Mildilla's Musing

Supa Dupa Fly individual Mac cheeses.

This stuff aint messin’ about mate. Not only was there 2 types of cheese in here, Gruyère and mature cheddar, but there was about 500g of each. To go even further than that, there were strips of torn white bread, drowned in melted butter adorned atop of each cheese pile as a finishing touch to add more crisp! This is a version of a Martha Stewart classic and, although I think my mac cheese is pretty bang on, I have to bow to the queen, these were fucking amazing. I served them with Tomato salad and some baby leaves to help cut the heaviness of it all.

One NYC cherry cheesecake. It is said a bad workman blames his tools and I am guilty as charged. I followed an American recipe that had me all over the shop with my oven temperatures and timings and, to boot, my 70’s oven just burnt and curdled it. This all pretty much reduced me to tears of hot frustration. Having spent ages stoning cherries, pushing crumbled biscuit mix into a 10” tin, all whilst dripping with sweat thanks to our October heatwave, I then had to wait while it cooled for an hour and then spent 6 hours in the fridge to find out just how much of a failure it was! However, please note how the biscuit base and the top of the ‘cheesecake’ are the same brown colour rather than a the base being a beautiful dark brown and the top a creamy yellow colour.

I served it to my dinner guests as the final cheese course of my 3 course cheese feast. They were very nice about it but the fact half of it is still in the fridge and the vegetarian has not attacked it in the night is the biggest barometer here. My name’s Milly and I’m cherry cheesecake failure.

Roasted tomato and garlic soup whisked up with a cheese crouton on top. Again this was conceived and created on a Saturday afternoon in the hottest October London has ever seen (possibly). In my heat-drenched, delirious state I decided to create a three course cheese feast with soup as the starter, regardless of the weather and the fact a Gazpacho would’ve been wiser. I can say it went down a storm and I will be making a lot more variations of this over the winter months.

It’s boiling outside. Perfect kinda weather not to pin your lil heart on making a cherry cheesecake. Why? It’s boiling and this entails having your oven on for an hour at least. It also means going in hunt of cherries and other ingredients in midday heat and then, due to the fact your cherry stoner hasn’t arrived in time, sticking a hairpin into a potato to create your own stoner and picking the stones out of a heap of cherries. Now this is a painstaking, time consuming task, especially with your 1970’s oven kicking out heat into your already airless kitchen. So what was the upshot? What was the end result? You will have to check back tomorrow for that cherry cheesecake update my friends but know this: My hands, face and chest were covered in purple cherry juice even after a good scrubbing.

Pieday is the new Friday #2 - Morello Cherry Flakey Pastry Pie

I know it’s boiling hot outside and the last thing you’re thinking about is pie but tough titties. I baked a pie and have decided that Pieday should be every Friday and not just monthly as I first indicated. This means you must now fixate on my pie please! Give it the love and attention befitting a wonderful wonky pie. This is a Morello Cherry flakey pastry pie and my favourite pie yet! I had always had romantic notions of Cherry Pie which to my thinking is the epitome of traditional American baking so I had high expectations going into this one. I was also worried it was gonna be all soggy cos I forgot to blind bake me base but it wasn’t. It was soggier than planned in the middle but the overall flavour was the perfect mix of sour cherries and buttery pastry.

Bottom-line: Even the non Cherry lover in my life was a big fan. This one’s a keeper.