Raspberry ripple cheesecake

We did manage to make this cheesecake in the end, and put those digestives to good use! This is fairly quick to do, as it’s a no bake recipe, and again, you can use whatever you prefer to sweeten it with. I looked around a bit for sugar free cheesecake inspiration (ideas here and here) and came up with this.

Ingredients

200g digestive biscuits (see previous post)
50-75g butter (see note below*)
250g cream cheese
250ml double cream
85g rice malt syrup (or maple syrup etc.)
Approx. 100g raspberries, frozen

Method

Crush the biscuits with the end of a rolling pin or in a food processor or blender. Add the melted butter. *Note on the butter: I found this was too much and I ended up adding a load more biscuits to dry out the crust, so it ended up pretty thick. So, reduce the butter to 50g and see how you go from there. Press the biscuit mixture into the base of a cake tin or pie dish (can use an 8 inch tin). We pressed a few raspberries into the base, just for funsies. Place this into the fridge to chill.

Make a raspberry puree by gently cooking the frozen raspberries in a saucepan until bubbling and then cool slightly and blitz if you fancy it. It would then be sensible to sieve the mixture to remove the seeds. One day I will do this and reap the benefits, but for now, we will just pick the seeds out of our teeth!

Whisk the cream until it is thick, with soft peaks, add the cream cheese and mix. This is less cream cheese than is normally called for, but it was the size of the pack I had, and it produced a lighter flavour which was a welcome change, no-one moaned about it anyway!

Pour half of the cream cheese filling over the chilled crust and then dollop some puree over it before pouring on the rest of the filling. We then had to attempt to make it look like the picture in the kids cook book, so messily spooned on lines of puree (this is where blending and pureeing would have been useful) and the little one attempted to do feathering on top. I was very good and let her do it all herself, and it was just as she wanted it. Put the cheesecake back in the fridge for a few hours or overnight, then use a sharp knife to cut the slices.

Good try at feathering kid!

Pomegranate and blueberry sorbet

I’m going on maternity leave from the blog, so this will be my last post for a while. There is no baking happening at the moment because of all the decorating, cleaning, sorting, washing and re doing all these things after a whirlwind messes them up behind me! Also, it’s been a bit too hot to have the oven on and just thinking about it takes me to the freezer searching for ice to crunch on. For anyone local who’s been trying to get their hands on a bag of ice from the supermarket, look no further, they are here. All of them.

So, naturally my last post for a while had to be something quick, easy and refreshing; pomegranate and blueberry sorbet. How summery, with a beautiful rich colour, that may or may not have led to eating this outside to avoid staining anything! I used a recipe from the Waitrose Kitchen magazine, which also provided last year’s peachy ice cream relief. The recipe says fresh or frozen blueberries can be used, I went for frozen ones which worked well but took a little longer to blend (even in a KitchenAid blender!) with only a little pomegranate juice. It got there in the end and I couldn’t be bothered to push it all through a sieve (despite the photo!), so I just added the cooled sugar syrup and poured the mixture into a tub.

I don’t have an ice cream maker, so I just got out the sorbet a few times during the afternoon and mashed it all up instead of churning it. This probably doesn’t give the best texture, but as long as you remove the sorbet from the freezer a good ten minutes at least before you serve it, it’s easy to scoop out.

Thankfully this sorbet was exactly what I was hoping for; cool, refreshing, and slightly tart. Perfect for hot afternoons in the garden, pondering the next phase of life in the bake what you want family 🙂

No churn peach and ginger ice cream

It’s hot, so ice cream is needed. I saw a big tub of funny little peaches for £1 at the fruit and veg shop, which turned out to be called saturn peaches or UFO peaches or saucer peaches…you get it, they look like they’re flattened. I highly recommend trying these peaches if you never have, they are so juicy and sweet, I kept getting requests from around my ankles for ‘more pitch, more pitch please Mummy!’ I decided to try this recipe that I’ve had for a while, I cut it out of a Waitrose magazine sometime last year, and it’s so quick and delicious.

I halved the recipe and used six of the Saturn peaches, as they’re smaller than the ones the recipe calls for, and it seemed about the right amount. I used some fresh ginger cut up finely, which gave it a nice heat, if that’s possible in an ice cream.

Ingredients

6 ripe yellow fleshed peaches or 12 saturn peaches
600ml pot double cream
397g tin condensed milk
12 pieces crystallised ginger, roughly chopped

Method

• Place the peaches in a heatproof bowl and pour over boiling water. Leave for 10 minutes and then peel off the skins and remove the pits. Chop into small pieces, as they become quite hard when frozen, but try it out and chop to your own preferences!
• Whisk the cream and condensed milk until it has thickened and falls into ribbons.
• Add the peach chunks and ginger to the cream mixture and stir gently. Pour into a freezer proof 2 litre dish or tub, and freeze for 4 hours or overnight. Take out of the freezer 20-30 minutes before serving.