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Brown Bread Ice Cream Cheesecake

Brown Bread Ice Cream Cheesecake

Most of my best baking has been done following a conversation with my wife. I got in to baking New York Cheesecakes following a request from her to bake one for her birthday. Last night we were talking about family favourite recipes and, as it seems no cookery blog is complete without a long introduction to the recipe, here goes. My late father-in-law loved brown bread ice cream. Such a gorgeous malty taste with a nice bit of crunch from the breadcrumbs. Could I replicate that taste and texture with cheesecake? Probably…

Quick bit of research and it turns out the breadcrumbs aren’t that difficult to do, the malty taste can come from the Horlics (*Other malt beverages are available), and I reckon Malted Milk biscuits will make the perfect base.

Right. Quick spin around the ingredients, Clive, then back to me.

The breadcrumbs…

Oven to 180C.

  • 250g brown bread. I’ve a really good deli a couple of miles away, their date and walnut bread hit the spot perfectly. Blitz it up into largeish crumbs. Not a fine powder, not chunks.
  • 50g butter. Melted. Then cooked a bit more so it goes brown and nutty, just like they needed for the Financiers on the Bake Off last night.
  • pinch of salt
  • very generous pinch of cinnamon.

Melt the butter in a largeish pan, once it’s foamed and started to go nice and nutty, stir in everything else. Mix well, spread on a baking tray, bake it for half an hour, stirring every 10 minutes so it doesn’t go burnt on the top, uncooked on the bottom. Leave to cool while you get on with…

The base

  • 175g (ish, err on the side of generous) Malted Milk biscuits, crushed to an even, breadcrumb consistency.
  • 50g butter, melted.

The usual cheesecake base here, no tricks, nothing unusual. Though you could sling in some more cinnamon if you wanted. Mix butter with biscuits, spread across the base of your 23cm diameter, spring-sided cheesecake tin, bake for 10 minutes at the 180C the oven is already set to.

Finally…

The Mix

And this is where the story really starts…

  • 720g Philadelphia cream cheese. Full fat. No substitutions, alterations, swap-outs, or store’s-own-brand-alternatives. This is the good stuff, this never fails.
  • 250g marscapone. Any old marscapone will do. No elitism here.
  • 300ml soured cream.
  • 75g each of
    • Caster sugar
    • Soft dark brown sugar
    • Horlics or other malted beverage powder
  • 4 eggs
  • Half the breadcrumbs you made earlier

I’ve been doing this a while now, and I think this is about the right order

Put the Philly, the marscapone, the sugars, and the Horlics in a bowl and mix. You might have some lumps of soft dark brown sugar in the mix, don’t panic about that. All adds to the texture of the cheesecake in the end.

Crack in the eggs, all at once, then mix – carefully so you don’t over-mix it – until they’re blended in. Go around the edge of the bowl with a spatula, make sure you’ve got everything. Add the soured cream and mix that in. Finally, add in the breadcrumbs, stir so they’re evenly distributed, then pour onto the base.

Bake for 45, 46 minutes at the aforementioned 180C. Open the oven a crack, switch it off, let the cheesecake cool in there for a while before transferring to a fridge to chill overnight.

Serving tip? Run your knife under boiling water before making each cut. They’ll be razor-smooth.

The Verdict

I don’t know whether it tastes like brown bread ice cream, but it is wonderfully caramelly, slightly crunchy from the breadcrumbs, and is just plain delicious.

Share and enjoy!

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Bake like you mean it Recipe Shed

Nigel, our new doughy overlord

I don’t usually name doughs. Obviously, a sourdough starter has to have a name (Herman, in this house) but others? Nah, not necessary. But my daughter called this one Nigel and Nigel he will forever be.

Nigel is a rich dough. Probably the richest I’ve ever worked with (though, all credit, it was my wife who did the majority of the work). He’s the dough you need to make Liege waffles, the requested birthday lunch for my youngest lad.

As with most recipes, we looked at a few from the internet and cherry-picked the bits that looked like they would work when combined with our usual go-to sources – The Cookery Year Book and Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Oh, and we also made more than anyone suggested – there’s 7 of us, it’s a birthday feast, we’re all going to want a few.

