A Cheesecake Dessert

On Thursday, my parents went away so Alex and I thought that we would have Becca and Ashleigh over for dinner. Dinner was easy, going to be wraps but I thought I'd be nice and make a dessert too. I saw this cheesecake on Love and Olive Oil which apparently comes from "The Loveless Cafe" in Nashville. I changed it quite a bit though because I wanted petite cheesecakes and the difference between American and New Zealand ingredients. But they still tasted amazing, even though Becca and Ashleigh wouldn't eat them. Who wouldn't eat cheesecake right? But Becca doesn't like cheesecake and Ashleigh doesn't like bananas, so they were both out of luck there! Still, if you do like banana and chocolate and cheesecake, then you'll really enjoy this recipe.

Banana Split Mini Cheesecakes (Makes 12)

Ingredients:
3/4 cup digestive biscuit crumbs
2/3 cup sugar
3T cocoa powder
5T butter, melted
250g cream cheese (Philadelphia of course!)
1/4 cup mashed overripe banana (2 small bananas)
1/8 cup sour cream
2T plain flour
2 eggs
50g chocolate bits, melted

Directions:Preheat oven to 150ºC. Line a standard 12 cup muffin tin with paper cupcake liners. Process the digestives in a food processor until you get fine crumbs and take out any large pieces. Add 1/3 of a cup of sugar and cocoa and process until combined. Then add the melted butter and process until the mixture comes together. Spoon 1-2T of the mixture into each muffin cup, until there is a layer covering the bottom and press down into the liners.

Filling:To make the filling, place the cream cheese, 1/3 cup sugar, banana, sour cream, and flour in a food processor; pulse to form a smooth paste. With the machine on, add the eggs, one at a time; scrape down the sides and pulse briefly to ensure all ingredients are incorporated. Measure out 3/4 cup of the filling and set aside. Pour the remaining filling into crust. Return 1/2 cup of reserved filling to the food processor. Add melted chocolate and pulse to combine, scraping the sides of the bowl to make sure the batter is evenly mixed. Spoon 1-2T of the chocolate mixture over each muffin cup, until the banana mixture is covered. Drizzle the remaining 1/4 cup banana filling over the chocolate in each muffin cup and use a blunt knife or bamboo skewer to swirl them into a marbled pattern; do not overmix. Bake in the center of the oven for 20-30 minutes. Remove the muffin tin from the oven when the centres are still just slightly jiggly. Return the cheesecake to the oven, turn off the heat, and let stand without opening the door for 7-8 minutes. Remove from oven and let stand in the pan on a rack until cooled to room temperature. Cover and refrigerate for at least 3 hours, or overnight if possible, to allow it to set completely. Enjoy!
Becca and I got bored that night so we took heaps of photos on my computer... This is my favourite. I hope you like it too! ;)

Baking Day with Evie Pt 3

So the last thing on our baking day was cookies. Unfortunately they were a little bit dry because I should have just pulled them out of the oven but I was like no, they can go a little longer... So I cooked them a little long. But other than that they taste great, so I would definitely recommend them!

Triple Chocolate Fudge Cookies

Ingredients:

125g bittersweet chocolate, chopped

75g milk chocolate, chopped

30g cup butter, cubed

1 1/2 eggs, at room temp

1/2 cup sugar

1/2T espresso powder or 1/2T brewed coffee

1t vanilla

6T flour

1/2t baking powder

1/8t salt

3/4 cup chocolate chips

Directions:

Put chopped chocolates and butter (first three ingredients) into a sauce pan over low heat and melt. Once melted, remove from heat and set aside to cool slightly. Mix eggs, sugar, espresso powder, and vanilla. Add the melted chocolate to the egg/sugar batter. Mix well. Next add the flour, baking powder, and salt to the batter. Mix well. Lastly, add chocolate chips. Chill dough for approximately 60 minutes or until it can hold a shape. Preheat oven to 180°C. Line a baking sheet/tray with baking paper and scoop dough in small balls on paper and space about 2cm apart from each other. Press dough to flatten. Bake for 10 minutes. DO NOT OVERBAKE!

Baking Day with Evie Pt 2

The second thing that we made yesterday was... Death by Oreo Cupcakes! These are soooo yummy. Especially for someone who loves cookies and cream. :D They were a little dry, but I think that's because we added all of the flour and ground oreos as well, so I've reduced the amount of flour in this recipe. I would even just eat a bowl of this icing. Mmmm...

