Cheesecake brownies

Mmmmmm.  They’re delicious and combine two favourite foods – chocolate and cheesecake.  The recipe is pretty simple and they don’t take too long to make.  And in any case, they are more than worth the effort.  Here are the details.

• 150 g butter
• 300g cooking chocolate (Milk or dark depending on your preference, I ‘ve made the brownies with both and in combination)
• 3 eggs
• 1 cup caster sugar
• 1 1/2 cups plain flour
• 1/4 cup sour cream
• 250g cream cheese

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius.  Melt butter and chocolate in a small saucepan on a very low heat until they are fully combines.  You could use a double boiler if you’re worried about the chocolate seizing but it should be fine as long as the heat is low.  Set aside to cool. 

In a small bowl mix together the room temperature cream cheese and 1/3 cup of the caster sugar.  When they are fully combined, add one of the eggs and mix thoroughly. 

In another larger bowl whisk the two remaining eggs and then mix in the remaining 2/3 cup sugar.  To this mixture, add the chocolate mixture and combine well.  When the ingredients are smooth and glossy, add the flour 1/2 cup at a time, mixing well after each addition.  Then fold in the sour cream until well combined. 

Line a brownie pan or 20cm square cake tin with baking paper and spoon the chocolate mixture in.  Make sure it’s spread into the corners.  Spoon the cream cheese mixture on top of this and use a knife or spoon to create marbling in the mixture.  Bake for 30-35 minutes and set aside to cool in the pan afterwards. I found this made 18-21 brownies depending on how you divide up the pan.

the finished product

Buttery lemon biscuits

Welcome to post number 100!  I’d like to think I had something exciting in store but alas, all I have is a recipe for delicious biscuits that I somehow failed to take photos of.  Not quite sure how I spaced out on that one but the biscuits have moved along to their final destination as a morning tea offering at work, so no chance of catching up with them. 

I found a recipe for lemon and poppyseed biscuits on Taste.com.  It looked pretty reasonable so I thought I’d try it out even though I didn’t have any usable poppyseeds.  The recipe worked quite well, and for once I managed to make the number of biscuits the recipe suggested the dough would produce.  Bits and pieces as follows.

• 150g butter
• 1 cup caster sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 cups plain flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• grated rind of one lemon
• juice of 1/3 lemon

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius (160 for fan forced).  Cream butter and sugar, then add egg and mix well. Fold in flour and baking powder, when combined add grated rind and juice.  Roll dough into 30 small balls and place, with space between them, on lined baking trays.  Bake for 12-15 minutes until lightly browned.

My biscuits turned out fairly well, lemony and buttery with a slightly crunchy outer layer.  They didn’t spread out enough to look like the pictures on Taste.com but I think I had the oven turned up too hot.  I baked them at 180 degrees instead of 160 but they were still cooked through and buttery, crumbly inside.  They just looked more like bite sized cookies instead of larger biscuits.  Sprinkling some sugar on top of the dough before baking would have worked quite well too.

Chocolate, pear and walnut pudding

I was in need of dessert the other night and decided that I had to make use of the rapidly ripening pears in my possession.  I went looking online for a cakey, pudding type recipe.  I wanted something similar in texture to a self saucing pudding but it didn’t have have the sauce.  I found this recipe which turned out perfectly. It’s a Nigella Lawson recipe but I didn’t note the site I copied it from – my bad.  So the recipe as follows:

• 4 pears
• 1 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup plain flour
• 1/4 cup cocoa
• 140 g butter
• 1 tspn baking powder
• 2 eggs
• 2 tspns vanilla essence
• walnut pieces

Preheat oven to 190 degrees Celsius.    The pears were peeled, sliced and placed in the bottom of ceramic casserole dish.  Sprinkle the walnut pieces over the pears. The original recipe suggested that all other ingredients could be chucked in a food processor and blended up that way.  I don’t have one so I mixed it up the old fashioned way (by hand).  To the butter I added the sugar, flour, cocoa and baking powder and mixed well.  When this was mixed I added the eggs and vanilla and mixed till it formed a smooth batter.  The batter was smoothed over the top of the pears and the dish placed in the oven for about 35 minutes.

just add eggs

The pudding turned out delicious.  It was especially good with ice cream but I kind of wished that I had bought some custard (I was not in the mood to make my own from scratch).  I will definitely make this dessert again.  It was delicious (did I mention that?) and it had just the right cooked through but still a little squishy pudding texture that went so well with ice cream.  If you really wanted chocolate sauce it wouldn’t be too hard to find a few tips to make this a self saucing pudding (or you could just get some chocolate fudge sauce).

the finished product (the other photos with ice cream were even blurrier)