Chocolate Cheesecake

A few nights ago we had guests round so I got to make CHEESECAKE!!! Baked white chocolate cheesecake to be exact. Making the base was great anger management as I got to crush to biscuit to smithereens. This pudding was quite fattening as there is about 900g of full-fat cream cheese!

To go with this rich desert I made a raspberry coulis. It was sweet and had a little alcohol in it. I put in lemon liquor, it gave a lovely after taste.

Serving the desert caused a problem, the base decided to stick to the bottom of the tin, so everyone got cheesecake with a side of biscuit base.

This recipe came from a GoodFood magazine.   

Panzanella

Mum and I were watching a cooking programme on telly and saw that the chef was cooking Panzanella. So mum went to the shops and bought some bread, but I couldn’t make that day as the bread was supposed to be stale so I had to wait till the next day. You have to prepare it in advance so the bread can soak up the juices, so you had to plan ahead.

To prepare the veg I had to place tomatoes in boiling water for a few minutes until the skin started to crack and peel, then I took them out with a spoon and peel the rest of the skin off. You then had to scoop the seeds out of the tomatoes and pour it over the bread, along with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and garlic. The peppers and chilli had to be roasted under the grill until charred on all sides. The veg got chopped up and layered with the bread, along with black olives and capers.

French Fancies

For the past week I have been in France on a school trip, so when I got home I thought I might cook something to do with France... never cook if you get home at 4:15 in the morning, which I did. Mum showed me some recipes that looked nice but then we saw FRENCH FANCIES!!!!

First of all I had to make the sponge which was easy enough. While that was in the oven I made syrup to pour over the sponge when it came out of the oven. I cut the sponge and poured over the syrup, and then disaster struck..... Fondant icing.  At first I had no problem, the recipe told me to follow the instructions on the pack. All I had to do was mix water, the fondant icing mix and food colouring, all was going to plan until it was time to put the icing onto the cakes. The recipe said to put a blob on top of each cake and let it drizzle down the sides, but my mix was a little thick so I decided to spread it... BAD IDEA!!!  The icing just dripped off the cakes onto the kitchen work surface and then onto the floor. I had to make 3 batches of icing to cover all the cakes as most of the icing was all over the kitchen and not on the cakes.

They turned out beautifully, and I got my dad to help me tidy up.

This recipe was taken from the recipe book ‘Stacie Bakes’.