Chocolate and Caramel Ripple Cheesecake with Brownie Base.

I have said it before but I will say it again. Cheesecake is my favourite dessert. It is also one of my favourite foods to experiment with. I love thinking up and trying out new flavours. This weekend brought the idea of mixing things up with a brownie base instead of the usual biscuit base. Now I don't know about you but I love, love, love brownies. Particularly when they are fudgy in the middle but crispy, bordering on over cooked on the edges. Pair this with a delicious, light cheesecake filling and I think that sounds like a darn good sweet treat.



The cheesecake filling I used is a delicious, light and fluffy filling. It is light on flavour which lets the brownie base remain the star of the dessert. And the chocolate and caramel sauces which are rippled throughout just finish it off. The gelatine in the cheesecake filling also means that you don't have to worry as much about getting the perfect consistency or allowing the cheesecake to set overnight. 4 hours in the fridge and you are good to go.



No fluffy around this week, it's straight to the recipe!

This week's tips and hints:
* I use about half of the chocolate and caramel sauces to ripple through the filling and save the rest to drizzle over when you serve.
* Don't stress if your filling is a little lumpy when you fold all the ingredients together. While you want it to be as smooth as possible, you also don't want to beat all the air out of the whipped cream. As long as the cream cheese was whipped until smooth and it is relatively well combined with the cream you will still get a delicious and smooth cheesecake.



Enjoy! Xxx

Chocolate and Caramel Ripple Cheesecake



Serves: 8 - 12
Prep time: 20 minutes
Baking time: 30 minutes
Setting time: 4+ hours

Ingredients

Brownie base
125g butter
1 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
3/4 cup plain flour
40g cocoa
1 tsp vanilla bean paste
1/2 cup choc chips

Cheesecake filling
3 tsp powdered gelatine
1/2 cup water
250g cream cheese
3/4 cup caster sugar
1 tbls lemon juice
300ml thickened cream

Chocolate sauce
120g good quality milk chocolate
4 tbls thickened cream

Caramel sauce
2 tbls brown sugar
40g butter
4 tbls thickened cream

Method

Preheat oven to 160ºC. Line the base of a 20cm springform fan with baking paper and grease the sides with butter.

Melt butter in a saucepan, over medium heat. Remove from the heat and stir in the sugar. Add eggs, one at a time, until the mixture is thick and glossy.

Sift in flour and cocoa and stir until well combined.

Stir in the vanilla and choc chips.

Bake for 30 minutes. Set aside to cool completely.

Once the brownie base has cooled start on your sauces and filing.

Caramel sauce

Place butter, cream and brown sugar in a small saucepan. Stir over low heat until the butter has melted and the sugar has dissolved. Do not boil! Set sauce aside to cool.

Chocolate sauce

Place chocolate and cream in a small saucepan.  Stir over a low-medium heat until the chocolate has melted. Do not boil! Set aside to cool.

Cheesecake filling

Sprinkle gelatine over water in a cup and stand in a small pan of simmering water. Stir until dissolved. Set aside to cool.

Beat cream cheese, lemon juice and sugar with electric mixer until smooth and creamy. Transfer to a large bowl.

Whip cream until soft peaks form. Fold cream into cheese mixture. Fold in gelatine mixture.

Pour half the cheesecake mixture into springform pan on top of brownie base. Drizzle 1/4 of the chocolate and brownie sauces over the mixture. Swirl with a wooden skewer.

Pour the rest of the cheesecake mixture into pan. Drizzle with another 1/4 of the chocolate and caramel sauces. Swirl with a wooden skewer.

Place in fridge to set for at least 4 hours.

Before serving heat leftover caramel and chocolate sauces for 15 seconds in microwave and stir until smooth. Drizzle over each slice of cheesecake as served.

