Christine @ Slowlivingessentials recently made a wonderful cheesecake. Here is her post about it. She used home made labneh and as I have been experimenting once again with making yoghurts this inspired me to make one too!
So here we go: my first home made cheesecake for over ten years…..
Just one slice for me please!
This is how I made mine:
Hot from the oven
Made these wonderful rectangular semolina buns and a batch of Dan Lepard’s legendary soft white baps today for our back lane BBQ! (Click on the links for the recipes)
Was a bit flummoxed about getting the softish dough onto the tray, but realised that the best thing was to roll the dough out on to the paper to start with, then pick the paper up together with the dough and plop it on the tray. I also made a bit of a mess of marking and scoring the bread but it mattered not a bit. Every last one was eaten and enjoyed by all accounts!
Soft white baps and semolina buns on the way to the party..
We had some very fine Italian spicy sausages full of fennel seeds and chile with ours.
If you don’t know it, Dan Lepard writes a great baking column each week in the Guardian newspaper, usually with ingredients that are easily available and fairly straightforward techniques for the home baker to follow.
Edit:
Celia has made these and partnered them with some fabulous burgers in chilly Sydney. Have a look here! And here are Di’s, which look very professional indeed. And Ulrike’s very smart buns. And C has made a loaf of it here, which I think is a smart move which would give you that lovely bread without all the hassle of shaping it into buns! I think Dan has created another winner here!
They seem really popular with kids, here are Christine’s, look at that scoring! and here are Heidiannie‘s too being enjoyed by her family and every time I see them I feel hungry all over again and think about making another batch…. oh look I did… Click here!
Brown toast or white?
I was listening to the Today programme, and came across Sheena Iyengar talking about her work on Choice and the Jam Experiment and it struck a chord with my experiences, shopping, at work, at play, living, in general, just about everywhere. Here’s a link to the interview:
If it doesn’t work you can find her on You Tube too.
You see, I like to say, “I hate choice”, it’s one of my lines, something I say a lot, but what I am very bad at managing, is, simply having too much apparent choice.
I don’t want unlimited choices, I want to choose between two, or maybe three, real possibilities – not have to wade my way through piles of irrelevant stuff to get to what I think I need. I drown in choices; the out-of-focus photos on my computer, the shelves of products in the supermarket, the endless channels on the tv that no one ever wants to watch. It’s exhausting, time consuming and ultimately soul-destroying.
But, it’s not the prevailing thought pattern of the West, to want less choice, is it? Choice is good, right? More choice, better choice, good for business, good for what exactly? Freedom = Choice. Isn’t that how it goes? Does it?
I am not so sure, both of those concepts are pretty slippery at the best of times and I’m hoping that this book will help me clarify my woolly thoughts and the idea of someone carrying out experiments on jam buying habits is a great one!
And she sounds clever and interesting too.
So I’m going to read her book and maybe I will get a bit smarter in the process.
Zeb Bakes 