GBBO 2015: Week 4 Desserts - New York Baked Cheesecake

In addition to my banana cheesecake I wanted to make a baked cheesecake as well to properly test my cheesecake skills. A popular recipe that I found was for a New York style baked cheesecake, and it also looked relatively simple as I didn't want to try something too adventurous and have it fail - I'm a perfectionist. I used this recipe for my bake.

The first part of the bake is to make the base.

Ingredients:

140g plain flour

50g butter

50g golden caster sugar

1 egg yolk

1tsp baking powder

To make the base, combine the flour, butter, sugar and baking powder in a mixing bowl. 

I tried mixing them with a spoon but found it was easier to do it with my hands due to the butter. Once these are combined, add in the egg yolk. 

Then tip the mixture into the cake tin and push it down so that it covers the entire base. I ended up with quite an uneven base as the mixture was difficult to work with. Which is evidenced by the sheer amount of fingerprints you can see in the photo.

This then went in the fan oven at 130 degrees celcius for about 25 minutes. 

While the cheesecake base is cooling, the mixture for the cake part can be made.

Ingredients:

900 cream cheese

190 golden caster sugar

4 eggs

1tbsp vanilla bean paste

This part is rather straightforward; simply put the cream cheese, sugar and vanilla into a bowl and mix. 

Then, mix in the eggs one at a time. 

With the mixture combined, it is ready to be poured over the base and baked. This recipe asked for the bottom of the cake tin to be wrapped in tin foil and then placed in a deep baking tray so that water can surround the tin - like a very large and very heavy bain marie. I think this is so the inside doesn't overheat or something like that. 

The recipe said to bake in the oven for 40 minutes, however it did not state a change of temperature from when I baked the base, so I left it the same. However this was not hot enough and it took so long to cook. I turned up the oven to about 160 degrees and that started to work. So I really don't know how long it was left in the oven as it took longer than was probably correct. The recipe said that when cooked the top should still have a wobble to it, which was quite hard to judge. 

The cheesecake was cooked by the time I took it out the oven luckily as the wait was actually horrible as I was staring at it in the oven for well over an hour. It didn't have a very strong taste to it, just a mild vanilla taste. I don't think that I would make this particular cheesecake again as I prefer things to have a bit more flavour and this just took so long to bake I don't want to see it again to be honest.

GBBO 2015: Week 4 Desserts - Banana Cheesecake

Cheesecake has always seemed like an easy thing to make, as it is the dessert of choice for people on shows like Come Dine with Me and Dinner Date. So I wanted to push myself more with this rather than keeping it simple. I decided to make a Banana Cheesecake this week, using this recipe.

The first part to making the cheesecake was to make the biscuit base.

Ingredients:

250g Digestive biscuits

150g Butter

30g light Muscovado sugar

First thing is to take the digestive biscuits and smash them into crumbs. When smashing up biscuits, cover them with a tea towel as I am still finding bits of biscuit all over the kitchen days later.

Melt the butter and sugar in a pan and then stir in the biscuit crumbs.

Put the biscuit mixture into the pan and use the back of a spoon to pat it into the base of the tin.

Then, leave the biscuit base to set in the fridge for half an hour.

The next task is to make the actual cake part of the cheesecake.

Ingredients:

300g cream cheese

120g golden caster sugar

220g banana

250ml double cream

4 gelatine leaves

70ml orange juice

3 egg yolks

The first thing to do is mashing up the bananas and placing them in a pan with the orange juice and letting it cook on a low heat.

Then when the banana starts to cook, turn the heat off and let the mixture cool.
In a small bowl I put the gelatine leaves in cold water to soak for five minutes - this is just what the packet that I bought instructed, other gelatine packets may differ. Then I stirred the gelatine into the banana mixture, one sheet at a time.
In a mixing bowl, combine the cream cheese, caster sugar and egg yolks.

In a second bowl, whip the cream. Then fold the cream into the first mixture.

Then pour this combined mixture into the pan with the banana mixture in.

Pour the finished mixture on top of the biscuit base.

I then left the cheesecake to set in the fridge overnight as I don't know exactly how long it takes to set. 

To finish it off, I cut up a banana into slices and put them on the top - my attempt at making it look pretty. 

This cheesecake was so delicious, I could definitely taste the banana in it and the biscuit base was so yummy. Everyone who tried it liked it so I will definitely be making this again. 

