A little indulgence on New Year’s Day

Do we need an excuse to bake rich, indulgent treats? Sometimes it is easy to believe all the hype in the media that everybody is the same the planet over. But that is plainly not true as we can see in the ‘Blogging World’. Not everyone celebrates Christmas and of those that do not everybody celebrates in the same fashion. We don’t all have turkey, Christmas pudding and mince pies.

Living in East Anglia there are plenty of Christmas traditions, however the traditional mid-winter celebration and feast predates Christianity. Our weather may not be as harsh as the northern regions, but a mid-winter treat certainly brings a glow of pleasure in the midst of all the grey and gloom.

The New Year was my excuse for an indulgent treat and I baked a white chocolate and stem ginger cheesecake (the Mary Berry version).

Firstly I made the cheesecake base with melted dark chocolate and butter mixed into some crushed digestive biscuits. Then, I finely diced four bulbs of stem ginger (that is ginger preserved in syrup).

Then I beat together two tubs of cream cheese with half a pot of sour cream and two beaten eggs in the whizzy machine.

Finally I mixed in a couple of bars of white chocolate that had been gently melted over hot water along with the prepared stem ginger and a teaspoon of vanilla extract. After pouring all the mixture onto the biscuit base the cheesecake was baked for about 45 minutes.

Delightfully easy to make and delightfully easy to eat!

GBBO – European Cakes – How about a Dobos Torte?

During the run of the BBC’s ‘Great British Bake Off’ there are some weeks when I watch and think, yes, I’ll have a go at that. And, naturally, I do like cake. Here are a few photos taken over the course of several hours as I followed Mary Berry’s recipe for a Dobos Torte from her book ‘Mary Berry’s Ultimate Cake Book’.

As you can see my copy (bought 1994) is rather tatty and well-used, but this was one recipe I hadn’t tried. Spelled, in error Doboz not Dobos and hailing mistakenly from Austria when József Dobos was actually Hungarian, this recipe was still worth trying out!

Firstly, you have to prepare the cake layers. In this recipe they are made using a simple fatless sponge recipe although I noticed on the GBBO they suggested a Genoese sponge. Either with or without butter the mixture has to be whisked for some minutes to get the volume. Mmm – I was supposed to get six layers, but obviously misjudged the amount of mixture for each circle and only ended up with five. Of course, each layer was then not as thin as it should be, but still they were quite thin and baked really quickly and so a couple (perfectionists look away now) were OVERBAKED!

Whilst the circles of sponge cooled I made the ‘fancy’ butter cream. This involved whisking egg whites with icing sugar over simmering water, adding to softened beaten butter and then incorporating carefully melted dark chocolate. At this point I thought if I make this again I’ll sandwich with chocolate ganache instead.

Moving on to the caramel.

‘Photographing making caramel’ = ‘Watching paint dry’
Well, it is a waiting game and then because I was fussing with camera – oohh it so nearly burnt. And, I didn’t want a ‘bin’ episode. Caramel all fine – it should be I’ve been making it since I first made peanut brittle as a 13 year old at school. Don’t think that would get past health and safety these days.

I think the most tricky part when making this cake is achieving the clean cut caramel wedges for the top. You do need to be vigilant and catch the moment for marking and then slicing the top caramel soaked layer.

Time to assemble, invite other cakeaholics round for coffee and biscuits, sorry cake, and cut.