Italian Ricotta Cheesecake

A while ago, I was reading one of Not Quite Nigella's posts where she visits a patisserie with a legendary ricotta cake. NQN said there was base which was a cross between pastry and biscuit and a silky smooth ricotta filling. I love ricotta and when I read this I took to the internet to try and find a recipe for myself, but I wasn't successful.

Then an episode of Italian Food Safari came along, where Guy Grossi and Loretta Sartori make an Italian Ricotta Cheesecake. Even though it was nearly one year ago that my interest was piqued, I clearly hadn't gotten over this cake. I gathered my ingredients and was determined to give it a try that very weekend.

I did make a few changes, because I loathe sultanas/raisins. I'm also not a fan of candied peel, so my cheesecake was not going to have any addins. I also added some vanilla to my ricotta mix.

Now, pastry and I do not get along. I have never been able to work properly with pastry. I can make it, but when it comes to rolling it out and working with it, it always tears and sticks to whatever I'm rolling it on (and whatever I'm rolling it with!), I can never work it into a shape, I have never been able to roll out any pastry large enough to drape it over any pie plate, I just make a mess. Luckily, I'm more of a cake than pie girl and I've got a few handy tricks in my arsenal for when the need for pastry arises.

None of those tricks helped me here. The recipe calls for you to make a pasta frolla (well, I think it's a pasta frolla, it's very similar to one I have made previously), which is incredibly light and delicate to work with. It increased my pastry woes twentyfold. It was very tasty, even uncooked, so that was some consolation while I rolled and rerolled and tried to not overwork the pastry.

Actually, the first thing you must do is roll and cut out a pastry disc, which I managed to do with no major issues. The recipe wants you to use a 26cm food ring, but I didn't have one so substituted my 22cm springform tin. I figured I'd make the same amount of filling but not use all of it. The recipe is surprisingly silent about how you get from "kneading the chilled dough" to "put the ring over the baked pastry disc" but some kind people in the comments said that you should bake your disc in a 180 degree C oven for 10 to 15 minutes. I think I took mine out at 10 minutes as it was starting to colour and a pasta frolla can get very hard very quickly.

The next step is to roll out long thin rectangles of dough that are just higher than the rim of your food ring. Looking back now, the helpful commenter recommended that you refrigerate your dough before attaching it to the cake. Maybe I should have tried that? Anyway, this was the most frustrating part of the cake for me. My pastry would tear, stick, not roll, not unroll... Grr!

I started rolling out much thicker rectangles and putting the smallest amount of pressure I could while rolling to try and avoid the sticking. The heavier pastry rectangles didn't like to stand up against the ring to start with, but eventually everything started to come together and look like a base that I could pour a cheesecake mix into.

I can't tell you how proud I was once that base was made. So proud.


After the pastry, making the ricotta filling was a breeze. Just lots of mixing.

Once the filling is all mixed and folded, you pour it into your prepared pastry case and bake it at 180 degrees C for one hour, lowering the temperature if the top starts to crack.


The cake is incredible. So smooth and creamy. The pastry crust was reminiscent of a beautiful buttery shortbread and it matched so gorgeously with the ricotta filling. The cheesecake itself is not very sweet and I think it might be because I didn't add the sultanas and candied rind. In fact, it was perfectly matched served with some sweet blueberries and raspberries.

Italian Ricotta Cheesecake
from Italian Food Safari

1 x 26 cm disc of shortcrust pastry
Extra shortcrust pastry to line the pastry ring
3 eggs (55 g)
60 g sugar
350 g cream cheese, at room temperature
650 g ricotta cheese
80 mL cream (35 % fat)
50 g sugar
80 g blanched almond meal

Sweet Shortcrust Dough, (1.2.3.) Makes 650 g pastry

1 egg (55g) (The pastry can be made without egg)
100g castor sugar
200g unsalted butter
300g plain flour

To make the pastry, cream the butter and sugar until light and pale. Add the egg, and continue creaming until absorbed.

