Friday 23 July 2010

World Cup Cooking

At work, we decided to have a sweepstakes with a difference -  no money involved - the winner got to choose the cake recipe that we'd celebrate the end of the World Cup with.

I did a weekly round up of who played who, and comments on each match, and it definitely made me more interested in the whole thing.

The winner chose a white chocolate and wasabi cheesecake, but as waitrose was all out of wasabi, and the team seemed a bit worried about the choice, I replaced the wasabi with raspberries.

I've never made cheesecake before and generally avoid eating it as it makes me feel a little ill. I decided that I'd make two, one baked and one not. I found two recipes on the internet although I did use slightly less cheese in one because I didn't want to buy another 200g tub just for 25g.

I accidentally bought double the white chocolate, as I assumed they were 100g bars, but they were in fact 200g. The leftover chocolate went into a wedding wednesday fondue, so it didn't get wasted.

It was hard work making the cheesecake, I decided to make the baked one as it would need time to cool. If I did it again, I'd buy a second tin because the first one definitely needed more time in the support of the tin before being moved, hence the cracks you can see in the picture. I'd also utilise my food processor more next time (I thought it would be fun to smash the biscuits with a rolling pin - it probably would have been if I hadn't tried to bash quite so many all at once.)



The non-baked cheesecake did seem to melt when out of the fridge for longer than half an hour, but the taste was still good.  The general consensus was that the non baked cheesecake had more of a white chocolate taste, but the baked cheesecake won because baked cheesecakes are awesome!

Here is a picture of my fridge post cheesecake making,  I think this is how all fridges should look.


And this is how you can tell that the baking you did for work was a success (the coloured plates are my cake plates).


The last photo is a small glimpse into my personality.  I have some OCD tendencies - can you tell?




8 comments:

James Hodgson said...

Some of us really enjoyed the cheesecake *and* did our own washing up! :-)

Carrie said...

That's very true - the blog world should know that some of the lovely people I work with are in fact capable of washing their own plates so that others can then have cheesecake too. Wonderful people!

Sugar Crawler said...

nomm nomm! i <3 cheesecake!


ps: i follow and linked your blog :D
swap-bot.com/user:sugarcrawler

Jennifer McLean said...

Mmmm, loving all the cheesecake pictures! They look great, as does your pavlova and cupcakes. I have a great suggestion for you about the bags for icing. You can purchase plastic icing bags in a roll so you always have a clean new icing bag to use. You can still use the couplers from the cloth bags and attach any tip. If you put a little less icing in them you can use a twist tie on the end to keep the icing in and then have to use a little less power to control the bag and less tired hands. ( I used to do wedding cakes before I started watercolor painting)
Anyway, I'm from blog swap follower swap and I love your blog. I will be adding a link in a blog post about the swap hopefully getting everyone some new followers.
Best,
Jenn (jaemac from swapbot)

~LilCountryBelle~ said...

Looks good :)
Hi! QueenQuisa visiting for Be my blog follower on Blogger via Swap-bot :)

Cherylann said...

UMMMM! I love cheesecake but it doesn't love me back. It looks great!

I AM A BLOGGER TOO!- and I am cmarois. You are mentioned in my blog entry for today. The URL is cmramble.blogger.com

Anne said...

Hi there, this is Anne aka missanne from swap-bot for the I'm a blogger follow me swap! I am drooling over this post!!

Lisa said...

I'm so glad I'm not the only one pathological about symmetry.....