To go with my absolutely atrocious cheesecake I decided to make raspberry mules, which I drank while waiting for the cake to cool, rather than as a delicious accompaniment to the world’s worst flour and cream cheese dish.
I dunked a tin of raspberries, with the juice, and some fresh ones in the blender with some mint leaves, the juice of one lime and a gargantuan slosh of vodka - whizzed it up and then topped up with ginger beer. Yummy.
Saturday, 28 November 2009
Cheesecake
Today I decided to do something stupid. That stupid thing was to make a cheesecake.
I got the recipe off the Waitrose website which handily let me know that Philadelphia cream cheese is the best thing to make this with. I won’t bore you with the Waitrose cooking instructions as I found them more confusing than a Pynchon novel. I have read them about nine times and I still have no idea what they’re telling me to do.
For the crust you need:
50g of caster sugar
150g of plain flour
Grated zest from ½ a lemon
Seeds from ½ a vanilla pod
1 large egg yolk
125g butter, diced
Typing this out I realised I put in 150g of butter and forgot the lemon zest.
For the filling:
600g of cream cheese
180g of caster sugar
1 tbsp of plain flour
Grated zest of one orange
Grated zest of one lemon (it’s good I forgot this in the crust as I only bought one lemon)
Seeds from ½ a vanilla pod
2 large eggs and 1 egg yolk. I used the white left over from the crust, but I’m sure that’s fine…
2 tbsp of double cream
To prepare the crust you need to put the flour, caster sugar, lemon zest (whoops) and vanilla seeds into a food processor and ‘pulse briefly’. I don’t have a food processor so I used a bowl and a spoon and nothing but man power. I knew how to get the seeds out of the vanilla pod from watching Something For The Weekend most Sundays with a hangover. But I didn’t realise that they’re really quite sticky and you’re more likely to slice through your thumb than do this easily. For any one who doesn’t know; you have to slice the pod in half and scrape the seeds out with the blade of the knife. Well, that’s what I did anyway. By this point I was swearing a lot and decided to put Queen on to drown myself out.
Now add the egg yolk and the right amount of butter and use your fancy-pants kitchen equipment or be a man about it and use elbow grease to combine it.
This ends up as a big sticky lump that you then need to squash into a disk, cover in clingfilm and stick in the fridge for an hour. I had a fight with the roll of clingfilm and used a sandwich bag instead.
I used this hour to glare and mutter at the evil roll of clingfilm, drink a beer and text the Best Friend ‘I’m making a cheesecale!’. Always double check predictive text. And cooking instructions.
Next up is the filling. Put the flour, caster sugar, vanilla seeds and zest in a bowl and mix together until smooth. My cream cheese was straight out of the fridge which made this a bit tough at the beginning and while grating the lemon I got some juice in my eye, but you don’t have to do that if you don’t want to. Add the eggs and the yolk/white one by one and make sure you blend it all together properly after each egg and then add the cream. My huge bowl of off-white gunk started to smell and look a bit like cheesecake at this point which was weirdly satisfying. Though I’ve just remembered that I forgot to put any cream in… Bugger.
Take the crust out of the fridge and roll half of it out until its 3mm thick. I suddenly realised that I don’t own a rolling pin so washed my beer bottle from earlier (look at me recycling) and used this. Every time the bastard stuff got thin enough it tore and then stuck to the kitchen surface even though I’d sprinkled flour absolutely everywhere. I finally got it done and shoved it on the base of the cake tin. You’re meant to use 20cm-diameter springform tin but I made do with a twenty one(!) cm diameter shallow cake tin with a removable base.
Once you’ve covered the bottom of the tin put it in a pre-heated oven at 200°c for ten to fifteen minutes until its set and a nice golden brown colour then leave it to cool on a rack.
When my little cakey base was cool I tried to put it back in the tin but it had grown a bit and cracked all round the edges. I ended up just forcing it in and covering any gaps with the crumbs which wasn’t very neat. Once you’ve got the bottom in the tin you need to line the sides with the remaining crust-dough stuff. I cut mine in to strips and overlapped the sides and then covered any holes left at the bottom with small bits of the dough, then trimmed the top to fit. Once you’ve done this you need to pour the filling in. It looked as though there was far too much for my tiny tin but it fit perfectly. Level the top and then put in the oven at 140°c for an hour.
Even though the filling was exactly the right amount I had loads of dough left over which was a bit strange and quite annoying.
After letting it cool and then sticking it in the fridge for a bit I took it out of the cake tin. The bottom was stuck to the base and the whole thing looked quite greasy. The cake itself was a bit soggy, rather than firm and spongy and the crust around the sides looked half cooked. I had half a mouthful which I couldn’t swallow as all I could taste was soapy flour but Sous Chef Mum had two slices. The whole thing took hours and the end result definitely wasn’t worth it. I’m sure that that’s down to my baking skills rather than the recipe though. I imagine that leaving out several ingredients didn’t help but boo to Waitrose recipe cheesecake. If anyone knows where I went wrong please do let me know.
