Strawberry and white chocolate cheesecake

BBC Good Food... yas, man. I kid you not, sad as this may sound, I think that this is my favourite website!

Perhaps it's a sign of my skill level that this turned out well - no oven use necessary, just a bit of sneaky fridg-ing/freezer-ing. While the cheesecake didn't take all that long to prepare, it did require a good amount of setting time and due to time constraints, had to get chucked in our freezer. I took it out of the freezer about half an hour before serving and put it into the fridge for a final twenty-five minutes.

Although fairly sweet, its not aaaah-my-teeth-are-going-to-fall-out sweet so it worked well after dinner. The best thing is, though, you can put it back in the fridge after the meal if there is any left at all!

Ingredients:
175g shortbread biscuits (digestives worked well)
50g unsalted butter, softened
200g melted white chocolate
300g medium fat soft cream cheese (i.e. Philly <3 )
200g fromage frais
225g roughly chopped strawberries

1) Crush the shortbread biscuits until they resemble bread crumbs. Mix the biscuit crumbs together with the softened butter and press firmly onto the base and sides of a 20cm springform tin. Refrigerate until needed. Melt the white chocolate in a bowl in the microwave and set aside until needed.
2) Beat together the cream cheese and fromage frais until smooth and thick. Add the strawberries to the cheese mixture with the melted chocolate and mix. Spoon the cheesecake filling onto the biscuit base. Level the top and chill for about 4 hours until set. (With freezer use, 2.5 hours is just about long enough!)

Blueberry muffins

Does food ever seem to just stare at you every time you look in the fridge? There have been blueberries in the fridge for the last week or so, and after seeing them for one day too many, these muffins finally ended up in the oven.

Despite the fact that they are not terribly uniform, due to my less-than-exemplary spooning-into-cases skills, the  bake was actually pretty reasonable, the rise was good and the blueberry flavour came through well.

However, I think that they could have done with more sugar, and perhaps the extra sweetness would make them a bit nicer. To be fair though, when they first came out of the oven, they were very nice, if a little tart, but the next day they were more like rocks than airy muffins.

On another note, the batter seemed to go on forever and I had enough to make some little ones (but they really were like pellets and/or bullets!)

From the crazy wee cupcake calendar thing which provides lovely pictures that are nothing like what mine ended up like...

Ingredients:
1/2 cup caster sugar
1 tbsp grated lemon zest (took roughly the zest of 1 lemon to get that much for me)
2 1/2 cups plain flour
1 tbsp baking powder
2 lightly beaten eggs
1 cup milk
1 stick unsalted butter, melted
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups fresh/thawed blueberries

1. Preheat the oven to 200.C and line a cupcake pan with cases.
2. Stir the sugar, lemon zest and baking powder with a spoon, in a medium bowl. Beat the eggs, milk and vanilla in a large bowl with an electric mixer until smooth, which takes about a minute. Add the dry ingredients to the eggs and stuff (technical term!) and stir until the blueberries are just combined.
3. Spoon the batter into the cases.
4. Bake in the oven for 20 minutes. Remove the tray from the oven and cool for 5 minutes.
5. Serve immediately (as they really really really don't keep that well).

According to the recipe, you can store them in an airtight container for up to 2 days, or freeze for up to 3 months, but I would take that little nugget of information with a pinch of salt ...