This recent horsemeat scandal is pretty horrifying, isn't it? It makes me enormously glad I rarely, if ever, eat pre-prepared food. I really enjoy cooking and one of the main reasons is I like knowing what's in my food and controlling what goes in. Sure, I ate microwave meals as a student, who didn't?! But I never find them very tasty or satisfying.

I'd like to show you that making your own meals is infinitely more satisfying than reaching for a plastic tray from the fridge or freezer. My lasagne recipe isn't quick, it can't compete with 4 minutes at 800W, but its 100 times tastier and satisfying and whilst its not a healthy recipe per se, it's got to be better for you than horsemeat which may or may not have been injected with vetinary drugs that make it unsuitable for human consumption! If you're organised in the kitchen and willing to prepare in advance, whilst it takes a while to cook, you don't have to be in the kitchen watching everything like a hawk.

Have I ever expressed my love for Lakeland on here before? If not, shame on me. If so, sorry, you're going to hear it again. I ADORE Lakeland. Not only can they both amazing customer service both in store and online (and I cannot begin to tell you how important that is to me. I hate going into shops to be met with sales assistants too busy chatting to each other to serve me, or contacting a customer service department by e-mail to be met with useless automated responses or rudeness. URGH. Thankfully, Lakeland do neither!), but their products are wonderful, more to the point. Full of kitchen and homeware gadgetry (a big obsession of mine, I put some sort of kitchen gadget on my wishlist every Christmas and birthday!), but no gimmicks. Everything is actually useful, actually serves a purpose. Yep, you probably did survive without it, but with it, your life is going to be better, in culinary or housekeeping terms.


My most recent Lakeland catalogue arrived in the post. I remember when I was living at home and these would arrive for my Mum, she used to let me open it even though it wasn't addressed to me simply so I could pour through the pages until she got home from work. What an excellent mother she is! Anyway, this particular catalogue was so chock full of things I want I might have to put it in the recycling as quickly as I can bear so I don't spend every penny I own buying up everything. This catalogue is called Simply Home-Made and there's so many amazing things in there. But what really caught my eye was their new range of cheese-making products.


I sort of knew that making soft cheese wasn't especially difficult, nor was it fantastically time consuming, but I hadn't really considered it. However Lakeland have teamed up with BBC Good Food columnist Gerard Baker to produce a recipe book:




Image courtesy of the Lakeland website

How to Make Soft Cheese  is a 34 page book with basic recipes, tips, equipment lists, etc. According to the blurb in the catalogue, you can make cream cheese, 'feta', halloumi, ricotta and mozarella to name a few. I'm hugely tempted by this. What goes one step further than making cheesecake? making cheesecake with homemade cream cheese in it, of course! I love being able to make those extra touches. My 'signature' dish, as it were, is lasagne (I might post a recipe one of these days). Its been a labour of love that I have worked on improving for 10+ years, and I make nearly everything from scratch (never have made the pasta, perhaps that's next!). The idea that I could make the mozarella that goes in the lasagne too just makes me even more excited.


As well as selling a how-to book, Lakeland also sell the other kit you might need to make cheese. Such as a maslin pan, which I would call a 'jam pan'. I already own one, which was a hand-me down from my mother, which was a hand-me-down from my grandmother, so I'm not looking to replace it. But hey, I'm one piece of kit up on the cheese-making thing, winner!




Image courtesey of Lakeland website
This is one of two cheese moulds Lakeland are selling, both this conical mould and the basket mould are a snip at £3.99 each.




Image courtesey of Lakeland website
You'll also need some muslin squares to separate your curds from your whey. Muslin squares can also be used to strain homemade wine or to make bouquet garni, and are re-useable. This pack of 10 can be found here for £5.49.


I'm pretty sure I have just talked myself into buying these up and making soft cheese. I'll be sure to post about how I get on when I do (let's face it, its not 'if', it's when).


If you've never been to a Lakeland store before, shame on you. Get yourself there immediately to immerse yourself in all that is wonderful about kitchenware. The staff know their products and will be more than happy to chat to you if you have any questions at all. Also, check out their bargain corner for some amazing bargain finds. My mother picked up this electric jam maker for £49.99 instead of the £99.99 it was a few years ago simply because the outer box was damaged. Literally, just the packaging was a bit bashed, there was nothing wrong or missing from the product. Half price for a ripped box! That's amazingly good! The Lakeland Store Locator is here but if you get the chance, you have to visit the flagship store in Windermere, Cumbria. Its a vast store in the most beautiful surroundings and the cafe there is completely to die for!


Are you a Lakeland fan like me? Are you a cheese-maker who can give me some tips on my first attempts at cheese? Let me know in the comments!