Ingredients, stage 1…

  • 240ml milk, luke-warm
  • 180ml luke-warm water
  • 3 sachets instant yeast
  • 4 large eggs, beaten
  • 2tbs vanilla extract
  • 4tbs golden syrup or honey
  • 6tbs sugar – light brown if you’ve got it, caster if you haven’t (we didn’t. I blame COVID-19. We’re just lucky we had the flour!)
  • 2tsp salt

Fit your trusty Kenwood with a dough hook (other mixers are available, trust me you do not want to be doing Nigel by hand!). Put all of the above into the bowl, mix until well combined. The sugar, syrup, and yeast are going to start to react and turn all of the sugar into alcohol and CO2. It’s going to rise like nothing you’ve ever seen before even though it’s the richest damn dough I’ve ever handled and they’re normally shy, quiet, and reserved.

Ingredients, stage 2…

  • ~1kg strong white flour
  • 2 packs of butter (standard Supermarket 8oz packs), softened but not completely melted if you can help it.

Get the mixer on a low speed and add in 3/4 of the flour. Get it combined with the yeasty bad boy you made in stage 1. Now start adding the butter. Couple of tablespoons at a time, getting it thoroughly integrated with the proto-dough you’ve got emerging. Keep going until you’ve mixed in all of the butter, then add the rest of the flour. Leave it on a low speed for 5-10 minutes to give you a gorgeous, smooth, elastic dough. If you try it now, it tastes rich and fantastic.

Take the bowl off the mixer, making sure you scrape down the dough hook (which has a tendency to hang on to nearly a whole waffle’s worth of dough), cover with clingfilm and leave until doubled in size. Timings across the internets vary, most suggesting 1-2 hours. We found 30 minutes was enough in a warm kitchen before we were facing a “magic porridge pot” situation – stop, little pot, stop!

Nigel was then dumped unceremoniously into a much larger bowl, lightly oiled, kneaded briefly, then covered with clingfilm and escorted safely to the fridge where armed guards would stop him escaping and trying to take over the world. Trust me, we feared for the world we’d come down to the next morning.

Having rested in the fridge overnight, letting the yeast do it’s work low and slow (a trick that works like a charm when you’re making sourdough or even just regular bread and have the time to do it), Nigel looked like this:

The dough, risen in a lightly oiled bowl and covered with clingfilm.

Not a world-dominating monster but still pretty damn enormous. If you taste the dough now, you’d better not be driving anywhere in a hurry because damn, it’s alcoholic! Time for the final ingredient:

Ingredients, stage 3…

  • 500g pearl sugar

We’ve got pearl sugar from Amazon, you can get it from wherever you find it. I’m sure there’s a Waitrose Essentials version.

Knead all of the pearl sugar into the dough.

Now time for the magic. Get your waffle iron heating up and ready. I did say you needed a waffle iron for this, didn’t I? Argos have a great little one for about £20 if you’re needing one.

Pull off a chunk of the dough about the size of a golfball, put it in the middle of the plate. Our maker does 2 waffles, so that’s 2 golfballs. Cook according to the iron’s instructions – 3-4 minutes, turn, 3-4 minutes, serve.

And you end up with these beauties…

Waffles.
Okay, so our other waffle iron does clown, lion, and possibly elephant shapes.

Thank you to all of our internet sources for inspiration and information. Particularly Handle the Heat who’s recipe provided the base for ours once we’d translated it into real measurements. Seriously, America, cups? In the 21st Century? We’ve got the metric system for a reason!

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Bake like you mean it Recipe Shed

Bread, two ways

It has been a while since I posted here, so have a couple of quick and simple bread recipes that I used at the school wellbeing day…

Yeah. Wellbeing day. A whole day off-timetable, no kids, spend the time getting to know your fellow teachers and partaking of some fun activities. First up, laughter yoga. Keep an open mind, the email said, giving nothing away. Now, don’t know about you but I’m old enough and cynical enough that when someone says “Keep an open mind”, my mental blast doors slam closed faster than Han Solo can say “Close the blast doors” and, yeah. Anyway. Moving on.