Stop mixer and add the flour, mix only until combined. The dough will be very sticky, wrap in plastic and chill prior to use.

Knead the chilled dough lightly first to soften, roll out with a small amount of dusting flour.

Roll out the dough and cut a disc the size of your food ring and bake on a flat tray in a 180 degree C oven for 10 to 15 minutes.

Place a 5-6 cm high 26 cm round ring over the baked pastry disc. Using extra shortcrust dough, press the dough onto the wall of the ring forming the sides for the cheesecake . Smear the pastry onto the edge of the base to seal the join. Trim off any excess dough.

Whisk the eggs and sugar, (60 g) until thick. Set aside.

Beat the cream cheese and sugar until smooth, then add the ricotta and beat until smooth.Add the cream, then gradually add the whisked eggs. Mix until all ingredients are well combined.

Fold in the almond meal. Transfer into the prepared base.

Bake at 180 ° C for one hour. When cool, dust with icing sugar.

Serve at room temperature, though store uneaten cheese cake in the refrigerator.

Bang Bang Chicken

D came to sit with me one evening when I was watching my recorded versions of Channel 72's Kitchen Time. Ching's Kitchen was on and she was making Bang Bang Chicken Salad. D is a huge satay fan and he really liked the look of this recipe. Luckily, we hadn't had dinner yet and we had all the ingredients, so we decided to give it a try.

First you poach the chicken. Poaching chicken isn't my favourite way of cooking chicken as I have a tendency to overcook it. I watched this one quite carefully though and it turned out okay (phew!). You are supposed to shred the chicken once it cools slightly, but I was lazy and just sliced it.

The sauce turned out completely different from what you saw on her show. Ching's was runny and saucy but ours was incredibly thick. It tasted okay, but I added more oil and rice wine than specified and it was still thick. I can't imagine our peanut butter was so gluggy to make that happen, so I'm guessing this is one of those recipes that hasn't been transcribed as well as it could have been. The sauce was also really really sweet. I added some soy sauce to calm it down, but next time (if there is a next time) I might try it without the brown sugar.

D enjoyed it and I didn't mind it, but I've previously made Nick Nairn's Bang Bang Chicken Salad and that was so much better than this one I think I'll stick with Nick from now on.

Bang Bang Chicken Salad
from Ching's Kitchen by Ching He-Huang

For the chicken

1 large chicken breast, 250g, boneless, skin removed
1 handful spring onions, chopped

For the sauce

2 tbsp groundnut oil (I used peanut oil)
2 small mild red chillies, seeds removed and chopped
2 piece ginger
1 tsp sesame seeds, toasted
1 tbsp peanut butter, smooth
1 tbsp sesame oil
1 tsp brown sugar
1 dash of rice wine

Place the chicken in a small saucepan, pour over enough water to cover and add a handful of chopped spring onions. Cover and poach the chicken for about six minutes over a low heat. Remove the chicken from the pan and slice when cool enough to handle.

Heat the oil in a wok over a high heat and add the chopped chillies, ginger, toasted sesame seeds, peanut butter, sesame oil, brown sugar and rice wine to the pan. Turn down the heat and bring the sauce to a simmer. Cook down for about 1-2 minutes before removing the wok from the heat and leaving the sauce to cool.

Serve the chicken over rice and with some sugar snap peas and bean sprouts, dollop over the sauce.

Eggs Benedict

I mentioned in my last post that I've just learned how to make a perfectly poached egg and I was dying for some Eggs Benedict, which led me on my quest to find a great hollandaise.

I've always had problems poaching eggs. I don't know what it was, but they never turned out and in the end it was just easier to fry them.