I'd just like to point out that this is NOT a sponsored post. Lakeland are not paying me in cash or in any of their amazing products for writing this post. I'm a genuine Lakeland fan and this post is therefore genuinely gushing!

One thing I love about Being A Grown Up (which basically means living in a place of my own with my lovely other half) is having people over for dinner. So far we've had people over for a couple of BBQs and two 'dinner parties'. And 9 times out of ten I drink too much of my carefully selected wine and regret that decision the next day. Must work on that.

A couple of weeks ago we had my 'in laws' over for dinner. I put it in commas because I'm not married but its easier to call them my 'in laws'. I'll lose the annoying commas from here on in. The food was delicious and I managed to track down a very decently priced wine that went amazingly with our main course. For some reason, when it comes to having people round for dinner, I like to experiment with desserts I've never made before. I wouldn't advise this, it leads to all sorts of silly fretting.

I should start by confessing that this recipe is not of my creation, its based on combining quite a few recipes and scouring various places for inspiration.

I love passion fruit, of all the tropical fruits, its definitely my favourite. I think I like it because it looks so damned weird. You have to question the first person to ever eat it, really. Anyway. White chocolate and passion fruit go very well together and as our other dishes were vaguely Thai themed, but I couldn't find a suitable Thai-style dessert, I decided I would just opt for something with passion fruit and probably white chocolate too. I considered this white chocolate and passion fruit mousse by the lovely Nigella Lawson who I should mention is my cooking idol and my biggest girl crush of all time. If I could look half as good as her now, in my late 20s, as she looks currently, I'd be a happy girl. But on this occasion, I decided I didn't want mousse and I started to think about how much I love cheesecake. So my search continued.

I decided quite early on I didn't want a baked cheesecake, I thought it might be a little bit richer in texture and whilst there are precious few light, low fat ingredients in any cheesecake, with a fluffier texture than baked, it feels lighter. Yep, I'll keep telling myself that. So my search led me here to this amazing website called Great British Chefs. Go and register and bookmark it. But don't do it if you're hungry. Its an amazing website full of excellent recipes by top chefs. Drool-worthy. And many of them look easy enough to do at home. That led me to this recipe by Matthew Tomkinson for white chocolate and passion fruit cheesecake. PERFECT. Except, it made a pretty small quantity and I wasn't sure I had an appropriate tin for such a small amount. But I knew I wanted to make an orange sorbet to go with, and I loosely considered the orange crisps but decided against in the end. Then I saw this recipe by Simon Hulstone and thought I could somehow combine the two. Except, by this time I'd bought white chocolate, so I needed a white chocolate cheesecake recipe, which wasn't baked. That led me to this recipe.  But I made a few little changes. So, after a LOT of waffle, this was my cheesecake recipe:

White Chocolate Cheesecake

200g Hob Nob biscuits, crushed
100g melted butter.

275g white chocolate
450g cream cheese (I used full fat Philadelphia)
375ml double cream
3 gelatine leaves

1 23cm springform tin, with the base lined with greaseproof paper

1. Break the biscuits up roughly in a food processor, then blitz until they resemble a sandy rubble. Pour in the melted butter and blitz again until both are combined. Tip this into your springform tin and flatten out with the back of a spoon. Cover your tin with clingfilm and pop into the freezer for at least a couple of hours to set the base.
2. Melt the white chocolate in a heat-proof bowl over a saucepan of water on the hob. I don't like using the microwave to melt white chocolate, I always burn it!.
3. Find a flat bottomed dish (I used plastic storage tubs, of which I have several), put some cold water in an inch or so deep and place your gelatine leaves in to soften for at least 5 minutes. make sure the leaves do not stick to each other (I used one large tub and one small tub to soften up three leaves)
4. Put the cream cheese in a bowl and if it is still firm from the fridge, beat it to soften it up. Add the white chocolate when melted and slightly cooled and mix thoroughly.
5. Place 75ml of double cream in a small saucepan, adding some vanilla extract if you like, and warm fairly gently. You don't want it to boil, but you do want it to be well over 35 degrees so that the gelatine leaves will melt into it.
6. Place the remaining 300ml of double cream in a bowl and whip to soft peak stage. I used my Kenwood with balloon whisk attachment, but you can use a handheld whisk or do it by hand, it'll just take a bit longer by hand!
7. When the gelatine is squidgy in the cold water, remove the leaves gently and squeeze any excess water out of the leaves. Drop the leaves in the heated cream and stir to dissolve, this will be fairly quick. Remove from the heat and allow to cool slightly, before stirring into the cream cheese and white chocolate mixture.
8. Finally, fold in the whipped cream, ensuring everything is evenly combined. Drop this mixture into your springform tin and take the time to get the mixture smoothed out as evenly as you can on the top, this will help when you put the jelly layer on later! Ensure there is some space at the top of the springform tin for this jelly later. Cover the cheesecake with clingfilm again and put back into the fridge for several hours to set. I made all of this the night before.

