I made these to-die-for Oreo Cheesecakes for a high tea today.  I thought I’d share the recipe, because you ought to make them and then have a sugar high headache like I have now.  Here are some more photos, they’re super quick and easy, using a cookie for the biscuit base saves loads of crushing-mixing-chilling time.

See?  There’s the cookie.

I’ll share the recipe, as I adapted it a little, using less eggs and cream cheese, fewer cookies and made it all metric.  Also, as my stick blender died, I mixed it all by hand.  I have found using a fork to work up the cream cheese, alternating with a whisk makes a good smooth cheese filling, so don’t let not having a good mixer stop you!  Sooo, adapted from the above link, here’s what I did…

Cookies ‘n’ Cream Mini-Cheesecakes

Ingredients

• two boxes of Oreo cookies, I used 20 for the cup cake bases, and chopped the rest to add to the filling
• 750gms cream cheese, room temperature
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 3 eggs, room temperature, lightly beaten
• 1 cup sour cream
• Pinch of salt

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 140 degrees. Line standard muffin tins with paper liners. Place 1 cookie in the bottom of each lined cup.
2. Beat cream cheese until smooth, scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Gradually add sugar, and beat until combined. Beat in vanilla.
3. Drizzle in eggs, a bit at a time, beating to combine and scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. Beat in sour cream and salt. Stir in chopped cookies by hand.
4. Divide batter evenly among cookie-lined cups, filling each almost to the top. Bake until filling is set, about 22 minutes (mine took about 30 minutes). I always let my baked cheesecakes cool in the now switched off oven once set, this seems to prevent the tops splitting.  Transfer to wire racks to cool completely. Refrigerate at least 4 hours (or up to overnight).

Voila!  I usually get all over the top with cheesecakes, sprinkling on flaked or grated chocolate, but ah, these are already unbelievable rich.  You could crumble cookie bits on top if you bought extra cookies if you wanted to really go all out.

Do you need to see another photo?

Last one, now go make them!

Only five more sleeps til the Auckland Art and Craft Market!  Wohoo!  You’ve probably heard the adds on the radio and seen posters up around town, so you’ve been saving up and planning your shopping list for AGES.  We’ll I’ve been planning for agaes too and I have some sweet treats lovely Scallop Snuggly softies and new Sea Horses too, as well as gifts for craftsy peeps!

So.. if you need to know the details, visit the website, or look here!

Saturday 11th June 2011
11am to 3pm
Aotea Centre, THE EDGE
Auckland Central
Gold coin entry donation

Did you see all the artist interviews?  I have been reading them too, here’s my one…

But so yummy!

I picked up a copy of Sugar-Free Toddlers at my La Leche League group.  I have browsed through the recipes, none I have tried, but it gave me some ideas.  I go off and on with my regular baking, at the moment I do dairy free scones whenever their called for, this time, I thought I’d make some cookies.  I found the recipes called for dried fruits or fresh pureed fruits instead of sugar, so I used 250 gms of Olivani, to which I added about three good handfuls of raisins.  It took a good 10 minutes to cream the mix with my trusty stick blender, raisins take more effort than sugar and butter!
The mix was a caramel colour and there were smallish chunks of raisins in it, then I added three cups of flour, about a teaspoon of baking powder, mixed it through, rolled into balls, squished down with a fork and popped it in the oven!  To these ones I added a half cup of cocoa powder, I like really rich cocoa choc cookies, so add less if you prefer.

I usually bake half the mix, and roll up into balls the remaining mix, which I place in a zip bag to grab and bake when I need a quick plate of goodies for a coffee morning.  It works really well, I just take them out to defrost, about ten minutes or so.  I bake them as I do the fresh batch, about 10 minutes on 180 degrees.  Yum!  They taste different to cookies with refined sugar, more fruity and rich, but Luna loves them, and so do I.

This is really just showing off, here is Luna’s birthday cake…  It took a good too nights to complete and she actually helped me mix and bake it, and it was a kind of torture for her, learning about having to wait until the following day to eat the cake.  I was a bit worried that the picture of the cake in my head would fail to appear in the layers of cake and off white chocolate icing, but after adding a couple of craters and astronauts, it turned out pretty close.

And one more…

The cake was made in two pieces, one double mixture in a large roasting tray, then one large cake in a round cake tin, stacked, with icing in between, I also had to poke a couple of skewers through to stop the top layer sliding off!  Then I trimmed the bottom layer into a circle, larger than the top round cake, and then just sliced off at angles all the way round, kind of fitting the off-cuts into the space between layers…  Phew then really carefully I iced it, trying to avoid the kind of avalanche effect (when the icing picks up cake debris and drags it off  the edge and onto the tray exposing the choc cake underneath…) this was tricky, and I thought it would all fall apart!  But a bit if careful smoothing and some strategically placed moon rock/marsh mellows and all was well.

Then the craters were fun and the icing sugar was all that was needed to make it look more white and less creamy.

This years garlic harvest was a bumper crop, we had made a few minor changes based  on last year.  We spaced the cloves out a little more – at least 15cms, and we actually did not feed the bed as much as the earlier plantings, and the cloves were already sprouting when we planted them.

