Spiderweb cheesecake

Page 189 - Spiderweb cheesecake

 
This was a fairly simple cheesecake recipe but the spiderweb design made it look quite fancy. It was the first time I've used gelatine and it was really simple to make - I love the fact this didn't need to go in the oven!

Chocolate and lime cheesecake

Page 216 - Chocolate and lime cheesecake

Yay another cheesecake! And with a double chocolate cookie base :-)

Very tasty although the lime was perhaps not as sharp as I would like. Quite refreshing though, we had it as ANOTHER of our Christmas Day desserts!

Cranberry and white chocolate cookies

Page 215 - Cranberry and white chocolate cookies

Another tasty sounding recipe! They were nice although I prefer my cookies chewy rather than crunchy and these were crunchy - but with a cup of tea they were nice. Cranberry and white chcolate is always a winning combination, and I'd make them again to perfect the consistency.

I guess you need to bake on a lower temperature for longer to get them chewy?!

Chocolate, Caramel and Hazelnut Cheesecake

Page 207 - Chocolate, Caramel and Hazelnut Cheesecake

I was beyond excited about making this cheesecake as it sounded like heaven on a plate. It was tasty, although I think I was a bit disppointed at the same time. We had it as one of our Christmas Day desserts and mum quite rightly said that there was too much going on with it. You didn't really need the chocolate layer as the caramel was enough with the hazelnuts. 

One criticism - I doubled the amount of caramel in the cheesecake and you couldn't really taste it very much.


Christmas Cupcakes

Page 204 - Christmas Cupcakes

I made these for Christmas Day and typically there was so much food that these were barely touched but I liked them.

A change from the usual light, fluffy Hummingbird cupcake these were more dense and had lots of soaked fruit in. As a fan of marzipan/almond flavours I love the icing as it contained almond essence (I may have gone a bit nuts with the amount I used!), although dad wasn't keen! Perhaps these would be nice with no icing or with basic buttercream icing for those that don't like marzipan. I enjoyed decorating them in a Christmas fashion for a change too.

Pumpkin cheesecake

Page 199 - Pumpkin cheesecake

Another Halloween recipe that I forgot to share...

The cheesecakes in the Hummingbird book are generally amazing and this was no exception. However, it didn't taste like pumpkin, perhaps as the pumpkin is so tastless on it's own!!!

Apple and currant bars

Page 190 - Apple and currant bars

Yum! I'm not sure if it's my love of cinammon, my love of cooked apple, my love of currants or my love of flapjack that made me love these most! But they're all of my favourite things in one recipe!

So easy to make and so tasty, would definitely make these again! My only issue was that I used too much of the biscuit recipe on the bottom and didn't leave myself enough to fully cover the top but theyy tasted AMAZING nevertheless :-)

Pumpkin whoopie pies

Page 189 - Pumpkin whoopie pies

Oh my I have some serious blog catching up to do - I made these for a party just after Halloween and haven't actually told anyone yet!!

I didn't think they were especially memorable, although perhaps slightly more moist than other whoopie pie recipes due to the pumpkin puree. However people at the party seemed to enjoy them. I wasn't sure if I used the correct pumpkin - I used "Libby's solid 100% pumpkin" from Waitrose as this was the closest I could find. However it didn't taste of much straight from the tin so no wonder the cakes didn't taste any different!