In September my partner and I went to Belgium for a few days. We stayed in Brussels and took a day trip to Bruges. One of the many things that's famous over there is speculoos biscuits. Crunchy spiced biscuits that are completely delicious and moreish. Over in the UK you can buy Lotus biscuits from supermarkets, which are a massed produced version of the same yummy biscuit. Ever since we got back we've been buying a packet here and there to enjoy with coffee.

Lotus have also produced speculoos spread. All the yummyness of the biscuit in spread form. I'm reliably informed its like peanut butter (I don't eat peanut butter so I wouldn't know). A quick scout on google seems to suggest its sold in the US as biscoff spread. I brought back two jars from Brussels (along with a jar of caramel sauce and chocolate spread, om nom!) and spent a long time scouring the internet for recipes and ideas. The first thing I decided to try was making a cheesecake. I love speculoos biscuits, I love cheesecake. This idea could never fail, really! I've previously experimented with cheesecake recipes as can be seen in my blog post here, although I decided to go for a baked cheesecake this time rather than a no-cook one.

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?

Im not into trends in any part of life, or at least, I am perpetually months behind due to a combination of being somewhat slow and also because I dislike hype in a big way. The more you hype something up to me, the more disinterested I become (50 Shades Of Dismay, sorry, Grey, anyone?!).

I've enjoyed baking my whole life, when cupcakes were called Queen cakes and made in fairy cake sized cases with chocolate chips that my Mum called 'polka dots' in them. My Mum was an extremely busy woman but she regularly made time to bake with me. She and my Gran had these metal recipe card boxes with handwritten recipes, mostly sweet stuffs but a few savouries too. My Mum used to let me look through and choose a few things to bake on a pretty regular basis and I would get to 'help' (which mostly involved getting in the way, making a mess, and eating all the goodies). And so my love of baking began. I don't think I'll ever get tired of making cupcakes, and I think cupcakes will be one of the things I bake the most forever and ever. But cakepops definitely interested me.

'Proper' cake pops are made by first baking a cake, then letting it cool, then crumbling it up, mixing the crumbs with butter cream icing, forming this icing and cake mix into balls, which are then dipped into 'candy melts' and decorated. A lollypop shape, full of cakey goodness. I've never actually tried a cake pop made this way. Remember what I said about hype?

My favourite shop possibly ever is Lakeland. And the lovely Lakeland sell a cake pop machine, which my OH bought me for Christmas. These make cake pops that are pure cake. You make up a cake batter, heat up the machine (its like a toastie machine, but it makes cake!), drop spoonfuls into the moulds, close the lid and heat for a few minutes. Pop open the lid after this time, and remove little balls of yummy cake. Simples. Here's some very badly taken pictures. The lighting in my kitchen is the thing I hate most about this otherwise excellent house.



The machine in action, this was at the end of  my batter, so I didn't have enough for all the holes!



Cake pop balls cooling

The machine comes with a couple of basic recipes and the quantities are perfect. We decided to make half vanilla and half chocolate cake pops. We opted for a cooking chocolate cover (it needs to be cheap quality stuff, because it needs to have oil in it to be the right consistency and texture. Real proper chocolate need not apply! In order to turn this from a cake ball to a cake pop, you need sticks. These are available at lovely Lakeland, on ebay, and many other places. To attach the cake, you melt the chocolate or candy melt covering, dip the stick into the chocolate, then push it into the ball of cake. When this sets, it'll act as a glue. Like so:




Let this set, then get on with covering each of the balls in chocolate. Before the chocolate sets completely, you can add sprinkles, glitter stars, coconut, all sorts. Once the chocolate is set, you can pipe on some gel icing, drizzle melted white chocolate on top, the world is your oyster. You will need something to help the cake pops stand upright while they dry. As you will see in my photos, we improvised with the large holes in a grater, and some holes we punched into an empty orange juice carton and an empty tagliatelli box. What we should have done really, was used our colander. But we like to think completely outside the box. In fact, we're probably lost inside a box far away from everyone else.






