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...

Orange, Lemon and Brandy Marmalade

In preparation for this week's BakeOff, I thought I'd post my recipe for marmalade. This was my first bash at making marmalade, and it was so successful that the resulting jars made it into our Christmas hampers, along with assorted jams and Chocolate and ginger biscotti.

(That's Crab apple and Chilli Jelly on the left, Bilberry jam in the middle, and a jar of marmalade on the right. And all artistically wrapped below...)

This recipe uses 1.6kg of fruit - you might want to reduce this as I found this amount filled even our biggest pot and there were a few tense moments during the boiling stage! It also made a huge number of jars - far more than any of my other batches of preserves - not that I'm complaining - apart from giving some away as presents I now have gorgeous homemade marmalade to last me through the next year!
You'll need :

1.2kg Oranges
400g Lemons
2.2kg Sugar
2.5l Water

Some brandy (you decide how much!)

Juice the fruit, retaining the peels. Chop the peel into chunks (fine or thick depending on how you like your marmalade!). Place the juice, peel, sugar and water into a large saucepan and warm to dissolve the sugar.

Bring to the boil and cook until it reaches setting point (test by cooling a few drops on a chilled plate). This stage smells absolutely fabulous! Once it has reached setting point, cool a little then stir in some brandy (I added about 100ml - will probably use more next time as I didn't notice the flavour that strongly). Pour into jars, and allow to set.

Tomato and Chilli Chutney

A random childhood memory.  When I was about 8, playing hide and seek in our back garden, being told off for using the best hiding place I had ever worked out. This hiding place, I feel safe in revealing 30 years later, safe in the knowledge that a) most people have stopped looking for me, and b) the location in question is long gone, was in our greenhouse.

Not being all that well off when I was growing up, our greenhouse was a rather unconventional structure, fashioned from off-cuts of wood and heavy-duty plastic sheeting in place of glass; a wonky door secured by a latch being all there was in terms of security, and the plants inside made the best hiding place for the aforementioned game of hide and seek, if one could wriggle round behind them without crushing too many of them.

I still remember the smell inside this greenhouse, the smell of plastic and tomato plants, the stifling heat on a July afternoon, trying to remain motionless as Paul Mitchell or Ian Nelson stalked me as mercilessly as a big game hunter stalks a vicious predator.

But what has all this got to do with recipes I hear you ask as you stare at your watch and tap your feet impatiently. Well... 30 years later I find myself in the position of being the one growing the tomatoes, rather than hiding behind them, and although our plants didn't fair too well this season, being by turns baked in unforgiving heat and then drowned by unseasonal weather, the rather straggly looking plants still yielded a rather respectable crop before finally giving up the ghost.

Spiced Plum Jam

One of the great things about making your own jam (and this also holds true if you make your own wine too) is that once you tell people about your hobby, you will never be short of the raw materials.  Anyone who has a fruit tree in their garden will soon be presenting you with carrier bags and boxes full of apples, pears, plums and anything else you can comfortably grow in your back yard.

This free food is amazing, and the generosity of friends is very much appreciated, but it does beg the question of why the purveyors of fruit aren't turning them into jams, wines, pies, crumbles and assorted other goodies instead of passing them on to me.  I for one am not complaining (and never having owned a fruit tree, perhaps the quantities produced are enough to satisfy anyone's fruit-lust and still have some to spare)

So here we go with another jam recipe, this time a spiced plum jam.  I love plums, can't get enough of them - they are perhaps my favourite fruit.  I have a habit of liking them very un-ripe and sour, and as a consequence, I get told off for eating them before anyone else has a chance to.  The plums we were given were a lot more ripe than that, which is better for making jam with (and also stopped me from eating too many when they were being pitted, which is probably for the best).

 This jam is a wonderfully spicy, fruity taste that made the whole kitchen smell like Christmas, even though it's only September.  Blimey, less than 100 days, need to start planning some Christmas posts...


This recipe only makes 3 jars - I only had a limited amount of plums and wanted to do a few different things with them.  Feel free to increase the amounts should you have bushels of plums (can you measure plums in bushels?)


Ingredients
650g Plums (pitted)
650g Sugar
Juice of 1 lemon
1/2 Cup Water
1 Cinnamon Stick
5 Cloves
8 Cardamom Pods
1/2 tsp Ground Allspice
1/4 tsp Nutmeg

Method
Pit and chop the plums, then wash them.  Place them in a large pan with just enough water to cover them.  Add the sugar, lemon juice and spices, heat the mixture to dissolve the sugar and then simmer for 10 minutes.  The plums will start to break up as they cook. At this point, you can fish out the plum skins if you don't like them in the jam - it's easier than trying to peel the fruit beforehand.

Also, remember to put your jam jars in the oven to sterilize (120ºc for about 20 minutes should do it)

 
(A good tip is to remember how many cardamom pods and cloves you put in, so you can check they all come out again at the end!)

After 10 minutes, bring the mixture to the boil. Boil hard for another 10 minutes and then test to see if the jam has reached setting point.

As usual, you can check this by putting a saucer in the fridge to chill.  Drop a teaspoonful of jam onto the saucer.  Let it cool.  If you can push a jellied trail through it with you fingernail, it’s ready.

Remember to fish out the cinnamon, cardamom and cloves, then transfer the jam to the sterilized jars and store in a cool dry place.

Bramble, Elderberry and Port Jam

Yet another result of the weekend's haul of berries is this jam, which is an interesting variation on the usual hedgerow jam, the addition of the port gives it an extra zing and depth of flavour and the elderberries make the jam lighter than just using brambles alone.

At this time of year, the brambles (or blackberries if you like - I'm not really sure if there is any difference really) are reaching the pinnacle of their flavour and ripeness, and a quick trip to any hedgerow, derelict ground or similar location will yield a healthy crop. They go really well in pies, crumbles, and also with pork.

Rowan Berry Jam

Since moving from the middle of a city, where the only trees tended to be in parks surrounded by drunks, to the (almost) countryside where hills, fields and woodland are all but a short walk from my front door, I've been gripped with the urge to find out more about what is growing in the hedgerows and on the trees I walk past most days.  And more importantly - can I eat any of it?

After picking Bilberries and turning them into jams and crumbles, and seeing that the healthy crops of brambles won't be ready for another couple of weeks yet (although many plants are already laden with ripe fruits - I think we are in for a bumper harvest this year!) I turned my attention elsewhere.

Bilberry and Apple Jam

Following on from our foraging adventures, we decided to make some bilberry and apple jam.  Sadly the apples weren't home grown or picked wild, but hey, you can't have everything, can you?

500g of bilberries took two people about an hour to pick, and gave us a very pleasant afternoon out in the countryside.  Also, for those of you not familiar with these berries, there is a nice article about them here