GBBO 2015: Week 3 Bread - Banana Bread

I have been intending to make bread for absolute months, and now I actually have no choice but to make it! I decided to go with the signature bake of this weeks GBBO; quick breads. I had to google what these were, and found a list of examples of quick breads - and praise the gods, Banana Bread was on the list! I absolutely adore banana bread. Normally the things I bake take at least four days to get eaten by everyone in my house, but when I made this, it was gone in less than 24 hours - mostly into my mouth. This is just so easy to make and it is going to be a permanent feature in my kitchen from now on. I used Mary Berry's Banana Loaf recipe to make this.

Ingredients:

100g butter

175g Caster sugar

225g Self-raising flour

2 eggs

2 bananas

1tsp baking powder

1tbsp milk

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees celcius (fan oven) and then grease the loaf tin and line it with greaseproof paper. The bananas need to be mashed up with a fork until it is practically a liquid.

This recipe really is simple. Weigh out all of the ingredients and add them into a mixing bowl. 

Then simply mix them all together. 

And it's done! Ready to go into the oven. Let it bake for an hour. 

And voila! Heaven on a plate.

GBBO 2015: Week 2 Biscuits - Biscotti

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Week 2 of the GBBO made me nervous as I am not great at making biscuits. I have only had one successful previous attempt at making biscuits as often I make them too thick or thin or I over work the dough. But then when I read that it was biscotti I thought well that's different, it might turn out quite well. I have never made or eaten biscotti before, and honestly I couldn't think what it looked until I went to Costa for lunch and saw they were selling little packets of biscotti.
I chose to use a recipe by GBBO host Paul Hollywood as I thought this would surely mean that my bake would succeed. You can find the recipe here. He has the recipe for three types of biscotti and I chose to make the chocolate, almond and orange flavoured biscotti.

Ingredients:

280g Plain flour

250g Caster sugar

3 eggs

1/2tsp baking powder

1/2tsp vanilla extract

50g dark chocolate

50g chocolate chips

100g blanched almonds* 

zest of 1 orange

*One difference I made to Paul Hollywood's recipe was the blanched almonds; his recipe states 135g blanched almonds, I only bought one packet of 100g so that it how much I used, which I found was plenty once chopped up.

First off, the usual preparations of oven preheating at 140 degrees Celcius and placing some greaseproof paper on a baking tray - I put a smidge of butter in the corners of the tray to stick the paper down.

Mix the flour, sugar and baking powder in a mixing bowl.

Then in a second bowl, beat three eggs together. The recipe said I won't need all of the egg, but I definitely needed more than two.

This was the easy part, and here endeth the easy part. The mixture then became really difficult to mix and did not look like a dough to me. The recipe said that it should not be sticky at all, and well, it stuck my fingers together and to the mixture and to everything else in the vicinity. Cutlery was lost to it. It was like trying to climb out of quicksand.

Anyway, after a brief cry as I thought my mixture had gone wrong, I decided to just carry on with it. So now it was time for the flavourings. First I added the vanilla essence as this was the ingredient which required the least preparation. I then chopped up the blanched almonds into halves or thirds, melted the dark chocolate over a pan of boiling water, weighed out the chocolate chips and grated the orange as only the zest was needed. 

I then added the ingredients to the mixture and mixed it by hand. The mixture was too difficult to use a spoon to mix it and although my hands got very stuck together and I forgot what my hands actually looked like, it actually all looked a lot better when it was mixed together. 

I scraped the mixture out of the bowl and onto the sideboard, which I had floured. Then I cut the dough into two (roughly) equal pieces. 

The recipe said to roll the dough into 'a long log, about 4cm in diameter'. I do not know how long 4cm is, especially on uneven dough which had already made me cry twice by this point. So I roughly rolled the dough into two long blobs. 

And finally into the oven for 30 minutes. 

After 30 minutes, I took the tray out of the oven and let it cool for 10 minutes. Then, I cut the logs into diagonal strips and turned them onto their flat sides. This was when it finally was looking like biscotti - or what I think biscotti looks like. 

Then, back into the oven for another 35 minutes. 

Ta da! The finished product looks a lot better than I thought it would, and I think it actually looks quite fancy and pretty. And tastes crunchy and chocolatey which is good!