Wednesday 7 October 2015

How NOT to make a cheesecake

I'm over on the Really Real Housewives blog all this week, sharing tips and ideas. When the lovely Housewives approached me, I knew I had to include a recipe, because they really love their food over there.

Before you read further, check out my post on the Really Real Housewives blog...

Done that... Okay, good.

So, the problem with a recipe: I am not a good cook.

Solution: Wing it, and share my mum's really simple cheesecake recipe...

Or, at least, that was the plan.

It starts off well. I crush up the biscuits like an expert, while the butter melts under a gentle heat (note: mutli-tasking, people. Aren't you impressed?)

However, I read the recipe wrong and only melt 28g of butter. I pour it into the biscuit crumbs and notice (observant) that it isn't coating the crumbs at all. I slice off some more butter, melt it, pour it in. It still doesn't look enough, but that's the recipe, so okay... I put the base into the cake tin, press it down, put it in the fridge.

I open my laptop to change the recipe, and realise I should have put 85g of butter. So - with 28g plus an undetermined amount already mixed in - I'm now melting more and hoping it will come out somewhere near the actual 85g it should have been.

Next, I tip the soft cheese into the bowl - two small tubs, so I know I've got the right amount there - and start to weigh out the yoghurt.

Except... the scale isn't switched on. So now I have to pick up the (luckily, quite solid Greek) yoghurt with my fingers while I turn the scale on.

Next, to whisk. It's an electric hand whisk, so I clip the mixer blades and turn it on. One falls off straight away and another isn't working. I unclip the blades, by now covered in the mixture, and reattach. And repeat twice more until it inexplicably starts to work.

And as a final flourish, after I've put the mixture into the tin, I realise I completely forgot to add the sugar...

I contemplate pouring myself a glass of wine to recover, and remember it's only 10am (responsible).

Moral of the story: Don't ask me to cook, anything, at all, ever!


To make me feel better, I'd love you to share your kitchen disasters.
And then, remember to visit me at the Really Real Housewives blog.


32 comments:

  1. When my husband and I were first married, I made a pie for him to bring to an office party. I used a frozen pie crust. No big deal, except I forgot to take the paper out that separated the two pie crusts that were in the package. When someone cut into the pie, there it was between the crust and the filling. Sigh. I was so embarrassed but everyone was a good sport about it. And I learned my lesson - next time, BUY a pie. :)

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    1. Oh dear... I had to make pastry at school once, but forgot to add butter. Water and flour makes very solid pastry!

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  2. I'm not a bad cook. I can follow a recipe and even make the occasional improvement, but it's taken more than 15 years of marriage to get to that point. The first time I cooked from my husband, he scared me out of the kitchen. (He's a total food snob and a gourmet chef for fun.) I've decided that you can do anything you put your mind to, even appease a food snob.

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    1. My Hubby is the main cook/baker in our house. Everything he makes is practically perfect. Why argue with it? :-)

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  3. I'm the opposite, I absolutely love cooking and baking. I did, however, have a minor disaster in the kitchen this weekend. My Dad was coming over on Sunday, so I decided to make him a Victoria Sponge cake (I don't see him very often and it's his favourite). I was in a bit of a lazy mood, plus I'm not all that well at the minute, so I didn't line the cake tins. Unfortunately, when the cakes came out of the oven they were glued to those damned tins. I got them out eventually, but it made a bit of a mess of the sponges. Luckily, once I'd spread the jam and sandwiched the layers, you couldn't tell. My Dad even gave it 10/10, so obviously he didn't notice!
    This was my latest disaster in the kitchen, but they happen quite a lot!

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    1. We recently bought some rubbery cake 'tins' - they literally peel away from the cake. Brilliant things. (Got them from Lidl, I think)

      When I've had a really bad cake disaster, we just cover it with custard - gorgeous!

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  4. I am kinda okay in cooking, but many times even after I follow a recipe meticulously it doesn't turn out right :(

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    1. Yes, that's really annoying. I like recipes with pictures - for comparison - but so many times it just doesn't look the same.

