just call me Nigella...

For this next cheesecake, I delved into one of my favorite cookbooks titled "Kitchen Recipes From the Heart of the Home"  by Nigella Lawson.  I absolutely love her recipes and really enjoy making them! What I've always loved about her is the fact that she provides some sort of memory or event that ties in with each recipe.  When I first bought one of her books and saw all the print introducing the recipe, I did what a lot of people would do...skip straight to the ingredients.  But I really enjoy reading them now! I feel like i'm watching one of her programme's on the television rather than reading a book.  Each one contains something different and this was no exception.  Being a student I found her introduction very relevant as she talks a lot about the wasting of food and how she can't stand to do so.  Considering the students budget, I think it's safe to say that none of us can really afford to waste food!  I was a little apprehensive about this recipe as it seemed a lot more complicated than the others I've tried so far but I thought why not! And in fact, it wasn't as bad as i thought!  Before she even begins to list the ingredients needed, Nigella mentions a few tips about the mixture which you definitely need to know before you start! For example, she tells you that the cream cheese must be at room temperature as it needs to be left out of the fridge for quite a while for it to warm up slightly. 

Ingredients:

Base.

250g Digestive Biscuits

75g soft unsalted butter.

Cheese Mix:

4 Bananas

60ml Lemon Juice

700g Cream Cheese

6 Eggs

150g Soft Light Brown Sugar

Toffee Sauce:

100g Soft Unsalted Butter

125ml Golden Syrup

75g Soft Light Brown Sugar.

Method.

1.  Pre-heat the oven to 170 degrees/ gas mark three and put a full kettle to boil.  Wrap the outside of the tin with a layer of clingfilm then wrap that in a layer of tin foil.  This will protect the cheesecake in its water bath.

2.  Process the digestive biscuits with the butter until you have a sandy rubble.  Press this into the bottom of the tin and set in the fridge.

3.  Mash the bananas well with a fork and add the lemon juice.  Set aside.

4.  Process the cream cheese until smooth, then add the eggs and sugar.  Last of all add the mashed bananas and lemon juice.  Process until smooth.

5.  Take the biscuit lined tin from the fridge and sit in the middle of a roasting tin.  Pour the cheese mix onto the top.

6.  Pour the boiled water into the roasting tin until it comes about halfway up the cheesecake tin.  Place the roasting tin into the oven.  Cook for 1 hour and 10 minutes.  

7.  Remove the roasting tin from the oven and take the cheesecake from the roasting tin.  Gently peel away the layers of clingfilm and tin foil and let the cheesecake cool.  Put in the fridge to cool and remove half an hour before serving.

8.  To make the sauce, melt the butter, golden syrup and sugar in a saucepan over a gentle heat until it bubbles.  Let it continue to bubble for 1-2 minutes.  It will be a foamy, amber mixture that should resemble liquid honeycomb.  Let it cool slightly before pouring into a jug.  It will thicken as it cools.

The method itself was very easy and extremely well presented.  It wasn't in a big long paragraph like some recipes are.  Each new thing you had to do had a separate bullet point and was in the exact order in which everything needed doing.  The first thing you are told to do just after the mention of the cheese needing to be at room temperature is to pre-heat the oven, which I would more than likely have forgotten otherwise.  The recipe was so easy to follow that I didn't even need mum this time! Except for when I did....I began mixing everything together as was stated, but when I stopped and had a look, the cheese, lemon juice, bananas, eggs and sugar were looking like a pale lumpy mess.  The biscuit base had worked wonderfully and so I was really hoping the mix would turn out just as well.  But unfortunately I did get a bit stuck.  And this was the point I felt I needed mum.  Luckily she had a very simple solution : put it in the blender which worked perfectly!  One thing that I feel was missing from this recipe was how the mix should look.  I was certain my lumpy mess wasn't right and mum thought exactly the same.  And instead of the usual thick creamy mix, this was really quite like a liquid so I was a little worried that it would leak into the base of the cheesecake, but thankfully as I had remembered to set the base in the fridge previously, it sat nicely on top. 

But all in all i was extremely proud of this cheesecake!  It even resembled the picture provided in the book of the finished product which makes a change for me.  I did feel the need to make a few little changes though.  Instead of using four bananas, which i'm not that keen on, i decided to cut down to two and a half so the flavor wasn't too overpowering and I'm so glad I did.  You could definitely taste the banana but instead of being the only thing you could taste, the base and cheese mix were still there.  I also had to adapt the topping.  As stated before, my mum is a diabetic so instead of smearing the toffee sauce which, lets face it, is basically pure sugar all over the top as suggested, I put it on the side so everyone could decide how much they wanted, or have none in my mums case.   In the recipe Nigella tells you that you can leave some of the sauce on the side "for people to add greedily as they eat" which really made me laugh as it just sums up my brother completely!  I always remember whenever there is dessert on the table, he's the first one to go for it, if there's any left at the end he'll be the one finishing it off!  He does love his food.  And I have to say, that this has definitely topped all of the others so far...definitely one to save for another day!