Mixed Berry and White Chocolate Friands

As a general rule I am more of a savoury snack type person. I love pretzels and salty little morsels. Sit me down with some cheese and crackers, or some chips, and I will be one happy little Corinne. There are times however when you just want something sweet. And there are a few sweet things I will never say no to. Last week I told you my all time favourite dessert was cheesecake. This is so true I could eat cheesecake any time of the day or night. This week I am going to share my favourite afternoon tea sweet. Berry and white chocolate friands.

Coffee dates with friends, while super trendy and lots of fun, can be a little boring for me when it comes to ordering. I don't often drink hot drinks and when I do order one I usually only drink two thirds of the mug before I lose interest. This means that at catch ups I am often the one sitting there with a glass of water or soft drink while everyone sips away at their hot beverages. Because of this I always try and ensure that we are headed somewhere that serves something tasty to eat. I love looking at all the delicious, pretty little sweets in the glass fronted cases. I do not, however, enjoy making a decision on which sweet to buy. Decision making and I are not exactly buddies, in fact I hate it! Friands are the exception to this rule. If I spot friands in that glass fronted cabinet all bets are off, the decision is made and I am guaranteed to not have ordering remorse.

That's a thing right? I'm not the only one who suffers from buyers remorse at restaurants am I? You know, when you um and ah over the menu, eventually making a last minute decision when pressed by the waitstaff and regret your decision as soon as it arrives. I am notorious for it.

Anyway friands never give me ordering remorse. They have also become one of the most requested sweets for me to bake by my family. So I thought it was time to share one of my most popular recipes with you.

This week's hints/tips:
* I used mixed berries today, I usually use just raspberries but thought I would mix it up this time. I was also out of raspberries, haha. So basically you can top them with whatever you think will work.
* I usually bake my friands in muffin cases. This is for a few reasons: it makes cleanup easier; I am too lazy to grease my pans; I don't own a proper friand pan.
* Save your left over egg yolks. They can be used to make pudding or lemon curd or custard. Store in an airtight container, covering the yolks in water, for up to two days in the fridge.

Enjoy!

Mixed Berry and White Chocolate Friands



Makes: 12
Prep time: 10 minutes
Baking time: 30 minutes

Ingredients
6 egg whites
185g butter, melted
1 cup almond meal
1 1/2 cups icing sugar, sifted
1/2 cup plain flour
100g white chocolate chips
100g (roughly) frozen berries

Method
Preheat oven to 180°C. Line or grease 12 pan muffin tray or friand tray.
Place egg whites in a bowl and whisk lightly with a fork to combine.
Add butter, almond meal, sifted icing sugar, and flour. Stir to combine.
Add chocolate chips and stir through.
Divide batter evenly between pans.
Bake friands for 10 minutes, then top with berries. Bake for a further 15 - 20 minutes, until golden.
Cool on wire rack (right side up).
Drizzle with melted white chocolate or dust with icing sugar before serving.

Rocky Road Cake

Do you ever get an idea in your head and you simply cannot rest until you have tried it? This happens to me often, whether it be a craft project, finding a piece of clothing or decor that I feel like I have to have, or a recipe idea. I will admit that I am terrible at losing interest part way through if I am not succeeding though. If you look through my crafting things, or look in any of my notebooks you are likely to find at least one half finished 'great idea' project. Off the top of my head I can name at least 2 half finished crochet hats, 2 started crochet blankets, 1 recipe and 2 unfinished craft projects.

This week's feast was one of these great ideas. I tossed the idea of a rocky road cake around in my head for several days. I imagined a moist, dense chocolate cake, with rocky road ingredients in between the cake layers, covered in smooth, rich ganache, topped with rocky road pieces. So of course I set out to make this dream a reality. Unfortunately (for you guys!) it has taken me 2 weeks to 'finish' this great idea project and write up the recipe to share. I also apologise for the quality of the photos. I tried a new setting and rushed as I was dying to try the cake, it wasn't until I loaded the photos on the computer, days later, that I realised how terrible they were!

