Chocolate Cheesecake - take 2

I decided to make this cheesecake again, as a birthday gift to a dear, dear friend. This is how it turned out this time round.

Looks really different from the previous attempt! This time I managed to get the marble effect, by allowing the melted chocolate to cool a lot more than before. I didn't like the look though. Next time, I'll mix it all in.

Didn't get a chance to taste the cake, but I am told it was great, though a bit too rich, which I suppose it normal. Though, I'm wondering if it was because I used brown sugar this time instead of white sugar. Or perhaps by marbling the chocolate, the taste gets more intense. Anyway, it was fun to make! Happy birthday Val!

Chocolate Cheesecake

The sour-cream in my refrigerator was expiring soon, so I had to find some way of using it, and what better way than to use it for some cheesecake?

Amazingly, I had most of the ingredients in my pantry already, which just gives an indication of how much baking I've been doing!

As with the London cheesecake, there were quite a number of steps to making this cake. First, we had to make the base from pulverised digestive biscuits (Thank God for food processors). I went a bit creative here and added some cocoa powder into the mix, since I was in a rather chocolatey mood. Second, we had to mix up the filling. There was actually a small problem here - Nigella's recipe calls for the melted chocolate to be swirled, and not fully mixed, into the cream cheese mix to create a marbled effect. However, my chocolate refused to swirl. It preferred to flake. Which I thought was a rather ugly look, so I stirred everything in for a uniformly chocolate look. Third, we had to give it a steam bath in the oven, as we did for the London Cheesecake. Finally, I added some decorative touches via chocolate ganache swirls on top of the cake, as I had some leftover ganache from before.

The result? A lusciously smooth cake. It was beautiful. A lot lighter than the London Cheesecake, and not overpoweringly chocolately (cocoa powder in base notwithstanding...). Quite perfect. I will be making this again really soon as a birthday present for my pal Val. I'm quite sure she'll enjoy it!

Chocolate Torte - Jamie Oliver Style!

This is my first non-Nigella recipe on this blog. It's from Jaime Oliver, whom I adore as well. I caught him making it on TV once (can't remember which series), and I scribbled it down because it was chocolate! It's basically like a flourless chocolate brownie/mousse thingy on a graham cracker crust. You mix cocoa powder, chocolate, eggs, sugar, golden syrup, sour cream, pour it into the crust and leave it in the oven. Easy-peasy!

It was gorgeous - it's mostly chocolate afterall. But it was hard to eat too much of it because it was really really rich. We found that it went very well with a scoop of haagen-daaz macadamia nut ice-cream, which toned down the richness of the chocolate. Best served after it's cooled and set on the outside and a little warm and slightly runny on the inside (it's too runny in my picture). Yummy!

Muffin Mayhem!

I realised that I had been getting rather more adventurous in choosing recipes and thought it would be nice to go back to basics and bake something rather more wholesome. So out came Nigella's muffin recipes. As my son doesn't take raisins or blueberries, I settled on her Banana Muffins, which looked like a safe bet, especially since she describes it as "easy and quick for a child to make". And it wasn't my first time making muffins.

But as I was making it, I began to fear that things weren't going well. First, the recipe calls for 2 "oozingly, bulgingly heaped 15 ml tablespoons of clear honey". I tried my best, by the honey wouldn't bulge in this hot weather. So I wasn't quite sure if I got the required amount of honey in. Then, Nigella commands that the mixture should not be over-mixed, "just stir a couple of times". I did as instructed, but the resulting mixture didn't look quite right. It looked really under-mixed, with bits of flour still floating around. She reassured though, that "you will have a not terribly attractive lumpy sludge, but don't worry about it".

So I decided not to worry about it. It went horribly wrong and the muffins turned out like this:

The white stuff isn't icing sugar, it's flour! The muffins didn't rise at all. They were hard as rocks, and bitter, and full of flour! On hindsight, I think I could have taken her "just stir a couple of times" with a big pinch of salt, and stirred the mixture a few more times. I suspect too that I didn't get enough honey into the mix, as the mixture was way too dry to look anything like sludge, even if I proceeded to mix it a few more times.

I was devastated, even if my son thought the muffins were edible, and proceeded to eat them anyway...

The failure rankled so much, that that evening, after the kids went to bed, I proceeded to whip up another batch of muffins. This time, blueberry muffins, which didn't have the silly honey requirement. It called for buttermilk, or yoghurt+semi-skimmed milk. I used the latter, as I had a tub of half eaten yoghurt in the fridge. I didn't have fresh/frozen blueberries but I used dried blueberries. This time round, they turned out beautifully!

They looked good and tasted great as well, and was a lot easier to whip up than the banana muffins. Unfortunately, my son wouldn't eat them.

My confidence restored, I decided to give the banana muffins another go. This time round I put in more honey (about 2.5 tbsp of honey) and mixed it a little bit more. I was most relieved when I opened the oven door and found this:

Not quite as beautiful as the blueberry muffins, and somewhat harder (the blueberry muffins were really rather soft), but much much better than the sad rocks I found in my oven earlier...I will attempt this recipe again, just because I want to get it just right. Does anyone have any tips on this?