Clandestine Cake Club - Olde Sweet Shop

Well, this is almost a month late, but the most recent Clandestine Cake Club I attended was themed 'Ye Olde Sweet Shop'. You can see Sharon's post with all the attending cakes here. My contribution was a Strawberry marshmallow cheesecake. I wanted to make something that included sweets and used sweets as decoration on top, and I'm really happy with the result - this would be fantastic for a kid's party (perhaps in green!) and what you can't tell from the picture is how light this was - definitely light enough (and tasty enough!) to go back for seconds. I based the recipe on my memories of a pudding called pink fluff (most people know this under a variety of names!), which involves mixing jelly and Ideal milk, beating until it's really fluffy, then allowing it to set. This is the same thing, only without the bubbles.

This is a real show-stopper of a cake - and the only limitation with decorations is your imagination (and how well stocked your sweet shop is!)

Ingredients :

200g digestive biscuits (crushed)
100g butter

2/3 packets jelly (pick your flavour/colour!)
500ml greek yogurt
Packet mini-marshmallows (optional)
Sweets to decorate

Melt the butter and mix with the biscuits. Press into the bottom of a deep loose bottomed / springformed tin.

Make up 2 packets of jelly using about 1/3 volume of boiling water specified. Allow to cool a bit (catch it before it sets) and then make up to the full volume with yogurt. Mix in the marshmallows (if you are using them), pour into the tin on top of the base and allow to set. 

Once the yogurt layer has set, make up the remaining jelly using water, allow to cool until just before setting (you don't want to pour it onto the previous layer until it's quite cool otherwise you can melt the yogurt layer a bit). Pour it gently onto the previous layer, and position your sweets in the layer, or wait till it's set and position them on top (I used white chocolate buttons and waited till the layer was almost set and just pushed them in gently so the were slightly immersed, but not completely.)

Strawberry Ripple Cheesecake - Weekly Bake Off and Clandestine Cake Club

I'm having trouble not sitting down and eating this right now!

This week's Weekly Bake Off recipe was the American Chocolate Ripple Cheesecake, which I actually made a couple of months ago for my first Clandestine Cake Club outing. It was absolutely gorgeous and I felt it ticked all the boxes of my cheesecake requirements - tangy, sweet and sticky. I did feel that there was too little biscuit for the base, and so doubled the amount - I also used half ginger biscuits, half digestive for a nice tangy base.

Now coincidentally this week I have another Clandestine Cake Club event. I also have a Herman to bake (another post tomorrow!), and so I decided that rather than making 3 cakes, I'd recycle the recipe for the American Ripple cheesecake, but modify it for the CCC theme - Favourite Tipple, using some homemade strawberry jam and strawberry vodka.

Last year I really got into making jams and the Soup kitchen saw strawberry, bramble and port, spiced plum and bilberry jams, and an assortment of jellies (crab apple and chilli is my favourite). I made the strawberry jam using a very similar recipe to the bramble and port jelly - (just without the port!). The strawberry vodka was made by soaking strawberries in a bottle of vodka with a cup of sugar. After about a month, the vodka was drained off the strawberries and passed through a filter into a clean bottle.

And now onto the cheesecake - I've changed the recipe quite a bit, so will be listing the ingredients and method in a bit more detail than I normally do for the Weekly Bake Off posts.

Ingredients

Base
200g digestive biscuits
100g melted butter

Filling :
600g cream cheese
100g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 large eggs
100g strawberry jam
50ml strawberry vodka

Topping :
150g strawberry jam
100ml strawberry vodka

Method

Grease a sprung tin (mine is a 23cm tin)

Crush the biscuits and mix with the melted butter. Layer the biscuits on the bottom of the tin and press down. Put in the fridge while preparing the filling to allow to set.

Beat the cream cheese and caster sugar together, then mix in the vanilla essence and eggs.
Spoon half the mixture onto the biscuit base in big dollops.
Puree the strawberry jam and vodka together in a blender (my jam had great big chunks of fruit in it so this was really important!)
Mix the jammy mix into the remaining filling, then pour this onto the rest of the filling. Swirl together.
Bake in a preheated oven at 160ºC for about 30 minutes (you should be able to see the edges pulling away from the sides of the tin slightly).
Cool completely.
Blend together the topping ingredients - not as much as the filling - it's nice to keep some chunks of strawberries in the topping.
Pour the topping over the cheesecake, cover the tin with clingfilm and refigerate until ready for serving.
Release the sides of the tin, transfer off the base and onto a plate, and serve.
Enjoy!