I was watching an old episode of the Martha Stewart Show where Martha and Josh Eden of Shorty's .32 made eggs benedict. They said that you need to heat up your biggest saucepan with lots of water, add some vinegar and bring it to a simmer. Then you drop your eggs into the water and when they rise to the surface they're ready. Of course, her website is determined to make a liar out of me and I can't find this particular method in the four or five different articles I found about poaching eggs, but every time I've tried it it works, so I'm sticking to it!

Once the eggs have risen to the surface and are removed to drain on a paper towel, they are strong enough to handle. You can pick them up and trim the messy ends with scissors (see, it's a Martha method!) and you don't have to worry about them falling apart. I love this method of poaching eggs. I went on a bit of a poached egg bender after discovering this and put them on top of nearly everything.

This was a Monday morning breakfast. I used bacon instead of ham because ham can feel so slimy in an eggs benedict. I much prefer to use bacon rather than risk it with ham.

What better way to start the week than a perfectly poached egg, some luxurious hollandaise and some crispy bacon on some lightly toasted Turkish bread?

Roasted Asparagus and Blender Hollandaise

I love hollandaise. Eggs benedict is one of my favourite breakfasts although I only tasted it for the first time maybe four years ago. In that short time, I have discovered that I like my hollandaise to be more eggy than fatty, I like a hint of lemon rather than a strong lemon flavour, I prefer it to be on the thicker side than thin and runny but not oozy and viscous and I hate the ones that are "fake yellow" - the ones that taste like plastic. Luckily, more often than not, the hollandaise tends to be pretty good.

I've tried making it myself before using the traditional method of whisking your butter into eggs over a double boiler but I wasn't too impressed with the results and I was horrified by the amount of butter that went into such a small amount of sauce. I refused to make it at home again. It was easier to be an ostrich and stick my head in the sand about the amount of butter when you didn't see the butter going into it.

Despite all this, I still wanted to eat hollandaise at home. We don't go out for breakfast as often as we used to in an attempt to conserve our funds and when we do, cost is a more important consideration than selection. This tends to mean that the places we go to eat when we do go out for breakfast aren't the eggs benedict kind of establishments. I miss it. Plus, I've finally learned how to poach eggs properly, but I'll talk more about that in a future post.

I went on a quest to find some jarred hollandaise sauce that would meet my sauce standards. I was surprised that even though I visited quite a few delis and providores, I could only find one brand of hollandaise. You think this would have made me think that it probably wasn't a good idea to have hollandaise in a jar, but that didn't hit me until afterwards.

Anyway, I bought this jar of hollandaise and brought it home. I poached my eggs and everything was ready for my sauce, so I lightly warmed some hollandaise in a glass bowl over my poaching water. It looked lovely and it was a light creamy colour. Unfortunately, it tasted awful. Absolutely terrible. The worst plastic tasting hollandaise sauce I've ever tasted. I couldn't eat it and we ended up throwing the whole jar away. The whole $12 jar.

I started researching to see if there was a passable hollandaise sauce that could be bought by the jar (apparently not) and while I was looking around I found a post on a blog where someone commented that they couldn't go past something called blender hollandaise. A quick Google search showed that blender hollandaise was - surprisingly - hollandaise sauce made in a blender. No double boiler, no whisking. It's just some egg yolks, mild English mustard and lemon juice in a blender and you drizzle in some melted butter as if you were making mayonnaise. So easy.

I found a few recipes with varying ratios of egg yolks to butter, but I like this recipe from AllRecipes the best. I made it as written the first time and it was amazing. It wasn't greasy, it was thick and luxurious. It gave some of the restaurant hollandaises a run for their money.

As I said before, I prefer my hollandaises to be on the eggy side. This recipe had (comparatively) a small amount of butter and the next time I made it I cut the butter back to 50g with no ill effects. It was even better the second time.

I had bought some beautiful asparagus that morning and it was just asking to be eaten. I mixed them with olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper and then roasted them for 10 mins in 180 degree C oven. I topped them with my blender hollandaise and it was just lovely.

