Tag: Halloween
Roast Pumpkin Soup

Roast Pumpkin Soup

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Halloween’s coming up and that means it’s pumpkin time! In the world of carved pumpkins, the inner flesh is useless, but there’s no reason to discard all this delicious vegetable. So here’s something you can do with the leftover pumpkin sitting on your kitchen counter. Warming, smooth and healthy – this is a really quick and tasty lunch. Soup is also really good for freezing – so if you have more pumpkin soup than you can deal with in one go, pop it into a pot and bung it in the freezer until you fancy some more.

Here I’ve suggested roasting the pumpkin first as this will make it soft enough to get out of the skins, but if you’re using flesh from a carved pumpkin – meaning that it’s already out of the skin, you can use it just like that. This also works really well with butternut squash, so if you’re not a pumpkin family you can give that a go instead. My Mum’s really into gardening, and at the moment we have several squash plants taking over the garden, so soup is a great way of turning all this luscious veg into a meal that can be stored away and saved for a later day.

Recipe

Serves 4

Time: 45 minutes

Ingredients

  • 1 tbsp Vegetable oil
  • 1 Small red onion, roughly chopped
  • 1 Small white onion, roughly chopped
  • 2 Small pumpkins (about 1.5kg)
  • 1 Large carrot, peeled
  • 2 Medium baking potatoes, peeled
  • 2 Chicken stock cubes dissolved in 4 cups of boiling water
  • Salt and pepper to season
  • 125ml Single cream
  • 4 Rashers streaky bacon
  • 1/2 tsp dried chilli flakes
  • Fresh basil to serve

Method

  1. Pre-heat the oven to 180˚C. Halve the pumpkins and remove the seeds from the middle with a spoon. Drizzle with oil and then wrap each half in tin foil. Put them into roasting tins and then roast in the oven for 15-20 minutes, until softened. Set aside to cool.
  2. Meanwhile, put the oil into a large saucepan and add the chopped onion. Cook over a medium heat until the onions have begun to caramelise.
  3. Chop carrot and potatoes into chunks. Scoop the flesh out of the cooled, roasted pumpkins and add this, the chopped potatoes, and the chopped carrot to the onion. Pour in the chicken stock and bring to the boil. Leave to simmer for 15-20 minutes until the vegetables are tender.
  4. Meanwhile heat a grill. Put the bacon on a grill pan and heat under the grill for 5-10 minutes, turning over a few times, until crispy all over. Take out from under the grill and set aside for later.
  5. Puree the vegetables once ready with a hand blender, add the chilli flakes and season to taste with the salt and pepper.
  6. Pour in half the cream and stir to mix. Pour the soup into bowls and drizzle with the rest of the cream. Chop the bacon into strips with scissors and sprinkle over the soup. Garnish with fresh basil and serve with buttered bread.

Thanks for reading!

Emma x
Snicker Spiderweb Cheesecake

Snicker Spiderweb Cheesecake

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With my art course in full swing now I’m constantly in need of quick snacks to keep me going, and for some reason I keep on turning to Snickers, (I think it’s due to the relatable adjectives now on the packaging – grouchy and sleepy in particular).  I’m also a big cheesecake fan, and so I thought it was about time that I made a Snicker cheesecake thing.

I’ve named this a ‘cheesecake’ as it’s technically classifiable as one, but I should say now that it’s not your classic cheesecake. As usual I’ve gone pretty OTT with this recipe, and so it’s evolved into more of a cheesecake, torte, puddingy block. We don’t just have some biscuits, cream cheese and icing sugar. We have a peanut base, a liquid salted peanut caramel centre, surrounded by a caramel cheesecake layer, topped with a chocolate torte mixture and finished with a chocolate mirror glaze and chocolate buttercream rosettes. But this is the time of year to go all out with indulgent foods, so why hold back?

If you do want to make a simpler version though, you can leave out the chocolate torte and buttercream, and rather than doing a caramel peanut centre, mix the peanuts into the caramel cheesecake instead. This way you have peanuts, caramel and chocolate (the essentials), but it’ll take half the time to make.

It can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that Halloween is creeping up on the horizon, and so I’ve decorated this with a spider’s web to get in the mood. If you’re making this when spiderwebs are out of season you can pipe the chocolate in spirals over the glaze, rather than in this pattern, to create a more multi-seasonal design that way.

