chocolate swirl cheesecake slice

I've recently discovered that cheesecake is popular at social gatherings but as it is hard to cut into lots of pieces, it can be difficult to serve. And besides, it is so rich that most people only want a taste. So cheesecake slice fills that little niche.I wouldn't use cooking chocolate in this, it will be nicer with good quality eating chocolate. Doesn't have to be green and blacks, just whatever is on special that week.



Crust

• 2 x 250g packet of arnotts chocolate ripple biscuits (not plain brand)
• 250g of melted butter

I crush my biscuits inside a cloth bag with a rolling pin, but if you have a food processor, that would make it a whole lot easier. Just don't crush them too fine. Or your crust won't have texture. Stir in the melted butter. Line one or two slice tins with baking paper, letting the edges hang out. I use two tins, each about 23cm square but a larger slice tin would be fine. Pressed down the base should be about 2-3 cms. Place biscuit mixture into tin and press down with back of spoon, then cover with a sheet of baking paper and roll with a flat sided glass. This will make the base nice and firm. Place in fridge while you make the filling.

Filling

• 2 x 250g blocks of Philadelphia (or similar) cream cheese softened (back in the day when we had a microwave, I would cut it into chunks and zap briefly)
• 200ml pure cream
• 1 tablespoon of gelatine dissolved in 1/2 cup of boiling water and cooled
• I cup caster sugar (I have used plain white sugar and it works fine, you just have to beat it for longer. Brown sugar would also work fine and taste lovely)
• the juice of 1 orange, strained
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract (the one from the supermarket is fine but get the extract not the essence)
• 1 teaspoon of cinnamon powder
• 100g dark chocolate
• 100g white chocolate

Beat the cream cheese in an electric beater until there are no lumps. Add the sugar and dissolved gelatine and beat until the sugar is dissolved. Add the cream and vanilla and mix gently. Beat the mixture on medium speed until very soft peaks form. Melt the white and dark chocolate over simmering water or in the microwave. Divide the cheesecake mixture and add the dark chocolate and cinnamon to one and the white chocolate and orange juice to the other. The white chocolate mix might need some more time in the beater to come together. Spoon big dollops of each mix onto the crust and then make swirling patterns with a knife or a skewer. Place in fridge to set for at least four hours. To serve, lift out of the tray by the baking paper and cut into squares with a heavy knife.

NB - I put this in the on New year's eve as it wasn't quite firm enough to cut. It was delicious frozen too. Nice on a hot night.

pumpkin pizza with rosemary scented slow cooked onions, mushrooms and olives

I think we've finally found a good pumpkin dinner. And it uses a big onion. Excellent when the vegie box sends a surfeit of onions and pumpkin.

Ingredients

a 12 cm wedge of Jap pumpkin
a big brown onion
a sachet of tomato paste
2 heaped soup spoons of roast garlic paste
3 or 4 mushrooms
some pitted olives
some grated mozzarella cheese
some dried or fresh rosemary
a serve of ready made pizza dough (when I make pizza dough I make enough for 3 pizza dinners and freeze it)

To make

In advance

• Get the pizza dough out of the freezer sometime before lunch to allow it to defrost (unless you have a microwave, in which case you can defrost it that way).
  
• Peel and cut the pumpkin into slices about 1a nd a 1/2 cm thick. Place on a oiled tray and bake in medium hot oven until soft all the way through and starting to loose a little moisture.
  
• Slice the onion into rings and place in a heavy frypan on a low heat with a smidge of olive oil, some fresh or dried rosemary and a sprinkling of salt. Cover and cook on a low heat. Stir occasionally. The onion should collapse and turn a kind of golden colour without burning. When it's nearly done, cook for a short while without a lid to allow some of the moisture to cook off.
  
• Pit the olives and slice the mushrooms.

To assemble

• Oil the pizza trays.
  
• Roll and press out dough.
  
• Splodge some tomato paste and roast garlic paste onto each pizza. Mix together and coat pizza bases with the back of a spoon.
  
• Arrange pumpkin slices, mushrooms, olives, onion and rosemary mixture on each pizza. Cover thinly with mozzarella cheese.
  
• Bake in a hot oven, rotating at the half way mark. About five minutes before they are ready, slip the pizzas off their pans (I use a flat baking sheet to handle the pizzas when doing this) and bake directly on the oven rack to crisp up the bases.
  
• Remove from oven, slice and serve.

lemon and lime cheesecake

I do love an unbaked cheesecake. Made with cream cheese, cream and gelatine. And a crushed biscuit crust. Part of me feels like I should like the baked cheesecake more, but I really do prefer a well made unbaked cheesecake. Something to do with the creamy, slightly wobbly texture. Trashy but oh so nice. I don't tend to make them very often as they are not vegetarian due to the gelatine.

The success of this recipe depends on beating the cream cheese until it is very smooth before adding anything other than a little lemon or lime juice. And in getting the balance between the sugar and citrus right. I like to hover on the edge of danger here, but others around me prefer it if it isn't too lemony.

Crust

• I x 250g packet of arnotts ginger nut snaps (not plain brand)
• 125g of melted butter

I crush my biscuits inside a cloth bad with a rolling pin, but if you have a food processor, that would make it a whole lot easier. Just don't crush them too fine. Or your crust won't have texture. Stir in the melted butter. Place a piece of baking paper on the bottom of a spring form cake tin and clip together. Brush all around with oil or melted butter. Press biscuit mixture into tin and press down, including right into the corners with the back of a spoon. Place in fridge while you make the filling.

