Cheese cake

It turned out to be my turn for cake again last week! That's the third time since I started this eating British scheme back in August. Since I've been quite busy at work recently, I was tempted to go for a honey cake again, but this seemed far to boring. I'm an avid fan of Nigella Lawson's programme on BBC 2 and I had recently seen her making a cheese cake, which seemed very quick and easy. The challenge though, would be to make a version of it using British ingredients. I figured that the cheese would probably be the biggest problem. Cheese cake, and here I'm talking about the non-baked variety (I've never understood baked cheese cakes), is usually made using some form of extremely mild cream cheese, such as Marscapone. Clearly, this isn't a British cheese and although I briefly entertained the idea of making a cake using a large block of Stilton (the king of cheese, after all!), I thought that this might not be too popular with my colleagues at work. It was time to call in the professionals.

I called in at I J Mellis on Victoria Street, which is considered by many to be the best cheese shop in Edinburgh. I figured that if anyone was going to be able to help me, it would be them. It turned out that they didn't have anything suitable in stock, although the shop assistant assured me that they usually do and he was able to advise me that the cheese I was looking for was called "Crowdie", which is a famous Scottish cream cheese (you can learn more about it here: http://eatscotland.visitscotland.com/scottish_food/cheese/). He suggested that I should try the Jenners food hall. Luckily, this isn't too far away from Victoria Street and they did have some, so that was the cheese problem solved.

It then occurred to me that the next critical part of any cheese cake recipe is the base. Nigella makes her base by blending up broken digestive biscuits with butter, sounds simple, but are digestive biscuits really British? I don't think they normally quote a country of origin on most packs of biscuits, so I searched high and low in the Jenners food hall, but they didn't have any digestives at all. I didn't really want to go hunting around Edinburgh for biscuits as it was getting late, to it was time to deploy my trusted problem solving technique. I went and had a cup of tea.

Feeling refreshed and inspired by the brew, I realised that oat cakes go well with cheese and so would probably make a reasonable base for a cheese cake. So, I purchased a couple of packs of plain, Scottish oatcakes. Once I got the ingredients home, it was a simple matter of following the standard cheese cake recipe. I broke up the oatcakes and blended them with some butter to form the base material, which I then pressed into the bottom of a round, spring-form cake tin. I think mixed the Crowdie cream cheese with caster sugar and a squeeze of lemon juice, before gently folding in some whipped double cream. I then gently spooned this over the base and left it in the fridge over night to set.

I think it turned out rather well, although I have to say that the Crowdie cheese really does taste of cheese, which made for an interesting flavour when mixed with the cream, sugar and lemon juice. The key test was that several of my colleagues had second helpings, so it can't have been all that bad!

Friday cake (2)

I was lucky enough to be drawn for cake again last Friday, meaning that it was my turn to make cake for all my lucky colleagues today. Feeling that I didn't really do very well last time I was drawn, in terms of making a British cake, I thought I would try a little harder this time. This time, however, I was armed with knowledge of a source of British flour (Doves farm, as mentioned a little while ago), so I set out to think of a type of cake that I would be likely to be able to make from all British ingredients. In the end, at the suggestion of one of my colleagues, I went for a 'honey cake'. I've never made a honey cake before, so I wasn't really sure what to expect, however a quick search on the Internet revealed a few good sounding recipes.

Being a honey cake, one of the main ingredients is honey. And, of course, no cake would be a cake without a good quantity of sugar. The recipe called for light Muscavado sugar. Now, I didn't think I'd have much chance of finding British Muscavado sugar, since it is, I believe, always made from sugar cane. However, it turns out that 'Silver Spoon' sugar is made using sugar beat grown in Britain. In fact, according to the 'Silver Spoon' website, they process the entire sugar beat crop! Gosh. Unfortunately, it turned out that my local supermarket isn't one of the suppliers of Silver Spoon sugar, so that could be why I haven't so far noticed that you can indeed by British sugar. So, I headed to Tesco, who do apparently sell this brand of sugar.

After getting the bus all the way into town to go to Tesco, I find that although they clearly do sell Silver Spoon sugar, they had run out. I tried to get some of the other ingredients, but found that they had no British honey and didn't have the self-raising variety of Doves farm flour. So, I headed back to my local supermarket, Sainsbury's, where I was able to get Scottish Heather Honey and the self-raising flour. In the end, I settled for light Muscavado sugar, made from sugar cane. So, the cake wasn't made entirely of British ingredients in the end, but it was certainly a lot closer then last time!

I thought the cake was quite nice, but we shall have to see if any of my colleagues comment on it! I shall have to do a little more research on the sugar and see if I can find a reliable source of Silver Spoon sugar.

Friday cake

Oh dear. Well, I was drawn for cake this week, which is the first time in at least a year I think, but unfortunately comes while I'm still quite early on in my campaign. Perhaps I should explain a bit, at work we have a routine of having cake every Friday. “Very civilised.” I hear you cry! Well, indeed. Many moons ago, it seemed that the best way of choosing who we be responsible for making cake each Friday would be to have a random draw every time. So, this is what we do. This year has proved to be a truly excellent year in that the new students in our lab have demonstrated themselves to be very capable chefs and my name wasn't ever drawn. Up until now.

Well, I have an admission to make I'm afraid. That is, that although I've just made a suitable cake, it really isn't very British. I have a suspicion that making cakes out of ingredients that have been produced in Britain is going to be a bit of a challenge and one that I should have risen to for this prestigious cake baking opportunity.

It's been a really busy week at work, so I haven't had the time to look into it. But, enough excuses! I will have to do some homework on this one so that I am ready next time. Anyway, in the end I made a kind of chocolate and raisin loaf. I hope that the self raising flour might be British, but it doesn't say on the bag, so there's no easy way to tell. On the subject of flour, I'm sure I remember learning at school that nearly all of the grain grown in Britain is used to make flour that goes into biscuits and that bread is mostly made with imported flour. I wonder how true this is though? Maybe it was right back then, but does it still apply now? This, I will need to investigate – watch this space!

Anyway, the chocolate was in the form of chocolate chips, which are most definitely not British. Also, the raisins are not exactly likely to be British! There were four eggs in the cake, they were British! So, it's not a complete failure. Hopefully the cake will go down well tomorrow – it's also the first baked cake I've made for my colleagues in my 'new' oven.