Death by Oreo Cupcakes

Ingredients:
1/4 cup & 2T unsweetened Dutch-process or dark cocoa powder

1/4 & 2T cup hot water

1 1/4 cups plain flour

1t baking soda

1t baking powder

3/4t coarse salt

175g unsalted butter

1 1/8 cups sugar

2 eggs, room temperature

1T & 1t pure vanilla extract

1/2 cup sour cream, room temperature

1 pkt oreos

 

200g cream cheese, room temperature

115g butter, softened

3 1/2 cups icing sugar

1t vanilla essence

 

Directions:

Preheat oven to 180°C. Line 2 12 cup standard muffin tins with paper liners. Whisk together cocoa and hot water until smooth. In another bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Process the between a 1/4 and a 1/2 of the packet of oreos in a food processor until coarsely chopped. Melt butter with sugar in a saucepan over medium-low heat, stirring to combine. Alternately, melt together in the microwave. Remove from heat, and pour into a mixing bowl. With an electric mixer on medium-low speed, beat until mixture is cooled, 4 to 5 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, beating until each is incorporated, scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Add vanilla, then cocoa mixture, and beat until combined. Reduce speed to low. Add flour mixture in two batches, alternating with the sour cream and oreos, and beating until just combined after each. Divide batter evenly among lined cups, filling each three-quarters full. Bake, rotating tins halfway through, until a cake tester inserted in centers comes out clean, about 20 minutes. Transfer tins to wire racks to cool 15 minutes; turn out cupcakes onto racks and let cool completely. Then pipe the icing on to finish off.

 

Oreo Cream Cheese Icing:

Cream together butter and cream cheese. Add vanilla, then add powdered sugar slowly until blended well. Put the cookies in the food processor and process until very fine and powdery. Add to frosting and mix well.

Baking Day with Evie Pt 1

Evie is a lovely friend of mine who also really enjoys baking and we were planning our baking day for a while. As quite often happens though, life kept getting in the way. Every time we planned to have it, something else would come up or one of us wouldn't be free etc. So, after about 2 months, we finally got our day! :) We actually had a huge list of things, most of them more americanised, that we wanted to make, but you only get so long in a day! This is the first of the three recipes and it turned out pretty much perfectly! We were really happy with the finished product, even if we did both end up setting the paper cases on fire! :O These are great for a neat presentation and a perfect sized dessert. Also, we halved the recipe, so this quantity makes 12.

Lemon Meringue Cheesecake Cupcakes

Ingredients:

3/4 cup graham cracker crumbs (or digestive biscuits)

3/4T sugar
1/8 cup unsalted butter, melted
 
250g cream cheese, room temperature
1/3 cup & 1T sugar
2T cornstarch
1T finely grated lemon zest
2T fresh lemon juice
2t vanilla extract
2 eggs, room temperature
 
2 eggs
1/4 cup sugar with 1T taken out
 
Directions:
Preheat oven to 180°C and line a 12 cup muffin tin with cupcake liners. To make crust, combine the first 3 ingredients until evenly blended and crumbly and press into bottom of mini muffins cups. Bake for 8 minutes, then cool. Spoon or pipe cheesecake filling into cooled mini muffin tins bake for about 18 minutes, until cheesecake still moves a little when pan is shaken gently. Let cheesecakes cool to room temperature. Meringue layer can be made once cheesecake have cooled and cheesecakes can be chilled overnight (or at least an hour) and then finished. To finish, fill a piping bag with a large star or plain tip and pipe on top of each cheesecake. Evie and I used a cupcake pen with a very wide tip to pipe the meringue and that worked really well. Bake pie for about 6 minutes, just until meringue browns lightly. Alternately, use the blowtorch to brown the meringue, turning whilst cooking the meringue. Allow cheesecakes to chill for at least an hour and up to a day before serving.
 
Cheesecake Filling:

To make cheesecake, reduce oven to 160°C. Beat cream cheese until smooth and fluffy, then gradually add sugar while beating, scraping the sides of the bowl often. Beat in cornstarch, lemon zest, lemon juice and vanilla. Add eggs one at a time, scraping well after each addition. 

 

Meringue Top:

For meringue, preheat oven to 190°C, or ready your blowtorch! Whip egg whites until foamy. While whipping, gradually pour in sugar and whip on one speed less than highest until whites hold a stiff peak (the meringue stands upright when whisk is lifted).

