CHEESECAKES

So here we are, a mere 3 weeks and 2 days or so since my last post. Not so much striking while the iron is hot as striking after the iron has been in the fridge for a fortnight and then kicked into a snowdrift. Nevertheless, I've got hold of the iron now and regardless of temperature I'm striking with it for better or worse. And as it turns out this week, one of those 2 options turns out to be entirely and biliously correct.

Cheesecakes, then. Or more accurately, my idiotic idea that I should try to make something that's true to its actual name. Because let's face it, cheesecakes don't taste of cheese, do they? In fact, it tends to be that the less they taste of cheese as opposed to e.g. chocolate, strawberries and...er...New York (to name 3 popular cheesecake flavours), the better. So why not make ones that actually taste of cheese? After all, cheese - albeit mild cheese - is the main ingredient. How wrong can it go to just add more of what it's made of already? Well read on to find out, but here's a spoiler alert: VERY BLOODY WRONG INDEED.

Ingredients:

Would Sir like to see the cheeseboard? Well tough, because I'm about to ruin most of these in an act of foolish whimsy.

To indulge in your own personal rennet-fest, you'll need to either ram-raid a dairy (potentially with an actual ram, if it's a goat dairy) or pop down to your local cheese flinger for these commercially-available curds:

A packet of cheese biscuits
50g of butter
250g of ricotta
150ml of double cream
50g of Philadelphia (the cheese, not the US state - these'll be bad enough without adding soil)
A selection of cheeses of your choice - I went for* edam, wensleydale & cranberry and stilton
Assorted crap to decorate

*Well I say "I went for" as if I had some brilliant plan as to what I was going to make, but what I actually mean is I bought a variety pack of small cheeses that were on sale in Tesco and these 3 were the ones that happened to be in it.

Method:

The good thing with a cheesecake is, flavouring aside (as will become apparent soon enough), you can't go far wrong making it. I chose to make 3 personal-sized cheesecakes, but you could make 1 large one. Which I suppose could still be a personal-sized one if you're a particularly big person, such as that bloke off of Pointless who isn't also the bloke off of Armstrong & Miller.

First job is, crush your biscuits. About half a packet or so is a good bet, and an even better bet is to crush them in a freezer bag so the bits don't go everywhere. Melt the butter in a saucepan (or if you're lazy like me, in a bowl in the microwave as this takes about 6 seconds) and then stir in the biscuit crumbs - or sweep in as many as you can find off your worktop/floor if you decided to go the non-bag route in the end. You daft twat.

The non-rage option.

Once mixed, press them down into the bottom of your cake tin or pot or whatever it is you're using. I re-used the glass dishes from some 'real' mini cheesecakes* but you could use a small glass or jar, or the palm of your hand at a push. Though it'll make chilling the cheesecake in the fridge a tad uncomfortable.

*We've had these for a while I should add - I didn't eat 6 cheesecakes in 1 evening. I'm not a monster!

And of course if you decide you don't fancy a cheesecake in the end, you can pass the bases off as individual portions of really quite awful muesli.

Then, get your double cream, pop it in a bowl and give it a damn good thrashing until it's fairly solid. You can use an electric whisk for this of course, but in an attempt to demonstrate authenticity (and why I think that's worth doing for this blog is anyone's guess) I did it the manual, shoulder-knackering way:

I'm literally adding this picture for whip-arm sympathy alone.

Then, bung in your ricotta and philadelphia and mix them in, then divide your mixture into however many globs you need - this amount is plenty for 3 mini-cheesecakes.

Now it's just a case of mixing in each of your chosen cheeses, leaving them in the fridge for a bit to set and voila! A smorgasbord of increasingly terrible desserts.

Oh, and my other top tip for this part is to make sure your bowls are somewhere out of reach if you're a cat owner, as the last thing you want to have to do is to have to sprint back in after you pop to the loo because you've just heard your cat jump up onto the work surface in search of cream to shove its face in. Especially when you end up tripping over your trousers in the process, which have fallen down as you didn't have time to do them up properly. Still, not all bad as my hitting the kitchen floor at least scared the cat away before she ate anything.

The results:

Wensleydale & Cranberry

Cracking cheese...vomit! Oh wait, I meant 'Cracking cheese, Gromit!'. Sorry.

I thought I'd play it safe(ish) to start with and go for the mildest cheese with actual fruit in, so it's about as close to a regular cheesecake as possible. And do you know what? It was actually alright. The worst part was eating it with the base, as that was way cheesier than anything else and tasted entirely out of place. But with a bit of sugar and a normal biscuit base I reckon you could make a proper Wensleydale cheesecake and it'd be perfectly OK. In fact this was so dull, I deleted the video I took of me eating it because it's just me eating a fairly alright cheesecake.

This is what's known in the experimental cooking trade as 'lulling yourself into a false sense of security'.

With this result under my belt (and indeed above my belt, as I subsequently discovered I'd dropped some on my t-shirt), I moved on to level 2.


Edam

This really is a bit of edam and not a section of a waxwork apple, honest.

I thought I'd probably be alright here too, because edam is cheesier but not a hugely strong flavour - I mean, they give kids the Babybel version in lunchboxes and those tiny idiots are as fussy as anything with strong flavours. So how did it turn out once I'd grated a load of it in? Well see for yourself...

I cut the video before the worst of the retching, but bloody hell that was utterly awful - deceptively, it didn't smell at all. But the taste. Oh man. It was the flavour equivalent of the smell you get when someone with really rank feet takes their shoes and socks off off after a long walk on a humid day.

So much for thinking I'd be OK. But could it get worse?


Stilton

Well at least I didn't have to worry about whether it was mouldy or not.

Right then, the cheese equivalent of an end-of-level boss. Now I should add I quite like stilton, so I thought - even after the previous awfulness - I might get away with this. But did I?

No. No I did not. This was really, really horrible. Like before in that it was horribly feet cheesy as the overall flavour, but with a strange tang as well - like you'd licked a 9V battery while chewing on a marathon runner's used insole.

It just goes to show you that it's always the quiet ones you have to watch out for. I thought this week I'd emerge relatively unscathed (well, apart from when I fell over my own trousers), but as it turns out this selection took me to a particularly dank and musty corner of the culinary world.

And the worst part? I've still got the rest of the bloody cheese to get through, and now I've put myself right off it. Anyone want to subscribe to a very small and short-lived cheese sandwich by post service?

Next time: 'ready meals'