Next up was my leading a dozen other teachers through making a couple of different breads. The recipes below, in fact. Showed them that making bread is nothing to be scared of, that there’s not a lot of actual hands-on time, and that the whole thing, start to finish, can be done easily in a couple of hours.

Big shared lunch (see cheesecake recipes elsewhere on here for my contribution, 3 of them), and then an afternoon walking around Ferry Meadows in Peterborough. Cold, windy, flat-ish.

Bread, take 1 – Soda Bread

Ingredients…

  • 500g flour – 250g plain white flour, 125g plain wholemeal, 125g of sometbing more interesting – Khorasan, Spelt, Rye, Buckwheat. I find Khorasan works really well.
  • 1tsp salt – I use sea or rock salt here, it ends up migrating into the crust. Gorgeous. If you’ve got smoked or chilli salt, even better.
  • 1tsp bicarbonate of soda. Clue is in the name.
  • 420ml buttermilk. Or thereabouts. I’ve never got the stuff in the house so, I cheat…
  1. Make the buttermilk. Take 200ml full-fat milk, add roughly 20ml lemon juice (a tablespoon and a bit). Mix. Leave it for 10-15 minutes. Hey presto, buttermilk.
  2. Weigh out your flours, put them in a bowl. Add the salt and soda.
  3. Mix everything together into a wet dough. And it will be a sticky one. So add a bit more plain wholemeal flour and mix a little more. You don’t knead this bread, you don’t want to rile the gluten.
  4. Lightly flour a baking tray and turn your dough out onto it. Shape into a ball.
  5. Grab a dough cutter if you’ve got one and cut your ball into 4 quarters, lightly flouring the cuts. If you’ve not got a cutter, a butterknife should do the job.
  6. Leave the dough to rise a little, 10-15 minutes again (enough time to mark some homework!) and then put your oven on to 200°C.
  7. Bake for ~35 minutes
  8. When the time’s up, test the bread – turn the loaf over and tap the bottom. If it sounds hollow and drum-like, you’re golden. Put it on a rack to cool and wait as long as you can be patient before cutting a slice off and slathering it with butter.

Total hands-on time, about 5 minutes. Total time, end-to-end, about an hour.

On wellbeing day, 4 bakers out of the dozen chose to make soda bread, each using a different one of the alternative grains. And we got 4 superb loaves, some of which even made it to the bring-and-share lunch!

Bread, take 2 – Single-rise white loaf

A lot of people think bread is complicated and time-consuming. This recipe proves otherwise. Quality white bread in about an hour and a half.

Ingredients…

  • 500g strong white flour. Best for bread making
  • 1 sachet instant yeast
  • 1 tablespoon honey
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 300ml warm water

We’re going to give this bread every opportunity, every chance, to rise and do well. So, without further ado…

  1. Mix together the warm water, yeast, honey, and oil. Much like the buttermilk-making, if you leave this for 10-15 minutes the yeast will activate, the mixture will froth up, and everything will be ready to rock and roll when you start mixing.
  2. Give the flour 30 seconds in the microwave, heat it up, so the yeast isn’t given a cold shock when it meets the flour.
  3. Now mix everything together and knead it in the bowl until it pulls away from the side. The more you knead, the nicer your bread will be. A good 5 minutes at least. Of course, if you’ve a Kenwood with a dough hook, whack it in there and ignore it for those minutes.
  4. Take your dough and split it roughly 2/3-1/3. We’re going to make a cob. Shape both parts into balls, place the smaller atop the larger, oil two fingers and deeply finger your balls (sorry, Bake Off and Pottery Throwdown both contain these single-entendres).
  5. Leave to rise for about half an hour. Oven to 200°C.
  6. Bake for, again, about 35 minutes and test in a similar way.
  7. This time, you’ll need jam or marmalade, I reckon.

This, too, was successful. None of the bakers wanted to share!

So there you go. Bread. Quick, straightforward, plenty of time to do other things while fresh bread is rising, or cooking and filling the house with a mouth-watering smell of things delicious. If you’ve got faster ways to bake fresh bread from scratch, I want to know.