I did have some hollandaise left on my plate after I demolished the asparagus and it was so awesome I contemplated scraping my leftover hollandaise into a jar so I could have it again. It seemed such a waste.


Blender Hollandaise
adapted from this recipe on AllRecipes.com

2 egg yolks
1/2 tsp mild english mustard
squeeze lemon juice
80g butter (I have since made this again with only 50g butter and I like it much better)
another squeeze lemon juice to finish
salt and pepper to taste

In the container of a blender, combine the egg yolks, mustard and lemon juice. Cover, and blend for about 5 seconds.

Place the butter in a glass measuring cup. Heat butter in the microwave for about 1 minute, or until completely melted and hot. Set the blender on high speed, and pour the butter into the egg yolk mixture in a thin stream. It should thicken almost immediately. Finish with another squeeze of lemon juice. Season to taste.

Keep the sauce warm until serving by placing the blender container in a pan of hot tap water.

Mango Lassi

I bought two books from Doubleday's "Everything is half price!!" sale. One was Julie Goodwin's cookbook and the other was "Breakfast: Food Worth Getting Out of Bed For" by Greg Duncan Powell.

I'm not a good breakfast eater. I don't like typical breakfast foods. The combination of textures in cereal makes me feel ill. I do like toast, but I am extremely picky about what bread can be used. I confess that I would prefer to eat leftover dinner for breakfast any day.

I liked Greg's book because it looks at breakfasts around the world and through history and it had some intriguing alternatives to my standard breakfast of stuff on toast. Or eggs with toast. I do like eggs.

I have flagged so many recipes that I want to make, but so far I have only made one. I do enjoy the odd Boost Juice and I had made some half-hearted attempts to try and recreate the fruit smoothie sensation at home but had never really gotten past the buy the ingredients stage. Luckily, this book came while all the ingredients were still in the fridge and were ready to be made into a mango lassi.

I used mango from a jar and unfortunately, you could really taste it. Mine was also extremely thick, so I may have to adjust the quantities for the thickness of my yoghurt. Jar taste aside, it was really fresh and filling and there was heaps of potential for adaptations into something more smoothie-like.

Mango Lassi
adapted from Breakfast by Greg Duncan Powell

500g jarred mango pieces in natural juices
250ml milk
250g Greeg-style yoghurt
1/2 tbs sugar
8 ice cubes

Add all ingredients to a blender and blitz until smooth.

Tasty Toast Toppings

Recently Doubleday Book Clubs had one of their "Everything's half price!" sales and I bought Julie Goodwin's cookbook, Our Family Table. It's everything Julie promised it would be, a cookbook full of straightforward family recipes. I haven't decided if I particularly like that premise personally, but there are a few recipes in there that I could see myself cooking.

These recipes do not include the ridiculously named 'Spaggy Bol'. Not because it's a simple recipe that you can work out yourself if you try, but because of the stupid name. I understand that that's what you may call it at home with the family, but I really hate it when cookbook authors try to ingratiate themselves with readers this way. Use the correct names!!! Don't even get me started on the woman in the instant pasta ads who "mixes it up" with "mushies".

Please excuse the rant above if you don't mind this sort of thing. I also shudder when I hear news announcers on the radio annouce there's been a "prang" or a "bingle" on a major road. I hold authors, news announcers and advertisers to a higher standard than a normal person and I don't need the colloquialisms, thanks. (Of course, the soup ad where the kid is slurping is a whole other matter on a whole new level than the colloquialisms. Does anybody else find that ad disgustingly rude?)

Wow, those two paragraphs probably told you more than you needed to know about me. Let's move on to the food, shall we?

So far the only recipe I have made is adapted from her Breakfast Bruschetta. Julie gives three recipes for topping a leftover French breadstick for a quick cooked breakfast: sauteed mushrooms, roasted tomatoes and scrambled eggs with feta.

As it happened, this Sunday morning we had been to markets and to the bakery and I had some beautiful pane di casa just crying out to be eaten. I also had some fresh tomatoes and free range organic eggs. The universe was telling me I had to cook this breakfast.

