Cheese/Cheese products

Peanut Butter Cup Brownie Bottomed Cheesecake

Posted by annauk1 on July 14, 2013

Posted in: American recipes, Cheese/Cheese products, Cheesecake, chocolate, Desserts. Tagged: chocolate, peanut butter, peanut butter cups, Reese's. 15 Comments

How can the very title of this post not make you want to rush to the nearest supermarket and purchase the ingredients needed to make this delicious delight? That’s exactly what happened to me when my brother George sent me a link to this recipe and asked very nicely if I’d make it next time he and his family came to visit us.

Now, if you know me well, you’ll know my obsession with American recipes, also my like of, er, how shall we say, trashy recipes….and my big, no HUGE adoration of Reese’s peanut butter cups….so, when all three of these obsessions occur in one recipe? It absolutely has to be made!

It has my name all over it.

Destiny.

Here it is in all it’s beautiful, bountiful glory! It’s ok, you can tell me, how over the top it looks!….I can take it. I already know.
And isn’t that just a huge part of it’s charm? I meant, just imagine the chocolatiness, the peanutiness, the denseness of the baked cheesecake!

The recipe can be found HERE on the Tasty Kitchen website. It’s Erika’s recipe, so thank you, thank you Erika from the bottom of my greedy heart!

After the brownie bottom is baked, a layer of chocolate chips, peanut butter chips and Reese’s peanut butter cups are scattered on top. By this point I was almost sighing in delight as the chocolate started melting. Oh. My. Gosh.

The cheesecake filling is made, poured on top and baked:

Isn’t that just a lovely sight? Waiting to be decorated with yet more chocolate peanut butter yumminess.

I’m not one for subtlety, me.
So when all was done and dusted, I sprayed a tiny bit of gold shimmer spray on top. The Midas touch as it were.

Excellent! And completely OTT.

Love.

Arancini Di Riso

Posted by annauk1 on July 30, 2011

Posted in: Cheese/Cheese products, Family recipes, leftovers, Nigella Kitchen. 23 Comments

Here’s a great use for any kind of left over rice!
As long as it’s not plain rice and is left over from either a risotto or some kind of flavoured rice (mine was left-over chicken, chorizo and prawn rice. Highly flavoured and ideal for turning into aranci (Italian for ‘oranges’ and you can see why in the finished dish) The more subtly flavoured the rice, the more subtle the arancini.
If you want to add flavour to the arancini, for instance if your rice is a little on the plain side, you can stuff the arancini with left-over ragu sauce, if you have some in the freezer, or with little cubes of mozzarella, or indeed, both.

Left-over rice

First of all form the cold rice into large walnut sized balls:

If you are going to stuff the arancini, then make sure the filling is properly enclosed.
It’s not as fiddly a job as it looks really, as the cold rice will hold itself together really well.

Coat the arancini, first in egg, which has been thinned down with a little water so it’s not too thick and ‘eggy’ for want of a better word, then in breadcrumbs, the staler the better, shop-bought will do.
Deep fry on a medium heat, so that they have a chance to cook through and ensure the cold rice is piping hot, before they become wonderfully golden.

How can anything coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried not taste great, right?

Before I go, I want to wish you all a wonderful Sunday and show you Nigella’s old-fashioned cheesecake from her latest book ‘Kitchen’.

I love baked cheesecake, but don’t feel that I can recommend this one, it was neither sweet enough, lemony enough, or tasty enough. Mediocre is the only word I can think of to describe it.
A shame, but there you go. Not everything is worth making again, right?

Lemon curd cheesecake with summer fruits & white chocolate

Posted by annauk1 on July 10, 2011

Posted in: Cheese/Cheese products, Desserts. 10 Comments

Ever since I read Nigella Lawson’s recipe for her ‘No-fuss fruit tart’ I’ve loved the idea of adding lemon curd to cream cheese to create a cheesecake filling.

I love short-cuts, I really do.

I’ve been playing around with the idea, I can’t help it….and this is what I’ve come up with:

Lemon curd cheesecake with summer fruits and white chocolate

15 digestive biscuits
50g butter

600g cream cheese
200g lemon curd
zest of 1 lemon
juice of half a lemon
none-half a cup of sugar (try before adding)

various summer fruits for topping, along with a handful of white chocolate chips.

1. Whizz the digestives up in the processor and add the butter which has been melted. Use to line the base and sides of a pie dish.

2. Mix the cream cheese, lemon curd, zest, juice and sugar (if needed) in a mixer. I started off mixing it by hand, but it went really lumpy!
Pour into the pie dish.

3. Put in the fridge for an hour or so to firm up the filling a little, then cover with your Summer fruit. I had a little helper to stone the cherries for me:

Sprinkle chocolate chips over….. (grated white chocolate would be even better here I think)
Put in the fridge to chill.

Mmmmmmmm. It’s lemony and light and fruity….just don’t expect it to cut cleanly…it’s more of a spoon job as it were…

Bourekia me anari

Posted by annauk1 on May 7, 2011

Posted in: Cheese/Cheese products, Cypriot recipes. 20 Comments

Fresh Anari

‘Anari ‘ is a Cypriot cheese made from whey. The whey is usually a by-product from the production of halloumi cheese. The whey is brought to boiling point by which time curds will have formed, which are skimmed off to produce this soft cheese.
Anari is not generally known here in the UK yet, but we keep our fingers crossed! I remember when I was a child the same could be said of halloumi, which we brought back by the suitcase-load from holidays in Cyprus, probably illegally!
However if you live near a Greek/ Cypriot grocer I’m sure he could get his hands on some for you if you ask nicely enough.
Anari is available salted or un-salted, once crumbled it resembles slightly dry cottage cheese curds (Though cottage cheese is made from curds and not whey)
I’ve made these bourekia in the past succesfully using ricotta cheese, though if you do try this recipe with ricotta, please try and get the genuine, good stuff from an Italian deli/grocer, the texture will be much more similar to anari. The ricotta I’ve bought in the past from supermarkets has been more cream-cheese in appearance, though even this produces good bourekia – I mean how can anything deep-fried and then covered in sugar and syrup not taste good, right?!
Bourekia are small, half-moon pastries, filled with a mixture of anari, sugar and cinnamon, deep-fried and then dipped in a simple-sugar syrup and sprinkled with granulated sugar.
And as I’d brought some anari back from Cyprus……

1. I crumbled a pack of un-salted anari (300g) and mixed it with 1 scant tbsp cinnamon and 2 level tablespoons of sugar.

Crumbled anari, cinnamon and sugar mixture

2. I made a simple pastry using 500g plain flour, half a cup of oil, half a cup of cold water and a pinch of salt (add more or less as needed) which I then rolled out as thinly as possible and cut rounds out of using a biscuit cutter. My sister-in-laws use a pasta machine to get their pastry thin, thin, THIN!

pastry rounds

3. I filled each round with a heaped tsp of the anari mixture, folded the top over into a semi-circle and crimped the edges with a fork (there’s no need to wet the edges with water)

Filling with anari

little ‘pasty’ shapes

4. I then deep fried the pastries in vegetable oil, on a low/ medium setting (so that the pastry cooks before they turn a golden colour)
While I was frying the pastries I made a simple sugar syrup using a cup of sugar and a cup and a half of water, which I simmered for 5 minutes.

After I’d fried all the pastries, I dipped them briefly in the sugar syrup, then sprinkled them with granulated sugar…