Alrighty then, let’s do this thing.
The mirror glaze. Much attempted on the Great British Bake Off, much failed, or much left with something roughly the consistency of a car tyre wrapped around your cake, resisting the knife and quite possibly an attack from automatic weapons or artillery fire.
Pause there for a moment, rewind. Why the heck would I be doing something so awful to one of my cheesecakes? Well, let’s face it, they’re not always lookers. They’re not always the prettiest of things. And if you look at the effect a good ganache can have on a chocolate cheesecake, you’ll see that they can definitely be improved.
The cheesecake itself is a classic raspberry one, swapping out a chunk of the sugar for a jar of raspberry jam, adding in a sprinkle of freeze-dried raspberry powder from Sous Chef (here you go, no affiliate links here: https://www.souschef.co.uk/products/natural-raspberry-powder) to both the hob-nob-alike biscuit base and the mix itself. Basically it’s a Cranachan without the whisky and, as has been previously demonstrated, it’s gorgeous. But I’m taking one of these to a dinner party so I need to elevate it in terms of presentation. Hence the mirror glaze.
So step one, as always, hit the web, do some research. Or, Qwant it and grab the first recipe that comes up. BBC Good Food, so always a winner. Tried and tested. https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/user/10282926/recipe/mirror-glaze-0
But it calls for some odd quantities – 15g of gelatin rather than the 12g sachet it comes with. Fire up the maths brain and the quantities work out rather conveniently…
15g of gelatin becomes 12g. 200g of anything becomes 160g, 150g sweetened condensed milk becomes 125g. 80ml water becomes 60ml (1/4 cup) 100ml water becomes 80ml (1/3 cup). The rest of the recipe is unchanged.
Follow the recipe, make the glaze, panic when you realise your fancy sugar thermometer spatula thingy died a year or more ago. Relax when your amazing wife passes you an actual sugar thermometer.
And that’s a weird one to make. Not complicated, just weird. Glucose syrup is odd stuff to handle. I measured the sweetened condensed milk by volume rather than weight, so that might be a mistake this time. One to correct for next time, I think. It turned out a bit runny, so either I didn’t cool it for long enough or there was a little too much liquid. But, for a mark 1, it looks rather good, it tastes great, and it isn’t going to double up as heat shield replacement for the next Artemis capsule re-entry. It is a rather wasteful process, I’ve got a large plate full of leftover mirror glaze that my kids are slowly devouring as the day progresses. The cheesecake itself, in all it’s glazed loveliness, is sat in the fridge to allow the glaze to properly set and will be tested later. Given how the Mars Bar cheesecake turned out, I’m quietly hopeful.
Speaking of, if you’re making the Mars Bar one, skip the bourbon biscuits and give these a go – Le Petit Biscotte crunchy cinnamon and brown sugar biscuits. I got them in a 200g pack from Tesco when I was looking for Biscoff, turns out that if you eat 1 biscuit from the pack, what’s left is the perfect quantity for an awesome cheesecake base. Look for the big red LU in the biscuit section!