Julie's recipe for the roasted tomatoes was really just an inspiring idea, because I fell back on this recipe for oven-dried tomatoes and garlic, but only cooked them until the tomatoes until they were soft. I only used one clove of garlic because I do love the flavour it adds, but it was breakfast.


The scrambled eggs with feta I made (almost) as written. I did use milk instead of cream and I didn't use nearly as much butter. I didn't have any fresh oregano so I used some minced chives. I have made this a few times now and I've found that I like it best when the feta melts completely into the eggs, so I add it a little earlier than Julie calls for.

On a base of lightly toasted pane de casa, the tomatoes and the scrambled eggs were an awesome breakfast. D wasn't that big a fan, he's not really into scrambled eggs and he doesn't like tomatoes so he didn't finish his. He did let me eat it, so there were positives to this situation. I liked it very much.

Hey, Julie was even on Masterchef last night. Talk about appropriate timing. Shall we all just pretend I planned it that way?

Scrambled Eggs and Feta
adapted from My Family Table by Julie Goodwin

4 eggs
2 tbs milk
100g feta, diced
20g cold butter, cubed
1 tsp minced chives

Whisk the eggs and milk together in a bowl. In a small frypan over low heat, add the butter and the egg mixture. Stir gently for no more than 30 seconds, then add the feta.

I like my eggs to be quite creamy, so once the risk of egg mix splashing out of my frypan is reduced a little bit I start whisking my eggs a la Gordon Ramsay. I don't always do the on-the-heat, off-the-heat bit, but I do like the whisking.

Turn off the heat while the eggs are still runny as they will continue to cook. Give a final whisk until the eggs firm to your liking and then serve on toasted bread.

Philly Cheesesteak Sandwiches

I love the Subway Chipotle Steak and Cheese sub. It's one of my favourites. I don't even care that the meat comes in cubes, everything just works really well together and it's my guilty pleasure.

I might be showing off my foodie ignorance here, but at the time I had no idea that this was a spin on the Philadelphia Cheesesteak. (I love reading Wikipedia articles on the history of foods, don't you?). I discovered the wide and varied world of the Philadelphia Cheesesteak while I was trying - and failing - to replicate the Subway sub at home. I was never able to replicate the sauce, so I stopped my efforts and we never tried any of the recipes I found. Of course, when my sister S provided me with some of Subway's Southwest Sauce, I didn't think to make a cheesesteak.

Then I found this recipe Philly Cheesesteak Sandwiches on Life's Ambrosia via foodgawker. Many of the cheesesteak recipes I'd been looking at had processed cheese topping, which sounds a bit icky and is also quite difficult to get here in Australia. This one doesn't. It uses instead a roux mixed with cream cheese and grated cheedar which is easily made at home.

When I showed this recipe to D, he was most excited and wanted it for dinner that weekend. Unfortunately, I only had gravy beef on hand as we were going to make something in the slowcooker. The original recipe has steak cooked with granulated garlic, worcestershire sauce and salt and pepper in a skillet. I changed mine to be cooked low and slow on the stove. I caramelised the onions per the recipe then removed them to brown the meat. Once the meat was browned, I returned the onions to the pan with a little bit of beef stock and an adjusted amount of garlic and worcestershire sauce (when I say adjusted, I mean lots more, but I don't know how much I ended up adding) and then cooked it for 2-3 hours on a low heat.

After the meat had cooked, I removed it from the stock and cut it into small pieces. That's when I messed up. The meat was incredibly tasty as it was, but the garlic/worcestershire flavour was very very mild. I put the cut up meat back into the pan and added the directed amount of garlic and worcestershire. This pushed the meat into the "very strongly flavoured" category and it wasn't as nice anymore. It was still very very yummy, but it wasn't the one for me, one for the bowl kind of yummy like it was before.