Overall I was really happy with the end result, and it went down a treat with the whole family (which on this particular family dinner was 8 adults, 2 teenagers, and a three year old). There are a few things I learnt or would do differently next time though. So onto the recipe!

This week's tips and hints.
* DO NOT LEAVE OUT THE COFFEE. My mother was very concerned when she saw me adding coffee but I can assure you, as I did her, that it is a key ingredient. I did a lot of reading about chocolate cakes and discovered that the coffee helps to provide the moist texture and full flavour that makes this cake so good. You cannot taste the coffee in the final product.
* As you can probably see in the photos my ganache was not great, it is something I am still trying to master. I have narrowed the cause down to two mistakes. Always use good quality chocolate, I cheated and used cheap cooking chocolate. Big mistake! Also I tried to heat my cream and pour it over my chocolate. This just didn't work. My advice (having practiced since) is to heat the cream and chocolate together.
* I'm sorry I don't have quantities for the rocky road ingredients, if I'm honest I just used my judgement and guessed. You can use any ingredients you want. I used what I enjoy in my rocky road, I know there are lots of different recipes.
* I melted the marshmallows for the middle layer. You only need to place a small amount between the layers, it will spread and if you use too much it will leak out the sides and you will spend ages tidying it up and removing the excess, trust me.

Rocky Road Cake

Prep time: 30 minutes

Cooking time: 40 minutes

Ingredients

Cake

2 cups sugar

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour

3/4 cup cocoa

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

2 eggs

1 cup buttermilk

1 cup strong black coffee

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Rocky Road

Milk chocolate

Crushed nuts

Glace cherries

Marshmallows

Desiccated coconut

Ganache 

Dark Chocolate

Thickened Cream

Method 

Heat oven to 180°C. Grease and flour desired pan/s.

Stir together sugar, flour, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder and salt in large bowl.

 Add eggs, buttermilk, coffee, oil and vanilla; beat on medium speed of mixer 2 minutes (batter will be thin).

Pour batter evenly into prepared pans.

Bake 30 to 35 minutes or until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. 

Cool 10 minutes; remove from pans to wire racks. Cool completely.

Meanwhile make a small quantity of rocky road, by melting chocolate and combining all ingredients. Allow to set in fridge.

 When set chop into small chunk and reserve for top of cake.

Make ganache using equal parts chocolate and cream. Place in microwave safe dish and heat for 1 minute. Stir. If the chocolate is still not melted, repeat at 10 second intervals.

Place in fridge to cool.

Once cake has cooled and ganache has cooled and set, it is time to assemble.

Spread ganache on the top of the bottom cake and the bottom of the top cake. Spread a small amount of each roacky road filling on the top of the bottom cake (remember that a little of each ingredient will add up to a lot altogether). 

Place top cake on top.

Cover the entire cake with ganache and allow to set in the fridge.

When set, place reserved rocky road on top.

Enjoy!

Go-to Cake and White Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting recipe.

Sorry for the radio silence everyone. I've been in a slump, lacking inspiration and motivation in the kitchen for the last few weeks and as a result I let The Weekly Feast slide.

Do you ever find yourself at the end of a project looking at your finished product and being disappointed, even though it is perfectly fine? That is how my slump started. A few weeks ago I decided to try my hand at thrice cooked chips. They are something that are always raved about on cooking shows and I was intrigued. Deep frying is not something I have much, okay any, experience with. We don't even own a deep fryer. But I decided to give it a go the old fashioned way, with a saucepan full of oil. I took the time, researched the technique, I made sure my chips were all very similar size and I even used a timer. All up I think I spent 2 hours on these chips, and I was disappointed. To be perfectly honest they tasted no better than store-bought oven chips, actually they weren't even as crispy as oven chips. They tasted fine but lacked that distinctive crunch. I don't know if it was the oil I used, my technique, my timing or the fact that I was just guessing with the temperature of my deep frying oil. But the end result left me disappointed.

