Its Valentine's Day today, really apt for me to be posting about another dessert that I made a while ago. It was really easy, almost ridiculously easy.

Cost me about 11 pounds, enough for 6 Wineglasses and another small bowl.

Ingredients:
400g blueberries
6 Tablespoons of Caster Sugar
500g tub Mascarpone Cheese
7 Tablespoons Icing Sugar
10 Tablespoons of Double Cream
10 Milk Chocolate Digestive Biscuits
50g butter
Wine Glasses etc. Posh containers for serving.

So, start with the base. Crush the digestive biscuits and microwave the butter to melt it. Be careful not to burn the butter. Mix them together nicely and line the base with the layer of the mixture just about 1cm thick. Make sure that there's no air pockets within the biscuits. Leave the biscuit base into the fridge for about an hour to let it set. This ensures that it would break out and float up to the top when you add other things in later.

An hour later, take the glasses out of the fridge. Start to mix the mascarpone, double cream and icing sugar together in a big bowl, and keep on mixing them until it comes to a nice smooth consistency. Then put the mixture into the cups, and form another layer. Once again, make sure there are no air pockets in the layer. Also, remember to leave a bit of space for the blueberry topping. Leave it in the fridge for half a day.


Once again, remove the glass from the fridge and prepare to make the layer on top.

To a small pan on medium heat, add the sugar and blueberries.
Heat it up until the sugar melts and the blueberries have released their juice onto the sugar, forming a deep purple colour. This should take about 3 minutes and take care. DO NOT BURN THE SUGAR. Your parents will kill you.
Let the sugar cool a while, and then spoon it over the top of the glass.
Chuck it into the fridge for about 2 hours, and voila! Easy dessert. Happy Valentine's Everyone.

Today's post is going to be a little different. Recently was Jieru's, one of my housemate's birthday. I ended up attempting to make a marble cheesecake for the event. And even went on to purchase a 9-inch cake tin for it from Argos.

The initial recipe that I'm starting out from is from here. Will talk about the minor changes along the way.

Spent the day pretty rushed, having to suddenly do the dinner together with the base of the cake. Rather than crushing the cookies in a bag, I ended up using a pestle and mortar for it. No no, not the stones.

Thanks Leroy for helping crush the cookies, or I would never have had gotten the base done in time before rushing off for bridge for the night. The base was left to freeze in the freezer overnight after adding the butter. Just to ensure that it wouldn't crumble.


The next day, I took the base out for it to soften a bit, and moved on to getting the filling done. Whisking the Philadelphia initially, and with only sugar was horror. Do have a strong guy around on this step, either that or a nice whisking machine. It got a lot easier as I added in the eggs, as the batter gets more 'liquidy'. As I melted the milk chocolate and left it to cool in the fridge, I wondered for a moment if there was too much.



And I was right. After putting in a base of the normal cheese filling. I alternated between the 2 fillings as I spooned them in. And I realized I had far too much chocolate filling at the end. And I tried to save the cake by moving in the fillings around.


Horror of horror. The marble cheesecake now looks like a normal 2 layered cheesecake outside. Bleh. After baking for 1 Hour 15 Minutes and leaving it to rest in the oven for another hour, I left the cheesecake in the freeze overnight. And removed it 30 minutes before the birthday. Hoping for it to turn out with the texture of an ice-cream cake, the way that I did it for my tiramisu. Unfortunately, 30 minutes was too short, and the cake was still rather hard.

But at least there was a plus side.