Strange Easter it is. Just the three of us, no guests, stuck at home in spite of great weather- no eating out, no trips to the beach. All this courtesy of Covid 19, which put life on hold for everyone and we don’t know how much longer this state of things will go on for.
I’ve been spending a lot more on food for the last 3 weeks, we have a well supplied fridge and pantry; when I was still hoping that Mariusz would be here for Easter I decided to make this cold cheesecake that we loved when we lived together at home. Mum gave me the recipe, which I tweaked my way much to her disapproval again- last time I baked her “nut” cookies and dared to roast my walnuts before adding them, she nearly disowned me. 🙂 This time I decided to replace walnuts with hazelnuts, far superior flavour as far as I’m concerned. Mum raised her eyebrows, I still went with hazelnuts and had 2 slices of the cheesecake today. Not done with it yet!!!
Thing about this cheesecake is- one makes the cheese. 1 litre of milk, about 200 ml of soured cream well mixed with 2 whole eggs, vanilla sugar, caster sugar and vanilla essence all go into the pan and slowly get boiled till the curd kind of cheese begins to resurface. This takes about 30 minutes, then it needs to be drained off well, again, no rush there.
In the meantime a small sponge with 2 eggs gets baked, good idea to drizzle it with some booze ( I used Grand Marnier).
About 70-80 g of soft butter gets creamed with icing sugar, 4-5 tbsps, maybe more, must be tasted. This brand new curd cheese gets added spoon by spoon. Touch more vanilla. Nuts of one’s choice, quite a lot, very finely chopped, mine were already chopped and toasted. Raisins. Cranberries. Candied orange peel. Dried apricots, if there are any in the pantry. All this well combined, sweetened to taste, whacked onto the sponge, smoothed over. Canned peaches arranged on top, a jelly of one’s choice, to the fridge over night. Job done.
Easter Sunday, nearly 18 years I’ve lived in this country and today, for the first time ever I’ve made Yorkshire puddings. WTF??!! Yes. I had some beef fillet, I had roast potatoes, roasted carrots, French beans, I had bearnaise, I had Malbec. Iz has mentioned yorkies on school menu a few times, then we had some frozen ones from Waitrose, today was the day to stop being silly. I used James Martin’s recipe, loved watching them raising in the oven, scored them 8 out of 10. Florek and Iz loved them, for me they could have been thinner and crispier, which will be seen to next time. So for 6 yorkies I used 2 small eggs, well whipped with 150 ml of milk, to this 100 g of plain flour and a pinch of salt. The batter rested in the fridge for over an hour. Then the yorkie dish Lisa gave me forever ago got preheated with the oil and filled a bit more than half way up. Baked in 200 degrees for about 25 minutes.
I’m hoping to get myself a deep fat fryer next month, so when life is back to normal, Waitrose fish counter reopens and I can get mussels again, we’ll have a feast. With French bread, French fries, mussels and pinot gris. This is the plan. Fingers crossed.