Merry Merry Christmas!!! A little belated but nevertheless wishing you a very Merry Christmas! I have been MIA for a very long time – I think it must have been at least 6 months! I have been doing plenty and plenty of cooking but life seems to have been on the fast forward mode and time has just flown!
I love Christmas! Whilst when I was young, the excitement of presents and what was beneath those colourful wraps made it feel like Christmas could not come sooner! Now, Christmas seems to have come too quickly, and I keep telling A that I feel like I haven’t had enough time to really immerse into the festive season and really prepare for it – 
If I could have my way, we would have a mini snow village in our house with little train tracks and train sets (we have been having our eye on those sets selling at the shops but the price tags are enough to make you jump!).
Anyway, this year I had visions of a dessert buffet and the over ambitious me had a list that was really quite long – however I was quite pleased with how it turned out! So i want to share with you these REALLY easy christmas cheesecakes that I got from my Nigella IPhone App (which is awesome!!! Purchase it from iTunes! At $4.99 it’s really worth it!) – I love Nigella’s cooking, it’s always fun, simple to put together and she manages to explain it so effortlessly that really does inspire you to get into the kitchen!
Nigella suggests to use martini glasses and she just uses strawberries – I used small short tumbler type of glasses instead and because it was Christmas, I used a combination of kiwifruit, strawberries and mango. Totally delicious – I was impressed when I tasted the creamy cheesecake filling, and then of course had to lick more off the spoon!
Recipe by Nigella Lawson
Ingredients (Makes 4)
- 1/2lb strawberries (Very flexible – just use however much you want!) – for my version, I used kiwifruits and mangos too!
- 1tsp sugar
- 4 (approx half cup) of shortbread cookies (again, just blitz however much you want!)
- 250g cream cheese (at room temperature)
- 2 tbsp icing sugar (I ran out of icing sugar so I used caster sugar)
- 1/2 cup heavy cream (I bought single cream instead, so used that and it was just fine!)
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
Method
- Chop up the strawberries, kiwifruit and mangoes into small pretty squares (again it really depends on your mood and the occasion!)
- Put the fruits into individual bowls and sprinkle with the caster sugar, cover with clingflim and give it a quick couple of stirs to coat the fruit with the sugar (Note: I didn’t put sugar into the mangoes as I like its natural flavour)
- Put the cookies into a freezer bag and bash it with a rolling pin till you get a sandy bag of crumbs (I used my awesome new kitchen friend – the food processor, it was brilliant!)
- Measure the cream cheese and caster sugar into a bowl and whisk by hand (for me, I just threw it into my other beloved kitchen friend, the Kenwood cake mixer and let it do its job! I used the whisk).
- Then add the cream, lemon juice and vanilla, and whisk it gently to combine (again I used the cake machine to do this)
- Divide the cookies into the 4 glasses and arrange it in the bottom of each one, and then scoop the cream cheese mixture on top, and top it with the fruits!
That’s all! How easy was that! The tricky part was probably trying to gently put the cream mixture into the glasses without making a mess on the sides of the glass.
Enjoy! A dessert to impress without too much effort! Easy entertaining!!!
Hope you and your families had a lovely Christmas and wishing you a fabulous 2012! To more great times, food and love!
Tags: Cheesecake, Christmas