Filling

• 2 x 250g blocks of Philadelphia (or similar) cream cheese softened (back in the day when we had a microwave, I would cut it into chunks and zap briefly).
• 200ml pure cream
• 1 tablespoon of gelatine dissolved in 1/2 cup of boiling water and cooled
• 3/4 caster sugar (I have used plain white sugar and it works fine, you just have to beat it for longer. Brown sugar would also work fine and taste lovely but I quite like the pale colour of this cheesecake)
• the juice of 3 or 4 lemons and or limes, strained.

Beat the cream cheese in an electric beater until there are no lumps. If the cream cheese is a little hard, adding a small amount of the lemon juice will help. Add most of the remaining lemon/lime juice, the sugar and the gelatine and beat until the sugar is dissolved. Add the cream and mix gently. Taste for citrus/sugar balance. Add more citrus and/or sugar if necessary. When you're happy with the taste, beat the mixture on high speed until soft peaks form. Fill the crust, nearly to the top, and place back in fridge. The cheesecake will be ready to eat the next day. If there is any filling left over, place in a small bowl and have as a secret snack later that night. Yum.

To serve, run a knife around the edge of the tin and loosen the outside. The cheesecake should be easy to pick up with the baking paper. The baking paper will peel back easily once a cake slide or spatula is placed under the cake.

Beetroot Risotto

I'm starting to get the hang of growing beetroot and this how most of it is used. It's not really what I'd call a proper risotto, made with stock and constant stirring, rather it's the sort of dish you can knock up the night before shopping day and fold some washing (or go on the internet) while it's cooking*. And it will be good.

It contains a small amount of chilli, not so much that it tastes hot, just enough to lift the flavour a little. I also tend to use cooking sherry (Mildara Chestnut Teal) rather than red wine**, because that's normally what I have on hand and it seems to work pretty well. Red wine gives a better colour, but I think the sherry gives a better flavour. If you were cooking this for children, you could leave out the alcohol(which cooks out anyway) and the chilli but it wouldn't taste nearly as good. If I'm light handed with the chilli, Grace likes this dish and there's an amusing photo of her somewhere covered in it.

You will need
a large onion
several cloves of garlic
about half a small chilli (depending on strength, we're going for buzz not fire here)
a big handful of aborio rice per person ( I use 3 handfuls for the two of us and a Grace meal the next day)
a 400g tin of crushed tomatoes
2 medium sized beetroot (the leaves too, if nice and fresh) peeled and cubed into chunky bite sized peces
a good slosh of cooking sherry or red wine
olive oil and butter
a good handful of mint leaves
paremesan cheese for serving

To make
Dice the onion, garlic and chilli and saute gently for two minutes in a tablespoon of olive oil and about the same of butter. Sprinkle with a pinch of salt. When the onions are translucent, add the rice and cook for a minute or two, stirring constantly. The rice should take up all the oil and look pearly. Add the slosh of sherry or wine and let it all bubble up. Stir well.

Add the beetroot cubes and stir. Add the tinned tomatoes and stir. Add about a tomato can and a half of water and stir well. Cover and adjust the heat so that it just simmers. Return in fifteen minutes, remove the lid, have a stir. The rice should be nearly cooked and the beetroot done. Cook a little longer if necessary. Stir to remove any excess liquid. Add the beetroot leaves if using, and the chopped mint.

Serve with shaved parmesan.

*I cook this dish in my heavy Le Creuset frypan that I've had for more than twenty years, that I cook nearly everything in. It's a very forgiving pan and it occurs to me that the cookware might have something to do with being able to leave it simmering.
**Once I made this with Port and thinking that I was using red wine, used quite a bit. The resulting rissotto was delicious and i think the extra sweetness in the port made up for the woody end of summer beetroot.

Ersatz marscapone

Commonly referred to around here as fake marscapone, this tastes almost as good as the real thing and can be used in all situations I can think of that require marscapone: as a topping, as a stuffing, as a filling, in tiramasu. And it is much cheaper. I was given this recipe, or rather method, by a woman I admired as a top notch Italian cook about 15 years ago. It's been part of my repertoire ever since.

You basically whip cream and cream cheese together. I use pure or pouring cream (the kind without vegetarian offending gelatine) and philly cheese. The key is in the mixing. It helps to chop the philly into pieces and microwave for 30 seconds. Beat the cream cheese on its own with electric beaters on high until all the lumps disappear. This can take a while (if the cream was mixed in at this stage you might end up with butter and cream cheese). Then add the whipped cream cheese to the cream and beat with electric beaters until you have a smooth consistency. And voila, ersatz marscapone.

Herb pesto

This pesto uses easily grown herbs from the garden and nuts such as almond and/or walnuts. We think it is just as nice as basil pesto with pinenuts. And you don't have to wait until summer. I use a bamix hand held blender in a two litre honey bucket to make this and usually have a lot left over for lunches. It keeps better than basil pesto too. Proportion is the key. The bulk of the herbage should be a mild herb such as parsley with accents of stronger herbs such as sage and rosemary. If you don't eat cheese, leave it out, it will still be nice.

I serve it on pasta with sauted mushroom and diced fresh tomato or capsicum. It is quite rich so a little goes a long way.

You will need

three cups of parsley
some or all of these herbs; thyme, sage, rosemary, marjoram, oregano
two small cloves of garlic
about 60g grated parmesan
about quarter of a cup olive oil
about half a cup of almonds and/or walnuts
salt

To make

Wash and de-stalk herbs. Place in bucket with chopped garlic and other ingredients. Process with bamix or food processor until it is a coarse paste. Taste and adjust salt.

Serve about a tablespoon per person over pasta. Add other bits like diced tomato or sauted mushrooms, if you like. Also nice with gnocci or on toast