BBC - Food - Recipes : Chocolate peanut butter cheesecake

BBC - Food - Recipes : Chocolate peanut butter cheesecake:

I feel a bit apologetic for the overindulgent vulgarity that is this cheesecake here. But, really, why should I be sorry? You won’t be once you’ve eaten it; though perhaps I should warn that it’s not for the faint-hearted. Unashamed indulgence, wallowingly so, is what this recipe is all about.

Birthday cheesecake! And... it looked exactly like it does in the picture on the BBC website. It was lovely, and it never got gooey like Nigella warns it might, even when it was room temperature.

I have never made a cheesecake in the food processor before, but now I am a complete convert. Oh my goodness, it was so easy! And really delish too!

A Plateful of Pirates

Youngest Son (J) has his second birthday in November. We had a pirate theme, and a whole bunch of kids of all sorts of ages came along, and had a ball. All the kids were given a cardboard boat and sword, and we had facepaint at the ready. The pride of place definitely went to the birthday cakes!

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Sarah P

Birthday Cake for J, November 2008

My little boy turned one! ONE! Gosh! Kids are like a calendar - you see every day passing in front of your eyes, and you can't turn it backwards. They show me how fast time is passing. I can't believe it's been a year since Sarah X was here, that we had almost all of our huge family unit all squished into one house... and the wonderful entrance of J into our world.

Wow again.

Birthday Cake for L, November 2008

This is a buttercream base with plastic icing rug. The rug was a bit of an experiment. I was initially using a technique of just imprinting the heart shapes into the rug, but Chesh and I were fooling around and using the opportunity to explore a little, and I ended up with a bunch of tiny hearts, and with a little bit of a press, a bunch of tiny heart shaped holes. A match made in heaven!

The colour is Lilac and comes from the local cake shop, which is called The Sugar Smith and is in Maddington. They have a nice range of stuff, and Chesh and I did our cake decorating course there some years ago. So, we can now make our own wedding cake if we want - but the most valuable thing I learnt is confidence. We came out a lot more confident about cake decorating, and with Alton Brown's theory that cake is just a conveying mechanism for icing, we seem to do pretty well.

The flowers I bought premade from the Sugar Smith, and that's also where I grabbed the other goodies such as the wax teddybears, ladybugs, butterflies, wires for butterflies. I made the bowls from icing, and the fruits are lollies (little bananas, strawberries and grapes.) And I just thought the picnic chairs were cute.
:-)