g (1lb) strawberries, sliced
50g (2oz) caster sugar

2. Put the lemon juice in a pan with the rhubarb & caster sugar, and cook on a low heat til sugar is dissolved. Then cook for about 5 mins, tipping the strawberries in for the last minute or so (so they don't break up too much). It will be very juicy; tip it all into a sieve over a bowl and leave to cool.

Preheat oven to 200C.

For the cheesecake:
1 egg
finely grated zest of 1/2 lemon
400g (14oz) full-fat soft cheese
50g (2oz) caster sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla

3. Beat the egg in a bowl, then beat in soft cheese, sugar, vanilla and lemon zest.

4. Roll out pastry on a sheet of baking parchment to a roughly 12"/30cm round. Slide pastry & paper onto a large baking sheet. Spread cheesecake mixture over pastry to within 2"/5cm of the edges. Spread cooled fruit over top, then fold the pastry edges over the filling, leaving the centre exposed. Brush with reserved egg white & sprinkle with 1tbsp demerara sugar. Bake at 200C for 30mins.

5. Optional: While baking, heat the reserved juices with 50g sugar and boil for a few minutes until reduced to a thickish glaze (I left mine runny, for time reasons). Drizzle a little over the fruit to when out of the oven, and serve the rest warm, separately. Eat warm or hot with ice cream.

Capital Letter Cheesecake Bars

Sometimes I suspect that I'm subliminally trying to sabotage my own baking efforts so I'll be forced to make something again. Take these for example. Yes, every square is a little mouthful of Purest Heaven... but I screwed up, of all things, the chocolate drizzle over the top. How can anyone screw up a chocolate drizzle? All you have to do is, uh, drizzle chocolate. But no; mine seized up in the microwave until I had to add so much milk and butter to sort it out that it turned into a sauce/glaze. And it bothers me. It really does. I keep looking at the pictures and imagining them with drizzle; it's the tragedy of my heart.

And I just know I won't be satisfied until I make them again. With chocolate drizzle. And then I'll have to eat them, and you know, my life is so traumatic?


There are possibly a couple of things that could persuade me to forgive these bars. Firstly: they're called 'chocolate chip cookie dough cheesecake bars', and if you think that's a mouthful, wait til you take a real one.

Secondly: OH MY DAYS THEY'RE THE BEST THINGS EVER.


I mean, hello, CHEESECAKE (I think we all know how I feel about cheesecake, and to avoid scaring off anyone who doesn't know, I won't go into further detail). COOKIE DOUGH. I think everyone feels the same way about cookie dough. CHOCOLATE CHIPS. Self explanatory. CAPITAL LETTERS.

--Okay, fine, I just like to over-emphasize. Otherwise you might've missed all the chocolate chip/cookie dough/cheesecake components in these chocolate chip cookie dough cheesecake bars, or something.

To summarise: you absolutely can't go wrong with something like this.



Apart from the chocolate drizzle. Apparently it's easier to go wrong with a chocolate drizzle than you'd expect.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cheesecake Bars
Adapted from the version found on Bake Or Break
The Essential Chocolate Chip Cookbook.

Crust:
200gish (1 & 1/2 c.) choc chip cookie crumbs (I used choc chip Maryland cookies cause my flatmate was, get this, THROWING THEM OUT. They'd apparently 'gone soft'. I DO NOT BELIEVE IN SUCH BLASPHEMY. The original recipe uses plain graham crackers/digestives but also includes about 70g mini chocolate chips, which I omitted)
75g unsalted butter, melted

Sorry measurements are vague, by the way; I did half quantities and improvised a lot. If you have American measuring cups, you might want to dig them out for this one.

Preheat oven to 325°.

1. Butter a 9"-square baking pan. Line pan with parchment paper, leaving enough to extend over the sides. Butter the parchment paper.

2. Combine cookie crumbs and butter until crumbs are moistened. Stir in chocolate chips if using. Press crust mixture into bottom of pan and 1 inch up sides. Bake for 6 minutes. Set pan on wire rack to cool

Cookie Dough:
75g unsalted butter, at room temperature
40g light brown sugar
3 tbsp caster sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
100g plain flour
100g (1 c.) semisweet chocolate chips

3. Using an electric mixer , mix butter, brown sugar, sugar, salt, and vanilla extract at medium speed until smooth. Decrease mixer speed to low and add flour. Mix just until incorporated. Stir in chocolate chips. Set aside.

Fun fact: I stirred this all by hand and broke my wooden spoon in half.

Not deliberately.

Filling:
280g cream cheese, at room temperature
45g (1/4 c.) caster sugar
1 large egg, at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

4. Using an electric mixer, beat cream cheese and sugar just until smooth. Add egg and vanilla extract, beating just until blended. Pour batter into baked crust. Drop cookie dough by teaspoonfuls over the top of the filling.

Bake about 30 minutes, or until set. Transfer to wire rack.

For chocolate topping, melt 1/3 cup semisweet chocolate chips in a double boiler or in the microwave. Add about 1/2 tablespoon of butter if necessary to make chocolate smooth. Drizzle over top of bars. Cool bars in pan completely, about an hour.

Using the edges of the parchment paper, remove bars from pan. Cut into bars and serve.

I'm In Love

I've told you before how I use food to show affection; in that case, I must love you people very very much. This is The Recipe you've waited all your lives for, The Recipe to end All Recipes; this is what you will want to eat for the rest of your life (probably considerably shortening it in the process; I can't be blamed if you die of vitamin deficiencies or whatever). This is the recipe I make repeatedly at the slightest excuse, and this is the recipe I made on Saturday for a potluck dinner with my friends before we all go our separate ways to university.

