Week 5 - Baked Lime Cheesecake and Broth

This week we are with Mr S on p32, where we're baking a lime cheesecake.  Not something that I've done before, and perhaps I should have taken heed of the fact the Mr S confesses to a disaster with this, and treated it as an omen.

I certainly travelled a rocky road making it, but it seems to have come good in the end.

The trouble is with the pastry.  Mr S gives a number of warnings about the pastry needing chilling to stop it shrinking, to VERY CAREFULLY line the flan case to leave NO HOLES AT ALL or else the filling will leak out, then chill again; blind bake and then you are are eventually ready to put in the filling.

So I processed the flour, icing sugar and butter along with an egg yolk and a smidgen of water, bound it together, and following the instructions for preparing the pastry for the case.  I moulded it into the flan case and blind baked.

Well, the pasty case did shrink and came out the oven with huge cracks, looking like those pictures in wildlife documentaries of dried up watering holes in Africa.

Clearly, the filling would dribble through the base and all over the floor of the oven before I'd closed the door, so I had to have a rethink.

There were a number of options (try again, try again with a different flan dish, buy ready made pastry, buy a pastry flan dish ready cooked) but my colleague came up with the best, suggesting I bashed the pastry base into crumbs, binding with some melted butter and pressing into a flan dish as you would a crushed biscuit base.  Marvellous.

I did just that, and poured in the filling of lightly beaten egg, lime juice, cream, sugar and lime zest.  I baked it, and ate it once chilled.

By contrast, the broth (p. 41) was simplicity itself - chopped up carrot, celery, garlic, shallots and leek were softened in goosefat, then added to a big casserole dish with chicken stock, cooked pearl barley, bay leaves and thyme.

Potatoes were sliced and added on top and the whole thing cooked with the lid on in the slow oven for hours.

Tastes delicious - and sticks to your ribs!