Now while the chips were a small failure, the rest of the meal was quite tasty, but I was already in that funk. I had decided to have pork spare ribs with the chips. I mean what a classic combo, ribs and chips! After searching and procrastinating I landed upon this recipe for slow-cooker southern pork ribs. Looking back now I can appreciate this recipe, however I will admit that at the time the whole meal left me disappointed. I didn't even bother to plate it nicely and photograph it. The problem was that the whole meal did not match up to the picture I had in my head. But now I can see it was not the disaster I imagined it to be. The chips, while not crispy, were tasty and the sauce from the ribs was delicious. 

Since the 'failed' feast I have lost my mojo in the kitchen. I have been keeping things simple and boring. Cooking so I can eat, not because I am enjoying it. I decided to skip last weekend as I was going away and hoped I would come back refreshed and ready to get back in the kitchen. It was just what I needed. I headed down to the Hunter Valley to see the Eagles play at Hope Estate. They are one of my all time favourite bands and I've been hanging for this concert since 2013 when Glenn Fry mentioned the possibility of them returning in the near future. Couple that with the fact that we had seats closer to the stage than I have ever dreamed of being (21 rows from the front!!) and I was pumped! Well let's just say that the concert was...Spectacular! Amazing! Fabulous! Everything I wanted, basically. And it worked. I came home and spent Sunday evening and Monday trawling through my recipe books and picking out new and exciting things. To add to my new inspiration I went out to lunch on Tuesday, just a simple meal at the ex-services club but it was so tasty and presented so beautifully that it made me want to get in the kitchen and work to evolve some of my own recipes to make them something special. So keep an eye out for some of my own recipes hitting the blog in the future! Then I spent today grocery shopping for the next fortnight, when I will be trying out lots of new recipes. I promise to share my stories on time! 

I haven't been in the kitchen yet but as a sorry for going MIA I'm going to share my go-to cake and white chocolate cream cheese frosting recipe with you. What I love about this recipe is that the frosting isn't sickeningly sweet and the cake is so versatile. Add some cocoa for a simple chocolate cake, add your favourite flavoured essence, colour it, shape it. The sky is the limit. As you can see I love rainbow cakes. I simply make a double batch of batter, divide evenly and colour, then bake each cake. So enjoy the recipe and I will be back soon! I would love to see your creations if you try out the recipe.

Go-to Cake and Cream Cheese Frosting Recipe



Ingredients

Cake
125g butter, softened
1 teaspoon of vanilla bean paste
3/4 cup (165g) caster sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups (225g) self-raising flour, sifted
1/2 cup (125g) milk

Frosting
170g white chocolate
455g cream cheese
3/4 cup butter, softened
3 cups icing sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla paste

Method
Cake
Preheat oven to a moderate temperature. I generally set my oven to 160°, but every oven is slightly different. Grease and line cake pan/s.
Beat butter, sugar and vanilla until light and fluffy.
Beat in eggs, one at a time until combined.
Stir in flour and milk, in batches. Be sure not to over mix in this stage, you want your batter to stay light.
If adding colouring now is the time.
Pour batter into cake pan/s.
Bake until a skewer inserted comes out clean, generally between 25-35 minutes depending on the thickness of you cake.
Allow to cool in pan/s for 5 minutes, then turn out onto cooling rack to cool completely.

Frosting
Whip cream cheese until soft and smooth.
Add butter and whip until smooth and light in colour. The longer you whip the paler you frosting will be.
Add icing sugar and vanilla. Whip until pale and fluffy. If the mixture stays on your paddle/whisk/spoon when you hold it up you have reached the right consistency. If it is too runny, try placing in the fridge for an hour.
Melt white chocolate. I melt mine in the microwave but you can use a double boiler. If using microwave, place in a safe bowl, microwave for 30 seconds at a time, stirring with a metal or plastic spoon in between.
Allow chocolate to cool.
Once cool beat chocolate into frosting and refrigerate for several hours to firm up.