Now your cheesecake is set, you can concentrate on the jelly. I initially bought whole passionfruit, 6 to be exact, but I didn't want to keep the seeds in as people find it a bit off-putting. I quickly realised there wouldn't be enough fruit for my jelly, so I went back to Tesco where I found a 1litre carton of passion fruit juice for only about 80p. I used a combination of the pulp with the seeds removed and the juice but when I make this again I'll just use the carton of juice. It cheaper, its less fiddly and it comes ready sweetened!

Passion Fruit Jelly Topping
500ml passion fruit juice (from a carton is fine)
25g caster sugar (the juice is ready sweetened, but you might want a little extra to take the edge off)
4 gelatine leaves

1. Once again, fill tubs with some water and place your leaves in to soak for at least 5 minutes.
2. Place the passion fruit juice and the caster sugar in a saucepan and heat gently, again, you want to heat it above 35 degrees at least to get the gelatine to melt.
3. When the gelatine has softened, squeeze the excess water out and add to the passion fruit juice in the saucepan, stirring until the leaves have all melted.
4. Pour into a pyrex jug and allow to cool. When its lukewarm, get your cheesecake out of the fridge and pour the juice over the top. Carefully pop the clingfilm back on and slowly and steadily pop the cheesecake back into the fridge for several hours to set. I think the minimum is 4 hours. 

You don't need anything to go with this dessert at all, but having been originally inspired by this recipe I wanted to add a little orange sorbet. To be honest, I was so nervous about the cheesecake setting that I wanted to have something to serve as a bit of a backup! I had bought a bag of oranges with the intention of segmenting them and making the orange crisps, but obviously I gave up on that idea. So I juiced all 6 oranges, and added some orange juice from a carton in the fridge and a bit of the leftover passion fruit juice to make up the desired amount of liquid. To be honest, you probably dont need to use freshly squeezed juice, and it's a nice simple cheat if you dont! My orange sorbet was based on this recipe but I doubled the quantities, omitted the star anise and added some of the passion fruit juice as I had some left over! I made this using the ice cream attachment of my Kenwood, which requires freezing the inner bowl overnight.

Orange and Passion Fruit Sorbet

400ml orange juice (freshly squeezed from oranges, or from a carton, or a bit of both!)
200ml passion fruit juice
200g sugar

1. Place all the ingredients in a saucepan and bring to the boil, which allows the sugar to dissolve.
2. Remove from the heat and cool. This works best if you get the liquid really cold, so once its cool, pop it into the fridge to get cold.
3. Pop the cold liquid into your ice cream maker and churn for 30 minutes.
4. Place the sorbet into a tub and into the freezer until you need it.

Just for a bit of extra overkill, I also make some biscuits with this recipe which you then do this with. That, in all honesty, was too much. But I had made the biscuits for a dessert a few weeks previously, and I had some leftover dough in the freezer. If not for that, I don't think I would have bothered with that extra step!

Now, after all that writing, you're probably dying for a couple of very badly taken photographs, aren't you?






This was completely delicious, so much so that 3 out of the 4 of us all had seconds there and then! And it made loads of cheesecake, so we had lots of yummy leftovers for a few days after.

I'll definitely make this again. It does require a bit of effort but nothing about it is difficult and you just need to plan your time properly and make this well in advance. Its so tasty, not stupidly sweet and does feel quite light. Making this post has made me want to make it again right away!

Please let me know if you try this, I'd love to hear your thoughts! Do you like seeing recipes like this?

The first thing I should say about this recipe is I cheat at every turn possible. If there's a gadget I can use to get out of doing manual labour, I'll definitely do it. I appreciate that I'm an extremely spoiled lucky girl who has brilliant kitchen gadgetry. All of this can be done without these gadgets, however. I love to cook, but lets face it, who has time to be in the kitchen all day, every day? Not me, sadly. So if I can cheat my way to a tasty tasty meal, I'll do it.

This french onion soup recipe came from a Morrisons magazine years ago. My OH was the first of us to try making it and its a staple soup in my repetoire. Its not a fully traditional version of the soup, but it is less rich and less high fat than the original. If I'm really cheating, I'll buy a cheese-topped baguette from the supermarket and have that with this, but as I've been off and I've had some time, I decided I could make my own bread. Well, I could throw ingredients in my breadmaker and get it to do the hard work, but you know what I mean! This to me is comfort food at its finest. Its also pretty cheap, assuming you have a fairly well-stocked store cupboard.

