52 Recipe Challenge - Week 41.

This is going to be the last of my Easter baking inspired posts for this year as I realise it was ages ago now but I had bought all the ingredients so I thought I may as well make this recipe as well...  At the beginning of the month I had a link to a blog posted on my facebook wall, that blog was full of gorgeous looking baking which I wanted to try.  It was the Raspberri Cupcakes blog and the recipe I decided I'd give ago was the Cheesecake Filled Chocolate Easter Egg recipe.

Obviously as with all of these recipes you're probably best following the original recipe if you decide to make it yourself and you can go straight to it if you click here.

To make this recipe you will need:

A packet of hollow chocolate eggs (I had about 13 and used 8 as a few got damaged in transit.)
150g Cream Cheese
30g Icing Sugar
1/2 tsp Lime Juice the original recipe says lemon juice but I only had lime..)
1/2 tsp Vanilla flavouring
The recipe says use125ml of Whipping cream but I just used a tub of double cream
1 Passion fruit,
1 tbsp Apricot Jam,
A knob of Butter

To start off with I got the chocolate eggs out from where I had stashed them, then unwrapped them and tried to put them in my fridge's egg holder but soon realised that my chocolate eggs were smaller than real eggs... at least it got me to clean it!

So instead I dug out my egg cups and a Tupperware box and set about trying to cut the tops off the eggs without completely destroying them. By doing this I ended up with lots of chocolate debris and 8 usable eggs.

Once the chosen eggs were cup up I put them in the fridge to chill and got out both the cream cheese and cream.  I poured the cream into my food processor and put the cream cheese and icing sugar into a big mixing bowl.  Then I took a wooden spoon then combined the cream cheese and icing sugar, then I rooted out the vanilla flavouring and lime juice and added them to the mix.

When they were mixed together I turned the food processor on and whisked the cream for a few minutes until it had stiffened.

Next I added the cream cheese mix and whipped the two up together in the food processor before spooning some of it into the eggs I prepared earlier.

After I put the cheesecake mix into the chocolate egg shells I put them back in the fridge for a bit whilst I tidied up and sorted out the fake yolk. To make the fake yolk I cut open a passion fruit scooped out it's insides and rubbed the pulp in my sieve to get the juice out and leave the seeds.

Then when I'd juiced the passion fruit I added some butter and apricot jam to the bowl then I cheated by microwaving the lot for 30 seconds, gave it a stir mixing it then microwaving it again for another 30 seconds and re-stirring.  When the yolk mixture was combined I scooped a bit of the cheese cake mix out of the eggs and dribbled the yolk mixture in. After the yolks were added I put the eggs back into the fridge to set.

I ate about three of these and shared the rest, whilst I prefer them to cadbury's creme eggs I don't think I perfected the yolk as it had a bit of a buttery after taste and due to my alterations to the recipe I ended up with an excess of cheesecake mix... Ooops!

So I experimented with cheesecake cupcakes as well, which were less successful.

 Can't win them all I suppose!

52 Recipe Challenge – Week 13.

Last week I ended up making my recipe at the end of the week but I’m posting it this week so I’m not really cheating... honest!  Last week I finally managed to escape the allure of the nearby takeaways but I mainly  stuck to my tried and tested recipes such as nachos, lemon & ginger cake cupcakes, home made pizza, chocolate chip cookies and meat & potato pie. It’s partly because I had some pastry left over from the meat and potatoes pie that I decided to make the tasty looking mushroom and spinach pastries from my Marks and Spencers Cooks’s Bible.

The recipe in the book says you need:

2 Tablespoons of butter
1 Red Onion Halved and sliced
2 Garlic Cloves, crushed
225g Mushrooms, sliced
175g Baby Spinach
Pinch of nutmeg
4 Tablespoons of double cream
225g Prepared Puff Pastry
Plain flour for dusting
1 Egg, beaten
2 Teaspoons of poppy seeds
Salt and Pepper

I actually used:

Left over puff pastry.

1 Tin of creamed garlic Mushrooms

Three frozen lumps of spinach

1 heaped tablespoon of Nutmeg

1 egg, beaten

To start with I got the pastry out of the fridge to soften, turned the oven on to 200c/ gas mark 4 to preheat and then I got the tin of mushrooms out of the cupboard. I opened the tin of mushroom and heated it in the pan for a few minutes.

After doing this I got the spinach from the freezer and added three lumps, then stirred until they defrosted and mixed with the mushrooms. Next I tried to sprinkle a little ground nutmeg into the mix but instead opened the large hole on the spice container and loads of nutmeg came out... I stirred this in hoping that the garlic would disguise the taste of the nutmeg. I turned down the mushroom and spinach mixture and roller out the pastry on a floured kitchen side and then cut it in half, after doing that I turned off the pan on the hob and brought the mixture to the pastry. 

I spooned the mushroom mix on to the pastry and covered the mix before pierceing the pastry to let steam out but then the pastry started to rip. To counteract this I tried to patch it up with pieces of excess pastry , after doing that I moved the pastry parcels on to my slightly dampened baking tray. (It said to dampen the baking tray in the recipe...)

Then I got an egg out of my fridge, beat it and then brushed it over the pastry before sprinkling poppy seeds over the parcels and putting them in the oven for 20 minutes.  Once the pastry parcels appeared done I got them out of the oven and realised that one of them had given up the ghost and ripped open.

Despite the appearance I ate the split one whilst watching Dr Who on Iplayer and packed the other one away for my lunch at work the next day.

While not the most aesthetically pleasing of foods they were alright, I over did it on the nutmeg so they mainly tasted of nutmeg with a hint of garlic; however, the pastry worked well with the poppy seeds.  I’m planning on trying to make these again with the correct fresh ingredients and reposting as these have the potential to be great