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  5. Hahaha!!! I wish you had filmed this! You'd have made it to the top on YouTube with that story! I like baking and I do actually cook as well, but don't really "like" it the way the rest of my family does...

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  6. Oh dear - cheesecake is one of my fav desserts! I once blew up a lemon meringue pie, I left the finished dish on top of a hot hob! Not a great idea and it was for a cookery exam many years ago.

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    1. Oh no, in your exam! That's tough. I hope you managed to turn the pie around - Eton mess maybe? :-)

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  7. as long as you measured the wine correctly! by the way, you are using that metric stuff, maybe you'd do better with American?? Oh well, I do best when I sit and watch Ray cook.

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    1. I don't think the unit of measurement was the problem in this case, more not referring to the recipe often enough!

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  8. Hi Annalisa - I love cooking and thankfully usually don't have too many problems - probably didn't is a better word, seeing I don't do much cooking now. When I shared a flat with a friend in London - my new clean flat - we decided we wanted an icecream milk shake ... so what did we do - we took the top off to put the ice-cream in .. yes you guessed it - all over the place - a right mess!! I think I'd leave it to your hubby ... take care and here's to happy meals - Hilary

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    1. Lol, I think everyone makes that mistake at least once in their lives :-)

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  9. Just go buy one - much simpler.
    And believe it or not, I do cook. I'm a stickler for exact measurements. Ask my wife who likes to wing it.

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    1. It would have been, in this case, my not much of a recipe post for the Really Real Housewives :-)

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  10. LOL this sounds exactly like what goes on when I try to cook something. I am glad to find another hopeless cook. :D

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  11. Sorry about the cheesecake, but at least you tried! I'm still learning how to cook; I've been trying really basic recipes, like pasta, before I work my way up to the more complicated ones. So far I've messed up at least two out of five times, but at least I can the ones that come out okay.

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    1. No, you didn't mess up... you simply put your own spin on the dish ;-)

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  12. Oh no! I've been there. I baked scones last week and they came out of the oven looking flat like biscuits. It also tasted like baking powder. Yuck!

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    1. Scones can be a little bit tricky - mine never seen to go golden, they stay completely white! My favourite are cherry ones :-)

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  13. You should have had the wine. You were writing for an American blog, so our time, 10:00 am was...well, it was probably plenty late enough to begin drinking.

    My worst kitchen disaster was when I first got married. I tried to make soup beans in a crock pot with only a cup of water. I set it up in the morning, went to work, and when I got home, I enjoyed a bowl of crunchy pellets. Awful. I don't know what the heck I was thinking!

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    1. I burnt rice recently. I think sometimes we just stop thinking :-/

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  14. Cheesecake is super hard. I can never get it right. :/

    As for my own kitchen disasters...probably my mini pot fire. I was trying to make popcorn from kernels. (No microwaves in Ethiopia) and so I had coated the bottom of my pot with oil and then heated it. To check if it was hot enough yet, I dropped in a few kernels. Foom! Fire in my pot. I squealed, dropped my pot, and my landlady came over to see what the fuss was. And then laughed at me. Apparently you have to put in the oil and kernels in at the same time to avoid the kernels combusting upon sudden contact with hot oil.

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    1. Oops. I probably would have heated the oil first too - it just seems the natural thing to do.

      Recently, after boiling eggs successfully for years, 2 exploded on me on 2 successive days :-(

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  15. Hi Annalisa,

    Yes, it's actually me.

    I suddenly feel a whole lot better about my cooking :) I once cooked the turkey upside down. No, I wasn't upside down, the turkey was. Ah, the way a sentence can be interpreted.

    Enjoy your Sunday and um, happy cooking!

    Gary

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  16. I don't cook either! I'm dangerous to myself with knives. I just let my hubby do the things he wants. I'm happy to clean up afterward.

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    1. My husband has many opinions about the way I use knives. I'm very, very careful now!

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  17. Annalisa, I hang my head as I'm such a darned good cook. Trouble is, those around me expect gourmet food all the time, but these days I'm too busy. I love reading books about food too. That'll have to do for awhile! :-)

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