Its quite a time consuming exercise, so if you don't have a great attention span, this probably isn't for you. However, what we also discovered (we might have gotten a bit bored halfway through...) is that 'naked' cake pops are really tasty little treats too! I really liked the way these tasted, just a mini bite of cake. The coconut covered ones were really nice indeed. I think these would also be fun without the sticks, served up at the end of a dinner as a sort of petit four. The recipe booklet that comes with the machine also suggests making mini doughnuts, by cooking vanilla sponge cake balls, injecting them with warmed jam and rolling them in sugar. Sounds delicious!

I'll never be the sort of girl who abandons cupcakes in favour of cake pops, but they are definitely fun and very tasty. I can see kids really enjoying the decorating part as well, because they cry out for an excess of sprinkles and it allows kids to get super creative (even kids as old as me!). My OH also bought me the book Cake Pops by Molly Bakes, which gives recipes for traditional cake pops, but regardless of the innards, there's some excellent decorating and themed ideas in the book.

My verdict? Cake Pops are really yummy. A bit of a faff (the machine takes something like 4 minutes to make each batch of cake pops, and the batter makes 30, and then theres the decorating side) but well worth it. And the cake pops keep really well for a few days, even the 'naked' ones! If you get the chance, give it a go!

For those of you who know me in real life, you'll know that work has been challenging in the last 6 months. There is little I can do to make things better, but baking cakes can't hurt!

For a recent team meeting I took in these cakes:


Please forgive the poor lighting, we get very little good natural light in the evenings at the moment!

This cupcake holder was a present from my wonderful Mum and I just really wanted to show off my cupcakes on it! The cupcakes are mocha with mocha frosting and vanilla with vanilla frosting. I coloured the vanilla frosting slightly to make a peachy colour. I used my lovely new silicone piping bag fromLakeland to pipe the mocha frosting (I didn't do a particularly brilliant job!) and I decorated the mocha cupcakes with some chocolate covered coffee beans I bought on a recent trip to Bath.

Suffice to say, my cupcakes went down a treat with most people taking some of the spares home for their kids! I used to have the time to bake a little something for every single team meeting. See the pink cupcake storage tins behind the stand? My colleagues at work know these tins mean goodies have been baked for them and seeing the tins gets them rather excited! Recently, I've been so busy and stressed I hadn't baked anything, but I really enjoyed making these the weekend before our meeting, it's really therapeutic for me.

My work colleagues and I will soon be heading our seperate ways, and that makes me really sad to think about. I'll be making sure that, cake-wise at least, we all go out on a bang.

There now follows a photodump of all I've been up to 'creatively' in the last few months. I'm officially a World Cup Widow (I don't support anyone. Really. I wouldn't care if Scotland qualified, honestly!), so I may as well spam a blog nobody reads with pictures of things I made/bought/did.

I love to cook, but my real love is baking. However, in all honesty, I hate doing both in this house. I miss being able to call a kitchen 'my kitchen'. Monkey and I get one tiny shelf in a cupboard to store all our cooking utensils, baking trays, bowls, etc. The very thought of getting things out of our solitary shelf is enough to put me off. Very early on in my time living here, I decided to make Nigella Lawson's delicious chocolate pear pudding only to discover there were no mixing bowls! Does.not.compute. So, anyway, my point is, I tend to cook and bake very rarely, when the 'in laws' are not here, where I can be undisturbed (there is nothing in this world worse than a 'supervisor', particularly one that has no idea what they are talking about!) Bank Holidays are always a good time for me to bake, I find, and I coined the phrase 'Bank Holiday Bakeathon' for the two May occasions! I made some Red Velvet cupcakes from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook, a fantastic book which I would recommend to anyone keen on all things sweet! This particular recipe didn't impress me all that much, I didn't pay enough attention to the recipe until I was making it and only then did I really figure out that it was a not-very-chocolatey sponge coloured red with food colouring. Mine didn't even go red, despite buying the recommended food colouring! Still, they did taste good, I just don't think I would bother again.