AFS Camp Pizza

The potluck dinner from the other night (where Oscar made some really nice chicken!) was followed by an AFS camp over the weekend. It was a camp for returnees who had just come back to New Zealand after their exchanges. It was great because most of the students we had seen just before they left, so it was awesome to see how much they'd changed and what their exchange was like. Everyone seemed to have fun weekend and we certainly had some fun making pizzas in the kitchen! I don't usually make bread or dough and if I do it's often in the breadmaker. But Cam (different Cam to my Cam, he's an orientation coordinator with Oscar) is really good at making bread without a breadmaker and he does it all the time. He even has pizza stones which we used to cook the pizza, so it was pretty hard out! The pizzas tasted really good and so did the sauce that Steph (another volunteer) made. All in all a pretty great weekend with some good food.

Homemade Pizza (enough for 2 pizzas)

Ingredients:
3t yeast
1 cup lukewarm water
2t sugar
2T oil
1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2t baking powder
1 can tomato purée (400g)
1 small onion
2t oregano
2t mixed herbs
Pizza toppings (we used ham, salami, green and yellow peppers, red onion, mushrooms and mozzarella cheese.)

Directions:
Dissolve the sugar in the lukewarm water and then stir in the yeast. Leave this in a warm place to proof for 10 minutes. In a separate large bowl mix together the flour and the baking powder. When the yeast mixture is ready (puffy and foamy), add the oil to it and then pour the mixture into the flour mixture. Stir with a wooden spoon until the dough starts to come together. Tip the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead for 10 minutes, using more flour as necessary, until the dough is soft. Place the dough in a clean but oiled bowl and cover with a damp teatowel. Leave to rise in a warm place for 1-2 hours or until doubled in size. When the dough has risen, punch it down, remove from the bowl and separate it into two parts. Knead again until they are pliable and not sticky. Roll out on a lightly floured surface until you reach the size that you want. Then move the base either to an oven tray or a pizza stone and cover with the pizza sauce. Then add the toppings and turn the oven to 200°C on fanbake. Bake the pizzas for 10-15 minutes or until the crust is lightly browned and the cheese is completely melted.

Tomato Purée:
Chop the onions finely and fry in a small pot with some oil until translucent. Pour the tomato purée over the top, add the herbs and simmer for half an hour.

Cupcakes for AFS Potluck Thing

Not sure if this is actually going to be a potluck tomorrow, but Oscar (another volunteer with AFS-we're going to his house) asked if I could bring dessert, so here it is! I was just looking through Brown Eyed Baker's recipes and I came across this one. Now me, loving chocolate and peanut butter and all, I couldn't go past it. It looked reasonably simple but so yum! Of course I made it! They taste AMAZING. Using dark chocolate is a good idea because it contrasts so well with the sweet peanut butter icing on top. Last night, after I made them, I left 4 for my family and me. Alex and I had one and there were two left, but mum doesn't like peanut butter as much as we do, especially with chocolate (crazy, right? :O), so there were two left. Dad came downstairs with a cupcake and asked if I wanted half. I thought that it was his so I said, no you have it, it's yours. And he said that he'd already had one but they were so good he wanted another! But, he didn't want to feel bad for not sharing and he knew I was still up so he offered me some! Haha. A testament to just how delicious these are.

Dark Chocolate Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Icing

Ingredients:
115g butter, softened and cut into cubes
50g dark chocolate bits
1/2 cup dutch-processed or other dark cocoa powder
3/4 cup plain flour
1/2t baking soda
3/4t baking powder
2 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
1t vanilla extract
1/2t table salt
1/2 cup sour cream

1 cup icing sugar
1 cup smooth peanut butter
75g butter, at room temperature
3/4t vanilla extract
1/4t salt
1/3 cup cream

Directions:
Preheat oven to 180°C. Line standard-size muffin pan with cupcake liners. Combine butter, chocolate, and cocoa in medium heatproof bowl. Set bowl over saucepan containing barely simmering water; heat mixture until butter and chocolate are melted and whisk until smooth and combined. (Alternately, you can microwave the mixture at a lower power, stirring every 30 seconds until completely melted. This is what I did.) Set aside to cool until just warm to the touch. Whisk eggs in second medium bowl to combine; add sugar, vanilla, and salt until fully incorporated. Add cooled chocolate mixture and whisk until combined. Sift about one-third of the flour, baking powder and baking soda over chocolate mixture and whisk until combined; whisk in sour cream until combined, then sift remaining flour mixture over and whisk until batter is and thick. Divide the batter evenly among muffin pan cups. Bake until skewer inserted into center of cupcakes comes out clean, 18 to 20 minutes. Cool cupcakes in muffin pan on wire rack until cool enough to handle, about 15 minutes. Carefully lift each cupcake from muffin pan and set on wire rack. Cool to room temperature before icing, about 30 minutes.