But you know, if you wanted to make it, you wouldn't need a momentous occasion like that. After the first time, you get good at making up occasions. You start inviting people round specially and pretending it's a big deal when really you see them every other day/they deliver your post. In my family, we started off making this recipe because it was Christmas, and finished up making it because it was Tuesday.

I've wanted to blog about this cheesecake more or less since Happy Love Strawberry was created (actually, it might have been the reason it was created; I forget) but as it's usually made for a big occasion there's never a chance for decent photos, and I really wanted to do this justice. And then, of course, I got my beautiful Nikon D40, and -- actually, it might have been the reason I got the Nikon D40, too. Hm.

Ohh, look at that texture. That's worth buying £300 worth of camera for.

I can only go on about this cheesecake before so long before you all want to beat my face in with a shovel (er, a surprisingly violent imagination just emerged there) so I will say only this: make this. Make this now. Make this if you want everyone who tastes it to fall in love with you. Make it to celebrate your birthday/Christmas/Easter/wedding/funeral/diabetes diagnosis -- okay, perhaps not that one.

The first person who comments and says 'I made this and I didn't like it...' gets their face beaten in with a shovel. I simply won't believe you.

White Chocolate & Raspberry Cheesecake
Recipe adapted from The People's Cookbook, as seen in Good Food magazine (July 07).
Serves 12

For the base:
85g (3oz) digestive biscuits, crushed (Americans; graham crackers. I usually use 100g of each for the base cause I like a little bit more)
85g (30z) ginger nut biscuits, crushed
85g (3oz) butter, melted

For the filling:
500g (1lb 2oz) white chocolate, broken into pieces
50g (2oz) butter
1/2 vanilla pod, split lengthways
500g (1lb 2oz) full fat soft cheese
50g caster sugar
175ml whipping cream
225g punnet fresh raspberries, plus extra to decorate

1. For the base, combine biscuits & butter, then press into the base of a 23cm (9.5") springform tin.

2. For the filling, put the chocolate, butter and vanilla pod in a heatproof bowl and microwave in 20-second bursts to melt it. Allow to cool slightly.

3. In another bowl, mix the soft cheese, sugar and whipping cream til smooth.

4. Remove the vanilla pod from the chocolate mixture and stir the chocolate into the cream. Gently stir in raspberries with a spatula, then spoon on top of the base, smooth carefully, and leave in the fridge to set (8-24 hours).

5. Remove from tin and decorate with raspberries to serve.

I go to uni on Saturday, so blog posts may be sporadic for a while - I'm hoping to get in this month's Daring Baker challenge but time might be against me this week. Bear with me a bit and I'll be back with part two of the sugarcraft flower tutorial soon ^__^.

Also, I made a Flickr account! I'm not sure why. But it makes me feel cool.

Yeah, I ate this. Win.

Life Is A Bowl Of Cherries

I imagine that as around 80% of you read this, you are basking in glorious heat. Perhaps you are steaming from the red-hot lasers of the sun's rays. Perhaps you are too weak to lift your eyelids, and are instead resting your sweaty forehead against your computer screens in exhaustion, attempting to comprehend what I'm blathering on about now. Perhaps you are flailing in agony as your blood boils in your very veins.

Yeah? Well, screw you. I'm bloody freezing, and my skylight has started to leak. Welcome to the UK.

It may be monsoon season here, but it's not all bad news. For starters; we're awash (boom boom) with fresh fruit. Strawberries, raspberries, cherries... which apparently aren't berries, despite deceptive rhyming. I genuinely didn't know that, although I suppose the lack of 'berry' at the end of the name should have given it away.

Something else I didn't know about cherries: they apparently reduce your chances of developing diabetes!

The amount of sugar I live on probably significantly increases my chance of developing diabetes. Thus, I have found the perfect solution:

Cherry cheesecake!

No, listen. I have a scientific basis for this, and everything. The cherries, right, counter-act the sugar in the cheesecake. Therefore, you have a completely neutral chance of developing health problems as a result of overindulgence. And by the same logic, surely, the cherries counteract any calories or fat in the cheesecake? You could eat this entire cheesecake, yes, and have effectively consumed nothing at all. Therefore it follows that you absolutely should eat as much cherry cheesecake as possible (within the limits of your stomach exploding, which my cherry vs. sugar hypothesis doesn't cover). **

I've sort of lost my scientific link now, haven't I?

**Disclaimer: Indigo has pulled this out of her arse as an excuse to singlehandedly demolish a cheesecake intended to feed eight people, and takes no responsibility for cavities/diabetes/obesity/stomach-explosion that may occur as a result of you taking her scientific argument too literally. Not that any of those things will occur. Provided you eat enough cherries.

'Ent science a beautiful thing?

There's only one thing better than science. And that's cheesecake.

Cherry Cheesecake Slice
Recipe from BBC Good Food
Follow the link!

A couple of things. 1) Use good quality shortbread biscuits, not rubbishy ones (I have done it both ways, and it makes a difference. The photos are the cheap biscuits - what, I'm a cheap person - but with the nice ones you get a lovely crumbly buttery cheesecake base, so much better than regular digestives.) and 2)Don't put in the oven and then go off to watch telly and completely forget about it - I saved it more-or-less in time, but it wasn't as good as the first time I made it.

Still good though. Still sugar-neutal, this-isn't-going-kill-you, Indy-should-quit-science amounts of Good. Ohh yes.