The meat and the sauce worked very well together. It's an incredibly hearty sandwich. We served our sandwiches on dinner rolls and I could only manage one. D managed two and a bit, but was very full afterwards. It was a fun experiment, but I think when I want my cheesesteak fix I'll just go to Subway. Somehow, their sandwiches are nearly as filling as the ones we made at home. I think that part of the guilty pleasure is that everything is so processed in a sub, and good homemade food just can't replicate it.

Hmm. I don't know if I want to eat another steak and cheese sub now. It doesn't sound all that appetising, does it?

This recipe on Life's Ambrosia is extremely appetising though. Visit this post for the recipe.

Steamed Chicken with Ginger

This may not look at that pretty, but I was still kind of happy with the results. I was trying to adapt a recipe I made at the James Street Cooking School but using chicken instead of fish.

This was a more ambitious undertaking than it may seem, as I had some equipment issues. I do own a bamboo steamer, but it is quite small and I don't own a plate that fits inside and it doesn't sit nicely on any of my pans so it really doesn't do much more than take up space in the cupboard. I also have a double boiler saucepan which includes a steamer pan, but that was much too small for what I wanted to do. I ended up improvising.

I took my little nonstick wok and put two small ceramic condiment dishes in the bottom upside down. I then put in a tiny amount of water and finished it off with a plate which still let me close the lid (my wok has a flat lid). It looked a little ridiculous, but it worked!!!

This recipe was originally made with freshwater fish and has strong flavours which are perfect to disguise any muddy flavours. Of course, I was making this with chicken so my muddy flavours were fairly limited. I still thought that the flavours would translate well to chicken.

I didn't have any young ginger so I substituted normal ginger. In the cooking class we also used normal ginger, however I do think that ginger was a higher quality than the one I ended up using. Good knife skills are very handy when making this as the finer the ginger is sliced the easier it is to eat once it's cooked. My knife skills vary depending on my mood and this ginger was not as fine as I would have liked.

The first step is to marinate the ginger in some lemon juice. Then heat some grapeseed oil and sesame oil in a pan and fry 6 finely sliced cloves of garlic until they turn pale golden and then add the oil and garlic mix to the ginger and lemon juice. Add some toasted sesame seeds and soy sauce and then pour over some sliced chicken tenderloins and steam until cooked.

I slightly overcooked the chicken, I didn't realise the pieces would cook that quickly. The flavours were there, wonderful ginger and soy and sesame. I'll try this again, but I might try larger cuts of chicken next time. Comparing my sauce to the pictures of the sauce from the class, I may also add some extra soy sauce next time.

The sauce was fantastic even if it was a bit pale, it matched really well with the udon noodles.

More Macarons

More Twist 'n Roll macarons from the Brisbane Markets. They really are delicious. The chocolate one was my favourite.

Oven-Dried Tomatoes and Garlic

These Oven-Dried Tomatoes and Garlic were more foodgawker inspired cooking. It was borne from late night foodgawker browsing where I thought that roasting a whole pile of tomatoes was an incredible idea, no matter that I had no further plan as to what to do with them once I'd finished with them.

I bought a lovely bag of roma tomatoes from the market and cut them into 3 thick slices. I sliced some cloves of garlic thinly and combined them with some olive oil, salt and pepper. The tomatoes were amazingly tasty just like this, but I tried to restrain myself so I could put some in the oven.

Our oven is terrible. I cooked the tomatoes for five hours in a low oven (but still higher than directed in the recipe). My tomatoes did not dry out much and retained a more semi-dried texture. The smell was incredible. The whole house smelled like roasted garlic all afternoon.

We had some of these chopped up and stirred through pasta for dinner. The tomatoes were wonderful, they were pure concentrated tomato flavour. I have tried these again to a lesser extent, on a higher heat for 40 minutes to blister and soften the tomatoes and then had them on toast with scrambled eggs.

See this post on Eat Real for the recipe.