Peanut Butter Icing:
Place the icing sugar, peanut butter, butter, vanilla and salt in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Mix on medium-low speed until creamy, scraping down the bowl with a rubber spatula as you work. Add the cream and beat on high speed until the mixture is light and smooth. Ice the cupcakes and eat!

Wellington Bake Off!

Yay! Finally here! Although, to be honest, I wasn't a fan of the category. It was decorated biscuits. Of course, I like biscuits, BUT I'd never done decorated biscuits and never done royal icing before. I was considering quite a few different things, but I wanted to more conservative and try to do something really well, rather than something complicated and stuffing it up. When dad suggested emoticons I thought it was a really good idea and pretty simple to do so I went with that. I guess if I had my time over again I might try something a little more involved, maybe a filled biscuit? I'd also probably put a bit more time into presentation, it's definitely something that I need to work on. They tasted good and they looked good, very neat and well done I thought, but they weren't as flashy or intense as some of the others. So unfortunately I didn't win, but the woman who did had hers hanging off a tree, so that looked pretty damn cool! Becca and I did win being the youngest bakers there, so that was nice. :) I think mine possibly would have appealed more to a younger panel of judges because the judges were more around my parents' ages and I kind of had to explain the theme to them, that it wasn't just smiley faces but that they were sitting on an iPhone for a reason! Oh well, it hasn't deterred me from baking, I'll just have to put in more effort next time! They did taste good, a nice simple biscuit so if you're looking for something a little different, then here it is! :)

PS: The reason behind the name is that there is an application on iPhone that is really common and it's called Emoji. It gives you lots of cool emoticons to use in messaging etc. So we went with the tech-themed name!

Emoji Cookies

Ingredients:
300g butter, softened
225g icing sugar
225g cornflour
300g plain flour
1t vanilla essence

3 cups icing sugar
2T meringue powder
8-10T water

1 cup icing sugar
1/2T meringue powder
2-4T water
75g chocolate bits

Gel food colouring (I used yellow and black)

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 150°C and line a baking sheet. Cream together the butter and icing sugar until light and fluffy. Mix in the vanilla essence. Sift in the cornflour and plain flour and mix all togther with a wooden spoon until it comes together as a dough. Knead for 5-10 minutes or until you can work with the dough. Roll out the dough on a flour surface to whatever your desired thickness is. If you're doing some sort of decorated biscuit, I'd recommend about 2cm. Then take whatever circular object you have on hand (I used a plastic glass) and cut circles out of the dough. Place on the baking sheet, pull the leftover dough together and then roll out and cut again. Repeat until there's no dough left. Cook for 15-20 minutes or until they're just brown on the bottom. Cool completely.

Pipe a circle around the outside with the royal icing. Then thin the icing by adding tablespoons of water until the icing disappears back into the mixture after 10 seconds of dropping it back on top. Flood the cookies with the icing. You do this by pouring maybe half the area of the circle on top of the biscuit and then spreading it with a palette knife or the back of a spoon, right to the edges of the piped circle so that there are no gaps. You have to do this well in advance of when you need the biscuits, because the icing will take at least 3 hours to dry, I left mine overnight.

It would be a good idea to either print or draw some pictures of emoticons to have as a reference whilst icing. Use the black (chocolate) royal icing to make the faces and be creative! I did lots of different ones and it was really fun to experiment. This icing dries faster, so you only need maybe an half an hour afterwards to leave it to dry. Or not even. Just eat them.

Royal Icing:
Mix all ingredients (second group) on low speed for 7-10 minutes or until the icing loses its shine. Add more water by the teaspoon if it appears too stiff. At this stage you want to be able to pipe it easily. Once you have it at a good consistency, add the yellow (or whatever colour) gel food colouring. Beat until coloured, which can take maybe 3/4t of colour to get it really yellow enough for a face.

Chocolate Royal Icing:
Melt the chocolate at a reduced power in the microwave for 2-3 minutes and then whist until smooth. Add the black (or whatever colour-but I used black because it's easy to colour something black when it's already brown!) food colouring and whisk until all the chocolate is completely black. This will take maybe 1/2t. Then put the icing sugar and meringue powder in the bowl of an electric mixer and mix together with the chocolate until incorporated. Add the water, tablespoon by tablespoon, until the mixture is a little thinner that the yellow one used for around the outside, but thick enough to pipe easily. Mix until the icing again loses its shine. Then you're ready to pipe!