For the bread you will need:
Strong white flour (I used one with seeds and grains in it, which worked really well)
Dried Yeast
Sugar
Salt
Cheddar Cheese
Cooked Bacon, chopped
Tap water

For the soup you will need:
3-4 red onions (I used a net of 3, along with a half onion I had left from a dinner earlier in the week)
3-4 white onions (I used a net of 4 today)
2 garlic cloves
1L beef stock
Half-fat creme fraiche
Chives

I put the bread in the breadmaker last night and stuck the timer on so it would be ready this morning.



This was the recipe from the booklet that came with my breadmaker. I opted for the 'large' loaf.




Here are all the dry ingredients in the pan, after this I sloshed in the water, pressed the buttons and let it do its thing! My breadmaker has a special chute in the lid where I put the chopped bacon. By selecting a 'raisin' cycle, the chute opened and dropped in the bacon at the appropriate time! Amazing!



And here's the breadmaker last night, on its countdown, doing its thing!

Flash forward to this morning, when I made my soup. Here's how! First you assemble your cooking ingredients (yep, loads of ingredients!):




Then you break out the second cheats gadget, the Kenwood Timer Chef, and attach the food processor attachment, with the cutting blade inside:




You then peel and half your onions. If they won't fit down the chute, as some of mine didn't, cut the bigger halves into quarters. You then fire up the machine and push all the onions down the chute of the food processor until you have lots and lots of finely sliced onions:




Yep, it took me 1 min 25 seconds to chop up 7 1/2 onions! In fact, this was a bit slow on my part as I hadn't cut all the onion pieces down to fit in the chute, so I had to sort of force some of them down! You can of course finely slice all the onions by hand, but lets face it, who wants to do that?! You then pop your largest saucepan on the hob and splash a bit of oil in it (I used bogstandard olive oil but any flavourless oil will be fine), when the oil has heated up (keep the temperature fairly low), tip all your onions in. You will be faced with something that looks like this:




The onions will wilt down eventually. You now want to slow cook the onions for 20 minutes, you don't want them to get any colour rather just soften down.You don't need to stand over the onions for the 20 minutes, but you will want to be around to give them a stir every now and then so they all cook down evenly. After about 10 minutes (so halfway into the cooking), they will look like this:




After another 10 minutes, slice two cloves of garlic up into small pieces and pop them in with the onions. Give the mix another 10 minutes of cooking. Here's the garlic going in:




After the 10 minutes or so is up, the whole thing will be a big sticky soft lump in your saucepan. The onions will have leaked out some water and so will be swimming in a small amount of onion 'stock'. This helps with the flavour! Here's what it'll look like:




Doesn't look particularly inspiring but bear with me! Next, crack out the beef stock. I always use stock cubes or stock granules. For this particular soup, Oxo beef stock cubes are my go to. The Knorr beef stock cubes aren't dark enough to give this soup the colour it really needs. I use 5 stock cubes to make the 1 litre of stock you need:




You make up the stock and add it to the saucepan, give everything a stir then simmer the soup for a minimum of 10 minutes to bring everything together:




Meanwhile, as soon as the breadmaker beeps, the bread is done!




So you squee with excitement (this is an optional stage!) and turn it out onto a cooling rack to cool:




When you're ready to serve up, spoon some soup into a bowl and top with a heaped dessert spoon of creme fraiche and snip over a few chives. Serve with a lovely plate of freshly made bread:




Eat, enjoy and feel smug! The leftover soup will keep for a few days in the fridge, and also freezes well too. In fact, like most leftovers, this soup tastes better the next day. I've taken this to work quite a few times and its always brought me some comfort at my desk on a busy day.

I will leave you with  grauitous picture of my bread. I'm really glad I tried this seed-y flour rather than plain strong white flour. The bread wasn't enormously cheese-y or bacon-y, but had just enough. My OH suggested this would made delicious cheese on toast, so I think tomorrow we'll eat our soup leftovers with cheese on toast with this bread! You can undoubtedly make this bread by hand, and making bread by hand is very satisfying. The best starter recipes are from Delia Smith, here is the white bread recipe and here is the wholemeal recipe. You can then start to add things and adapt things to suit you once you've mastered these. I spent about £3.50 on the ingredients I didn't have lurking in my cupboards, and this will last two of us for two days and probably one final portion for me, so that's pretty good value!





Please let me know if you try this recipe, I'd love to know what you thought of it!