Category: Bake like you mean it

Alrighty. Obligatory backstory. Feel free to skip until you get to the list of ingredients.

Those of you who know me know I don’t drink. I know, it’s like “how do you know someone is vegan?” “They’ll tell you.” Used to drink, don’t. Usually. Except for certain occasions such as the Warwick Folk Festival where a little alcoholic immunisation help the joints with the roughly 20-odd hours of ceilidhs that occur over the weekend. And even there it’s not a lot. Apart from Saturday night where we somehow ended up on shots at the fantastic Moon Gazing Hare spirits horse box. Having discounted the unfortunately named BJ as it contains Amaretto DiSaronno (basically my wife’s Kryptonite), we moved through the Baby Guinness (Kahlua topped with Baileys) and ended up on the B52. For those who don’t know, it appeared to be equal parts Kahlua (coffee liqueur) and Grande Marnier (orange liqueur), topped with a Baileys float. Oh, and they slipped down very nicely indeed.

And then the culinary brain kicked in. Hang on, it shouted over the band. You already do a coffee cheesecake, it’s extremely good. And you already do an orange cheesecake, also rather tasty. So why not look to combine the two… I mean, what could go wrong?

So today’s recipe is by way of an experiment. If it works, there’s a whole world of cocktails out there to inspire the next generation of cheesecakes that could follow…

(if you’ve skipped, start here)

Without further ado, then, quick spin round the ingredients, Clive, then back to me. Oh, and oven to 180°C with a shelf in the middle ready to go. Oh, you can ignore the rhubarb. And the ghee. And the oil and jam jars at the back…

For the base, you’ll need:

• 6-8oz Bourbon biscuits, finely ground. I find the murder blades in the spinny thing work very well for this.
• 3oz butter, melted.
• 2oz very strong dark chocolate chucked in with the Bourbons as you blitz them to a powder not dissimilar to coffee granules.

Mix all the base ingredients together, put into the bottom of a 9″ spring-sided cake tin, press flat to make a nice, even base. I use a potato masher for this. Put the cake tin on a flat tray to catch any escaping melted butter, whack it in the oven for 10 minutes.

Meanwhile…

For the cheesecake itself you’ll need…

• 4 small pots or 2 large pots of Philadelphia cream cheese. Please, for the sake of the end product, use the full-fat cheese. Please. Really. Don’t think you can make a low-fat cheesecake, it’s not worth the disappointment. And don’t think you can get away with supermarket own brand for this ingredient, either. I’ve done that experiment so you don’t have to.
• 1 225g pot of marscapone. Yes, I’m mixing grams and ounces. Don’t tell me you don’t have both in your kitchen. These things come in 225g pots. Use 1.
• 4 medium eggs. If you look closely at the picture of the ingredients, you’ll see 5 eggs. That’s because these are rather small eggs. So I’m using more of them. If you’ve got really big eggs, just use 3. If you’ve got goose, emu, or ostrich eggs, please let me know how you get on but do adjust your proportions accordingly.
• 1 jar marmalade. There’s a whole step you can skip if you buy marmalade that doesn’t have bits in. Is your time worth it? Probably. Unless you made the marmalade yourself, in which case make sure you’ve a good crust of bread to hand.
• Instant coffee. The good stuff. Full fat, again. 1 tablespoon, heaped flat.
• 1 tub soured cream, 300ml ish.
• 5oz caster sugar
• 2oz Horlicks/similar malted powder stuff. Supermarket own brand absolutely fine to use here.

If your marmalade has bits in it, put the entire contents of the jar into a pan, heat it up (but not to boiling) and sieve out the bits. Then dissolve the instant coffee in the orange goo that’s left. Put to one side, leave to cool.

Then in a big mixing bowl mix together the cream cheese, the marscapone, the sugar, and the malty stuff until thoroughly combined. Add the eggies (sorry, eggs), blend those in gently, don’t over-mix. Finally while mixing, pour in the cooled coffee/orange mix and the soured cream, combine the lot. Beige is the colour you’re aiming for. It’s very beige.

The oven timer should’ve gone off some time around adding the eggs, you’ve taken the base out and it’s cooled slightly. Pour everything from your mixing bowl into the cake tin and return it to the oven. Endless experimentation tells me it needs to be there for 48 minutes.

Now wash up. Seriously. Wash everything up, put it all away. You’ll thank me later.

When the 48 minutes have elapsed, your cheesecake will look like this.

Switch off the oven, prop the door open a crack, and allow the cheesecake to cool naturally with the oven.

Once cooled, put it in the fridge overnight, then you’re on to making the topping:

For the topping, you’ll need:

• 1 tub marscapone.
• 300ml ish double cream.
• 4 tablespoons rum into which you’ve dissolved 2 tablespoons of that fine, full-fat instant coffee.
• 50-75g icing sugar, depending on how sweet you want your topping.

Whip the double cream, mix together the coffee/rum, sugar, and the marscapone. Fold B into A. As long as B is the coffee/marscapone mix and A is the double cream. If you’ve done it the other way around, fold A into B.

Run a knife around the inside of the spring-form tin, remove the metal outer. Then apply a generous layer of topping to your cheesecake. Pause, admire it, then add a bit more then leave it alone. It doesn’t need more topping, you’ll use about half of it. I suggest making a cake to use up the rest, or make 2 of these!

If my calculations are correct, the B52 should be gorgeous!

Tasting notes and modifications…

Well, the coffee overwhelmed the majority of the orange. Too subtle. So I’ve halved the amount of coffee to go into the orange. Further experimentation required. Far too much topping added, it really doesn’t need to be almost 60/40 cake/topping. So again, I’ve dialed that back.

But it’s a solid start and I wonder what other cocktails might just work…

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!