I got the recipe off the Waitrose website which handily let me know that Philadelphia cream cheese is the best thing to make this with. I won’t bore you with the Waitrose cooking instructions as I found them more confusing than a Pynchon novel. I have read them about nine times and I still have no idea what they’re telling me to do.
For the crust you need:
50g of caster sugar
150g of plain flour
Grated zest from ½ a lemon
Seeds from ½ a vanilla pod
1 large egg yolk
125g butter, diced
Typing this out I realised I put in 150g of butter and forgot the lemon zest.
For the filling:
600g of cream cheese
180g of caster sugar
1 tbsp of plain flour
Grated zest of one orange
Grated zest of one lemon (it’s good I forgot this in the crust as I only bought one lemon)
Seeds from ½ a vanilla pod
2 large eggs and 1 egg yolk. I used the white left over from the crust, but I’m sure that’s fine…
2 tbsp of double cream
To prepare the crust you need to put the flour, caster sugar, lemon zest (whoops) and vanilla seeds into a food processor and ‘pulse briefly’. I don’t have a food processor so I used a bowl and a spoon and nothing but man power. I knew how to get the seeds out of the vanilla pod from watching Something For The Weekend most Sundays with a hangover. But I didn’t realise that they’re really quite sticky and you’re more likely to slice through your thumb than do this easily. For any one who doesn’t know; you have to slice the pod in half and scrape the seeds out with the blade of the knife. Well, that’s what I did anyway. By this point I was swearing a lot and decided to put Queen on to drown myself out.
Now add the egg yolk and the right amount of butter and use your fancy-pants kitchen equipment or be a man about it and use elbow grease to combine it.
This ends up as a big sticky lump that you then need to squash into a disk, cover in clingfilm and stick in the fridge for an hour. I had a fight with the roll of clingfilm and used a sandwich bag instead.
I used this hour to glare and mutter at the evil roll of clingfilm, drink a beer and text the Best Friend ‘I’m making a cheesecale!’. Always double check predictive text. And cooking instructions.
Next up is the filling. Put the flour, caster sugar, vanilla seeds and zest in a bowl and mix together until smooth. My cream cheese was straight out of the fridge which made this a bit tough at the beginning and while grating the lemon I got some juice in my eye, but you don’t have to do that if you don’t want to. Add the eggs and the yolk/white one by one and make sure you blend it all together properly after each egg and then add the cream. My huge bowl of off-white gunk started to smell and look a bit like cheesecake at this point which was weirdly satisfying. Though I’ve just remembered that I forgot to put any cream in… Bugger.
Take the crust out of the fridge and roll half of it out until its 3mm thick. I suddenly realised that I don’t own a rolling pin so washed my beer bottle from earlier (look at me recycling) and used this. Every time the bastard stuff got thin enough it tore and then stuck to the kitchen surface even though I’d sprinkled flour absolutely everywhere. I finally got it done and shoved it on the base of the cake tin. You’re meant to use 20cm-diameter springform tin but I made do with a twenty one(!) cm diameter shallow cake tin with a removable base.
Once you’ve covered the bottom of the tin put it in a pre-heated oven at 200°c for ten to fifteen minutes until its set and a nice golden brown colour then leave it to cool on a rack.
When my little cakey base was cool I tried to put it back in the tin but it had grown a bit and cracked all round the edges. I ended up just forcing it in and covering any gaps with the crumbs which wasn’t very neat. Once you’ve got the bottom in the tin you need to line the sides with the remaining crust-dough stuff. I cut mine in to strips and overlapped the sides and then covered any holes left at the bottom with small bits of the dough, then trimmed the top to fit. Once you’ve done this you need to pour the filling in. It looked as though there was far too much for my tiny tin but it fit perfectly. Level the top and then put in the oven at 140°c for an hour.
Even though the filling was exactly the right amount I had loads of dough left over which was a bit strange and quite annoying.
After letting it cool and then sticking it in the fridge for a bit I took it out of the cake tin. The bottom was stuck to the base and the whole thing looked quite greasy. The cake itself was a bit soggy, rather than firm and spongy and the crust around the sides looked half cooked. I had half a mouthful which I couldn’t swallow as all I could taste was soapy flour but Sous Chef Mum had two slices. The whole thing took hours and the end result definitely wasn’t worth it. I’m sure that that’s down to my baking skills rather than the recipe though. I imagine that leaving out several ingredients didn’t help but boo to Waitrose recipe cheesecake. If anyone knows where I went wrong please do let me know.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