And a gratuitous macro shot:

Around Christmas time I finally succumbed to the obsession that is all things Cath Kidston. A bit like my obsession with cows really (no, bear with me on this!), I happened to once say I liked cows and cow print and I suddenly ended up with dozens of cow everything; ornaments and cuddly toys and pens and what not. At least Cath is a little more for grown ups than cows! (I still like cows, though. Fear not my mooing friends!). Anyway at Christmas I received both the Sew and Make books and a couple of months ago I finally decided to make the bag that came with Sew! I added a sort-of lining by using the pre-cut pieces to cut out some lovely grey-blue fabric I already had and basically made the whole bag double layered. It was an easy, enjoyable project. I hate buttonholes though, with a passion! I will learn how to make my sewing machine do it for me in future. Here is the finished article:


I'm not sure when I'll find a use for it, but its pretty. The books aren't the most wonderful in the world, Make! especially, as you don't appear to 'make' anything so much as embellish and applique to items you already own or buy for the occasion. However, they are awfully pretty and give inspiration, which is good enough for me!

Monkey and I have big plans to move out and have even taken that exceptionally grown up decision to open a joint savings account to put money into for the deposit/first and last/fees/other things associated with moving. We, of course, can't actually afford anything right now. But it doesn't stop me dreaming. Nor does it stop me buying things 'for our new home'. Mostly its cheap silly things like tea towels with cupcakes on them or a bunch of mugs from the Cath Kidston January sale, other times its usually cookware or bakeware or something similar. So when in TK Maxx the other day, I couldn't help but purchase these:

I've been a fan of Richardson Sheffield knives since I bought a couple to use whilst away at university. The RRP was supposedly well over £100 for this and I think I paid about £25. I'm not sure I'm a huge fan of knife blocks as it's always been my opinion you can trap germs down the slots that you then can't clean out, but nobody's going to force me to use the block anyway.I opened the box for a quick peek (and swiftly stabbed myself in the finger with one of the knives, at least I know they're sharp!) and was really pleased with them.

Through other blogs including Domestic Sluttery I learned of Wysteria Lane a website I love for many reasons; 1)I love Desperate Housewives 2)I love homeware/kitchenware 3)They gave me a £10 off voucher for my first order 4)When my order arrived it was more like a present! (albeit a present I paid for, but aren't they the best kind?!):

Inside was a set of cakestands from Bombay Duck (another website I may grow to love with all my heart, I've asked for a catalogue and will let you know my thoughts on the whole range once I've had a drool over it!):

The stands are gorgeous and according to my Mum, my wonderful late grandmother had something very similar. Well, if it was good enough for her its definitely good enough for me! You can stack them as shown above or use them seperately for a good old fashioned sponge cake!:


After I ordered these, I thought I would continue my online homeware shopping by browsing Urban Outfitters where I purchased two mirrored signs/pictures from their sale:

I reckon they should go in the living room of our new home but Monkey reckons they'd be better in the bedroom. I'm sure I'll win him over eventually! Additionally, a few months ago when browsing in St Albans I bought this from BHS for our 'new kitchen'

Effortlessly patriotic and depicts all that is great about summer....strawberries!

This week I worked my last week at a job I've been in for 14 months, which is something of a record for me, I normally make it to 9 or 10. I'm not a commitment-phobe, I'm merely trying to pack in as much experience as I can before deciding what I really want to do with the rest of my life. I started taking baked goods into work for my colleagues last month and it went down a treat, so I thought it was only fitting to take in lots of cakes and goodies on Friday as a good way to say goodbye:

These are vanilla cupcakes with vanilla frosting from the above mentioned Hummingbird Bakery cookbook. My cake stand loved getting a bit of action!

These are chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting courtesey of Hummingbird, along with Nigella Lawson's girdle-busting chocolate brownies from How to be a Domestic Goddess which has long since been my go-to for all sorts of recipes and recipe ideas. I like to put pecan nuts in my brownies, just so you know. Another gratuitous picture follows (I was testing out a 'food' setting on my camera!)


The baked goods went down a real treat at work and I had an incredible last day.I'm going to miss all the wonderful people there like crazy. I now have two weeks off to sort my life out and then I start a new social care job on June 28th. I hope they like cakes there too, or I'll get terribly terribly fat eating everything I make!