MACARONI CHEESECAKE

Oh man, the hipsters are going to love this week's attempt. Why? Well hold your horses, Susan - if I come straight out and tell you, you'll have no big reveal for the end and no reason to stick around. Although now I've said that I tell you at the end you could of course just scroll to the end to find it, so I've probably just shot myself in the foot there.

Anyway, what is it that they'll love but I'm not going to tell you why? Well it's a cheesecake - but not just any cheesecake. No, this cheesecake is the first step in a transatlantic fightback against the encroaching horror that is the Americanism 'mac 'n' cheese'. Don't get me wrong - I'm not some grammar Nazi who gets stroppy if someone doesn't say 'Whom is at one's door, Mother?'. This irritation comes purely from logic: because it's not 'mac 'n' cheese', is it. It's macaroni cheese. That's the name of the recipe, so that's what it is. Mac 'n' cheese is literally just a list of the ingredients, albeit with an abbreviated 'and'. It'd be like calling ready salted crisps 'sodium chloride 'n' potato', or toast 'bread 'n' fire'.

If I followed the same stupid logic as 'mac 'n' cheese' then this would be called 'mac 'n' cheese 'n' cake', which looks absurd and just underlines what a daft naming convention it is. There isn't even any cake in it for starters. Look - here's the list of entirely cake-free ingredients for you to check yourself!

Ingredients:

If you can't decide between a dessert and main course and for some reason decide to make something not really as nice as either out of bits of both, you will want:

75g of hob nobs
30g of melted butter (you don't have to buy it melted - but if it's a hot day and it goes a bit runny, that's a bonus)
100 ml of double cream
75g of caster sugar
200g of mascarpone cheese
100g of cooked macaroni
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla essence
(Optional) a teabag and/or some instant hot chocolate powder,
Some ibuprofen gel, for your aching jaw

Method:

First job is the worst job. Oh, other than the eating part I suppose, but that doesn't rhyme as well so we'll ignore it for now. Get your macaroni and pop it in a saucepan with some boiling water from the kettle. Of course to do pasta properly you're supposed to add it to cold water and bring it to the boil, but let's face it - for this recipe, cooking the pasta wrong is probably the least of your authenticity concerns.

Fancy a cuppa, guv? No? What do you mean there were 'funny bits' in it last time? I've no idea what you mean...

To make matters worse for any of you inexplicably trying to appease an Italian with this muck, I also cooked mine with an earl grey teabag and some instant hot chocolate powder in an attempt to make it a bit more in keeping with a dessert. Why both? Well I did a poll on Twitter on what to cook the pasta with and had a grand total of 2 whole votes - one for each. So thought 'sod it', and lobbed them both in. Don't tell me democracy doesn't work.

After a bit of cooking, I'm afraid you'll get some thoroughly unpleasant 'brownaround' occurring. Sorry. Also, the smell is pretty weird too - who'd have thought starch, tea and chocolate mist would whiff?

Sorry about the state of the hob. I was going to clean it first, but then I thought it'd probably need doing afterwards too. If not scrubbing down with acid.

Once the pasta has gone soft, quite possibly much like your knees in anticipation of having to eat this, drain it off and put it to one side. In a bowl I mean - don't just tip it out onto the floor, tempting as that may be. Now, let's crack on with the more traditional parts of the cheesecake - specifically, all the bits of this recipe that aren't pasta.

Pop your biscuits in a bag, and give them a damn good thrashing with a rolling pin or other club-style instrument. And remember to make sure the bag is properly sealed or biscuits will shoot right out and all over your worktop. Trust me.

Luckily I had some spare biscuits to top up my bag. Which given I'd been eating the spares as I went along is nothing short of miraculous.

Next, plop the butter in a saucepan and heat it gently until it melts. Stir in your crushed biscuits, and then press them into the bottom of ideally a small cake tin. Or, un-ideally, the lined inner bit of an ice-cream maker, like I did.

Despite looking like I've taken a photo of a clogged bucket, this worked really well. I should add I do have cake tins, I just didn't want to make a full-size cheesecake. It's almost like I've caught on that the less I make, the less I have to chum down.

That can go in the fridge to chill, and in the meantime pop all your other ingredients bar the pasta in a bowl and whisk. It should all blend together, and once nice and smooth you can stir in your lovely dank tubes.

If nothing else, this blog is turning into a nice little portfolio for me to apply for low-budget film special effects work. Today: alien intestines.

Slop your mixture on top of the biscuit base, push it down and leave it to chill for 20 mins or so. Then you're ready to extract it from the small metal bin you made it in (in my case) and serve!

The results:

Here's the thing. Pasta is, largely, tasteless. Goopy and chewy, but no actual flavour. It's not as if I'd made a cheesecake and shoved in a load of olives (although that's an idea...). So this is really all about texture. And there's a heck of a lot of that going on here. Observe, sir:

That tube in the middle poking out disturbs me. It's like a little eye, staring at me.

To that end, it was actually fairly pleasant to eat what with it being a cheesecake. It just involved a lot of chewing. A LOT. And this is where those hipsters come in.

Travel down any trendy high street these days, and you'll probably come across an independent coffee shop selling bubble tea - exactly the sort of place bearded trendsters like to hang out. And this, chums, is the food equivalent of bubble tea - something perfectly nice with random, claggy chewy bits added in for no apparent reason and certainly no benefit.

A lot of substances to work your way through here. Many of them simultaneously, and only about 50% of them wanted if you're hoping to avoid face cramp.

I'm not saying it'd work for everything: a cake with bits of chewing gum in would be pretty rank (especially if you had to chew the gum first). But it's certainly got more in common with something that's already popular as opposed to something totally horrific, so even without it re-establishing the inherent correctness of 'macaroni cheese' and banishing that unnecessary 'n' back to the likes of Shake 'n' Vac I reckon I may be on to something. If only my jaw would stop aching from all that mastication.

Next time: MEAT CAR

PS Criminy! Here's a plug for the splendid Mr Biffo's Found Footage, which also features lovely food (well, goujons anyway) and - regrettably - me, though reassuringly briefly.