Assembly
Once cake has cooled and frosting has set, it is time to assemble your cake. This part is all about your imagination! I love assembling as a layer cake with frosting sandwiched between each layer. This recipe makes A LOT of frosting but it's my favourite so I would rather have too much, than not enough.

Upside Down Mango and Coconut Cake

Sorry for the late post this week folks. While I aim to cook my feast on a Friday or Saturday night so that I can have the post up to break up the Monday morning monotony for you, life of course can spoil the best laid plans.

Upside down mango and coconut cake.

For the last six weeks I have had the please of having my Nan visiting and staying with us. She lives 1000km away so when she visits (generally for 4 - 6 weeks twice a year) other things can get put on hold while I enjoy some time with her. I started this challenge while she was here and she has been awfully encouraging, as she is with everything her grandchildren strive to do. But as I said this week life got in the way of a perfectly timed blog post (haha).

Success on the Pandora front
with a new little doggy charm
for my birthday present to myself.

February is a month of birthdays in my family. I particularly like to refer to the first week of February as birthday week. My birthday (26 this year for those playing at home) falls on the 2nd, I'm closely followed by my cousin (the big 21 this year!!) on the 3rd and then Nan (it's impolite to ask a lady over the age of 21 how old she is so I won't tell you, but I will say we are getting ready to celebrate a milestone birthday next year!) on the 4th. Nan and I don't get to celebrate our birthdays together very often, so when we do it still feels like a big treat to me! 

I am trying to encourage myself to do this
properly by setting up a study space

As I said this year held a milestone birthday with my cousin's 21st. Well this meant a trip to Sydney on Friday night (roughly a 5 hour trip) to get Nan almost halfway home and celebrate the birthday. I love visiting the family in Sydney, sadly we don't see each other nearly enough and it always seems to be short visits. But it was a great weekend none the less, with a family lunch on Saturday for the birthday boy, a spot of shopping in the afternoon (I was desperate to hit a Pandora store as we only have a small selection locally), a BBQ Saturday night and then the drive home on Sunday. Which left little time for cooking and blogging, as you can imagine.

Just to add something else into the works, I started studying today. After a year of casual work and career apathy I decided to try something new. I'm feeling enthused to be studying again, it is something I really enjoy. I do however love a good study break! Which is where this weeks Feast comes in.

We have a mango tree in our yard, which this year has produced the biggest crop we have had since moving here. Unfortunately we hadn't had the chance to eat them and noticed today that they were nearing the end of their fresh life span. Enter the Upside Down Mango Coconut Cakes from SBS Food . I love the idea of upside down cakes but have never actually cooked one. This was a great recipe to use up our aging mangoes and a few other pantry staples.

I have to admit that I am not a pro mango slicer, in fact I'm pretty terrible but I managed to extract a decent amount of fruit with no injury to myself. I made a few substitutions to save myself a trip to the supermarket and use up some left overs. I had run out of self-raising flour last week half way through a mammoth cupcake baking endeavor and have so far forgotten to replace it so I used white plain flour and wholemeal self raising flour. I don't think this made a great deal of difference. I also used coconut cream instead of milk, as I had some sitting in the fridge. I counter balance this I added a few tablespoons of normal milk to add a bit more moisture. 

The cake did take longer to cook than stated in the recipe. When I tested the cake, at the 35 minute mark, the skewer came out clean however I felt that it did not look quite right and still had a wobble to it. I put it back in for another 10 minutes and am so glad I trusted my instincts. It came out golden, moist and delicious. I am sure it would have been gooey without that extra time. 

I was terrified to turn it out. What if I dropped it? What if it didn't work? What if it tasted horrible? What if? What if? What if?! But it came out beautifully! Served with a scoop of icecream it was scrumptious. I think this recipe may have given me a love of upside down cakes, so watch out for some more of those during the year!  

In case you missed the link you can find it HERE. If you try it out please let me know what you think.

Well thanks for stopping by and I'll see you again next Monday (hopefully!).