Before braiding them this year, I also gave them longer to dry, a little too long as the leaves were quite crisp and brittle while I finished plaiting, but the garlic is just delicious.  We harvested them on the Summer Solstice, and although the heads were complete, they were rather small, I think if we left them a little longer in the ground, maybe another couple of weeks, or a month, they would have been much bigger. 

I’ve been experimenting with various bread recipes off and on for a couple of years, trying various different methods, all without a bread making machine.  Some just seem to take too long, too many steps – we’re talking rising at 4 am to make bread for breakfast – some others just did not seem to work, but now I think I’ve found a winner.

A friend of mine shared this basic recipe a few months ago and I’ve played around with it a lot.  I’ve experimented with it as a pizza base, a whole meal loaf, a flat salted and seeded bread and a calzone.  It works as a plaited bread, flat bread or a round or tin loaf…  it is so easy!  I use a few cheats, which save time more than anything, as it’s tricky baking with two littlees, you never know when you may have to dash off.

Here are the instructions for the basic large loaf, I frequently halve it if I’m baking for my little family.  Half makes plenty for pizza bases, depending on how thick you like it, making enough for two large pizzas, a calzone, or a couple of small plaited breads.

Into a large bowl, pour one cup of just boiled water, stir in three tablespoons of honey, stirring until the honey has dissolved and the water is just warm.  Sprinkle with one tablespoon of active yeast, cover bowl with a clean cloth and rest bowl in a shallow bath of hot water in your sink.  This seems to speed up the yeast, and in about ten minutes, more or less, you’ll have a bowl of frothy yeasty honey goodness.  I use just boiled water so it is still warm by the time the honey is well dissolved.

While you’re waiting for this to happen, you might like to sift three cups of flour, I usually use half wholemeal, half white, and a good pinch of salt into another bowl.  You can also add a few tablespoons of dried herbs, basil, oregano what ever you like!  A whole meal herby bread makes the best pizza base.  Once the yeasty honey has frothed up, add about three tablespoons of olive oil and the sifted flour.  Mix to combine until it is ready to turn out on the table to kneed.

I have used flour on my hands and the table, but I have also found using extra oil for kneeding works really well too, it also seems to make a smooth stretchy dough.  So I just use oil these days, which ever you use, kneed the dough for a while, until it feels smooth and elastic, shape it into a roundish ball, place back into the slightly oiled or floured bowl, cover with the tea towel again and allow it to rise for a few minutes.  I place the bowl on my stove top, just near or over the oven vent.  If you haven’t turned your oven on do it now!  (For a whole meal loaf I bake at around 180-190 degrees, for an all white loaf, I bake at about 200-210, no set time, just until the bread is lovely and golden).

Once the dough has risen, it might be twice the size, or just a third bigger, take it out, and gently give a kneed and shape.  Roll or pull it out for a pizza base, fold it over and flatten for a flat bread, or divide into thirds and stretch it out to plait, or just shape it into a nice oval as above.  For a calzone, I roll out into a very large oval, fill with a tomatoey lentily sauce, chopped mushrooms, sweated onions or shallots, cheese, whatever you like, fold over and twist edges.  For a yummy flat bread, drizzle with olive oil, and sprinkle with rock salt and cumin seeds.  Sometimes I let it sit again for a couple of minutes covered with a tea towel before I put it in the oven…  in no time you have a delicious bready meal!!

Just beautiful around here today, they garden is alive  with colour and the ground is warm, can’t wait for the garlic harvest.  Summer solstice is happening on the 21st of December, a day of pulling up the lovely fat bulbs, and of course a delicious lunch.

With the arrival of baby imminent I decided to have a go at making a ‘groaning cake’, a delicious spicy apple cake perfect for new mammas.  Check out the recipe here.

I came across this recipe a little while ago and couldn’t get it out my head, it’s just so cute and crafty!

I was a little unsure how the colour would turn out after the buttons were baked as the raw dough had quite a good pastel look – very vintage buttony – so these are maybe a little dark…  But anyway I found the recipe here if you want it ‘shortbread buttons…’

Such a lovely and satisfying way to celebrate the solstices.  This is the second attempt at garlic growing for us, and this is by far more successful than the first.  I so recommend growing your own!

The photo above was taken in August and shows the first strong shoots pushing up through the mulch and good worm cast compost…  only four months later and we have these!

I found some lovely large organic garlic cloves at my local organics shop, much of which was already sprouting and was much better than the seed garlic I bought from the plant shop the previous year.  We used the same bed in the garden, and for the six months it was between crops we added several layers of compost as garlic apparently uses a lot of nitrogen.  After planting the cloves we covered the bed in a thick mulch of leaves.

It was really very easy to grow, we have a worm farm which provides a good liquid fertilizer, that I applied fairly regularly, we had plenty of rain and so I did not need to water very often until late November.  We also tended to avoid many other plants growing in the same bed as garlic is one of those plants that does not make a good companion, ours shared the bed with some self-seeding Kale and Calendulas and that was about it.

It took a morning to brush off the dried dirt and braid up, about 50 cloves, six of which stayed smallish cloves and a couple that were spiked by the fork, so plenty for us and some to share around.  It’s good to let it air dry, we kept it mostly shaded for a few days until it was ready for braiding.  The flavour seems to develop nicely as the cloves dry, but you can still cook with them fresh.