Weekly Bake Off - Jammy Swiss Cakes and Clandestine Cake Club

I've fallen a little behind with blogging, but with 2 bakes last week, I had to prioritise!

First was the inaugural meeting of the Pudsey and West Leeds Clandestine Cake Club - this was organised by Sharon Clarkson, and on seeing that the places were going fast I signed up for both the first March meeting and the May meeting (this one booked up in about 2 hours!). Since I didn't sign up to take a guest, and apart from Sharon (twitter friend), I didn't know anyone I was a bit nervous, but I shouldn't have worried - after turning up with my American Chocolate Ripple Cheesecake a bit early, the evening went incredibly well. I was stunned by the number of cakes, and will have to go to future meetings with a strategy of only eating the smallest sliver of each to get a taste! One of the best things about the evening (apart from all the new cakey people I met) was at the end of the evening we all piled our cake tins up with leftover cakes - thus benefitting Mr Soup (who had been a bit grumpy about me making cake he wasn't going to get to taste!).

The event made the Yorkshire Evening Post, but I'm really looking forward to the article in a local magazine where the reported/photographer took pictures of all the attendees with their cakes - a far better image of the spirit of the event!

And so on to my Weekly Bake Off entry for this week - Jammy Swiss cakes. The recipe uses apricot jam, but with the vast surplus of homemade jam in the house, I decided to use (my homemade, delicious) blackcurrant jelly and strawberry jam instead. These little cakes wouldn't have caught my eye normally, but I'm very glad I made them. Piping the mixture into the cupcake cases took a bit of work, and negotiation with the piping bag (my nozzles are really for icing and were a bit small for the thickish batter), but once they were cooked, they were little melting parcels of deliciousness - not too sweet biscuity base set off nicely by the jam (they remind me of Viennese whirls). Mr Soup reckons they are a way to his heart, so I'm keeping this recipe on the top of the pile! And despite my rather wonky piping, they did look very pretty once baked and jammified...

Weekly Bake Off : Blueberry and Lemon Austrian Curd Cheesecake

Well, this week's Weekly Bake Off bake turned out to be sheer torture! We are meeting up with friends this evening for a regular music-related activity, and being rather useless at creating music, my contribution is normally cake related.

(And by music related - this video might give you an idea of what we do - record cover versions of songs, get drunk and then listen to them - below is a slightly un-seasonal example - if you look hard enough, you might spot Mr. Soup)

Having bought all my ingredients (and boy did it take a while to track down semolina in my supermarket - finally found it in the 'International' section!), I settled in on my own last night to get a bit of baking done. I'd decided to use blueberries instead of raisins, and since my ricotta came in 250g tubs, I scaled the recipe down ever so slightly to compensate for using 500g instead of 550g - fairly straightforward, and I just used 4 medium eggs instead of large ones. Other than that I followed the recipe to the letter, and once it was popped into the oven I got stuck into some TV.

After about 30 minutes, the smell was absolutely gorgeous! I rapidly started making plans to slice the cake as soon as it came out of the oven 'for photos', rather than this evening, and then of course, having cut it, I'd need to test it... A quick peek in the oven while putting some silver foil over to stop the top burning showed a promising looking top, and it brimming almost to the top of my (rather deep) cake tin. And then... I read the rest of the recipe! After baking, you turn the oven off and leave the cheesecake in for another hour. Then you take it out and allow it to cool completely. Obviously I was not going to be eating cheesecake last night - and yet I still had to sit and smell it for the rest of the evening!

Here's the picture I took after it came out of the oven - it turned out to be too hot to take the bottom of the tin off, even after an hour cooling in the oven, and another hour out of the oven, so I've left it in the tin (it's also easier to transport that way!) (sides removed for the picture).

After the cake was transported from Soup HQ to the secret location where the music event took place, it was served up to a hungry crowd who were very appreciative - even a non-cheesecake lover (yes, there are such people in this world...) had to admit that it was a rather nice cake.  Another convert to the cause of the cheesecake?  Only time will tell, but when the cake tastes so good and looks his nice, I think we can count them as won over...