Recipe

Serves 16

Time: 2 1/2 hours (plus lots more time for chilling)

Ingredients

For the base

  • 300g Peanut biscuits
  • 100g Digestive biscuits
  • 170g Butter

For the peanut caramel

  • 310g Caramel (I used Carnations)
  • 100g Peanuts (if salted don’t add the extra 1/2 tsp of salt)
  • ½ tsp Sea salt

For the caramel cheesecake layer

  • 125g Marscapone
  • 125g Philadelphia
  • ½ tsp Vanilla bean paste
  • 50g Icing sugar
  • 80g Caramel
  • 150ml Double cream

For the chocolate torte layer

  • 150g Good quality dark chocolate (at least 70% solids)
  • 300ml Double cream
  • 13g Icing sugar
  • 1tsp Vanilla extract

For the chocolate mirror glaze

  • 150ml Double cream
  • 135g Caster Sugar
  • 55g Cocoa powder
  • 3 ½ Leaves gelatine

To decorate

  • 100g White chocolate
  • 2 tbsp Double cream
  • 200g Butter
  • 100g Icing sugar
  • 75g Cocoa powder
  • 1 Bag Snicker bites

Method

  1. Line a deep round 20cm loose-bottom cake tin with butter and acetate (or baking paper), making sure that the strip around the sides comes above the top of the tin.
  2. Begin by making the biscuit layer. Put the two types of biscuits into a large bowl and break up into crumbs using the end of a rolling pin. Don’t worry if there’s chunks of peanuts because of the peanut biscuits, this’ll just create some texture.
  3. Melt the butter in a pan and then add this to the biscuits. Stir to combine, the biscuits should start to clump together slightly.
  4. Pour this mix into the lined tin and even out with the back of a spoon until an even thickness. Chill in the fridge for 20minutes until firm.
  5. Meanwhile prep the caramel. Put the caramel, peanuts and salt into a small bowl and mix to combine. Spoon this onto the prepare base, leaving a 1-2cm boarder around the edge , so that the caramel forms a smaller circle in the middle. Leave in the fridge to set for 20 minutes.
  6. Now make the caramel cheesecake layer. Using an electric whisk, whisk together the mascarpone, Philadelphia, vanilla, icing sugar and caramel until smooth. Then add the double cream and continue to whisk until smooth and the mixture is thick enough to hold it’s shape – this will only take 1-2 minutes so be careful not to overwhisk.
  7. Pour or pipe around the side of the cheesecake, to seal the peanut caramel in. Then spoon over the caramel, to completely cover it. Leave in the fridge to set for at least 2 hours.
  8. Once set you can move onto the chocolate layer. Put the chocolate into a heatproof bowl and gently melt over a pan of simmering water. Take off the heat and stir in the cream until the mixture is smooth and glossy. Sift and stir in the icing sugar, and then stir in the vanilla extract. Let the mixture cool for 10 minutes.
  9. Pour the chocolate on top of the caramel cheesecake and then put into the fridge to chill for at least 3 hours, until firm.
  10. Once the chocolate layer has set you can make the chocolate mirror glaze. Put the cream, sugar, cocoa, and 150ml water into a small pan. Heat whilst stirring until all the sugar is dissolved, I find using a whisk is a good way to get rid of lumps of cocoa.
  11. Bring to the boil and simmer for 2 minutes. Remove from the heat and leave to cool for another 2 minutes. Meanwhile take a bowl of water and soak the gelatine leaves until they’re squidgy. Take the gelatine out of the water and squeeze to remove excess water. Put into the chocolate mix and stir to dissolve.
  12. Leave the glaze to cool for 20 minutes. Pass through a sieve and then test with a thermometer to make sure it’s cooled down enough not to melt the chocolate layer in the cheesecake (below 38˚C should be enough).
  13. Pour the glaze over the cheesecake and leave to partially set in the fridge for 30 minutes. Meanwhile melt the white chocolate in a heat-proof bowl over a pan of simmering water. Add the double cream and stir to combine.
  14. Pour the white chocolate into a piping bag with a small nozzle and set aside until needed.
  15. When the glaze is just starting to firm up you can start to pipe. Pipe the white chocolate in 8 lines, each coming from the middle of the cheesecake. Then join the straight lines with curved lines to make a spider-web shape – I find having a picture of a spiderweb in front of me helps with this. Leave in the fridge for 2-3 hours to set completely.
  16. Now make the chocolate buttercream icing. Mix the butter, icing sugar and cocoa powder together until smooth and uniform in colour. Each butter varies in water content, and so will produce different consistencies of buttercream. If your mixture is too soft to hold its shape add 50g icing sugar and 25g cocoa and then mix to combine. Do this as many times as is needed until a thick mixture is reached. Spoon into a piping bag with a star nozzle.
  17. Once the mirror glaze is set, pipe rosettes of the icing round the edge of the cheesecake, before topping with halved snicker bite pieces. Leave in the fridge until ready to serve!

Thanks as always for reading! I hope you liked this one, any comments or questions just let me know.

Emma x